But what comes next?
Ayman al-Zawahiri deserved to die. It is difficult to overstate how much evil this man unleashed on the world. Osama bin Laden, his predecessor as leader of al-Qaeda, may have been the better-known and more showy of the two mass murderers. But it was Zawahiri who was the ideologue, the ideas man, the intellectual architect of al-Qaeda’s anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic doctrine of hyper-violence. From New York City to Nairobi, Riyadh to Bali, thousands of souls perished at the hands of Zawahiri’s 21st-century breed of Islamist barbarism. That hellfire missile that killed him in Kabul on Sunday did humanity a favour. Rest in pieces.
