Ausaf Newspaper for Daily Dawn/Handout via Reuters
When Ayman al-Zawahri, the post-Osama bin Laden leader of al Qaeda, was obliterated on the balcony of a pink house in a posh-for-Kabul district in the Afghan capital, neighbors heard a bang but did not see signs of an explosion.
A neighbor who lives nearby told Reuters that she heard a loud noise on Sunday but curiously did not see the usual chaos most Kabul residents associate with a bomb or missile attack including smoke and fire. That has led the ballistics chattering class to presume the attack was carried out by the notorious “flying Ginsu”—which is named after the iconic super-sharp Japanese knives that were heavily advertized in the 1980s. It is pretty much exactly as brutal as it sounds, slicing through walls or the roofs of vehicles to destroy its target.
The weapon—officially called a R9X Hellfire missile—seems straight out of a James Bond brainstorming session. The missile does not carry a warhead or explosives, and instead uses kinetic energy and six devastating blades to take out its target, according to a Bellingcat review of the weapon.