The mass media have shown that, with near total probability, the weapon used to kill the leader of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was a “ninja bomb”, a missile that deploys six plates of each meter long before the impact and that was designed to eliminate targets without causing civilian casualties
If you were cast in a James Bond movie, you would look like a typical Hollywood mask. It is a missile that, after being launched from an airplane, helicopter or land vehicle, flies for 8 kilometers until it finds its intended target and, a few seconds before the impact, deploys six blades about one meter long. . everyone The combined impact of a 500 kilo missile plus its swords, carried at 1,600 kilometers per hour, is enough to kill a man with a spear.
“Illefire R9X” is a weapon developed by the United States under President Barack Obama to carry out surgical strikes against terrorist leaders without causing civilian casualties. It has been used at least six times in five countries: Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Somalia. And it was always shot by drones, that is, unmanned aircraft, which sometimes flew directly from targets in places like the northern state of Virginia or the outskirts of the city of Las Vegas, 12,000 kilometers from the city.
This was about the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man who radicalized Osama Bin Laden, who was shot at the age of 71 in what was his last ‘fajr’ prayer when he went out to the grocery store of his home. in Kabul, Afghanistan. Two R9X Hellfire missiles were fired from a drone across the Afghan sky, their long pointed blades developed and sank into the runway. In the twinkling of an eye, one of the knights broke after the attack on the Twin Towers, as Lluis Miquel Hurtado recounts in his chronicle.
The fact that an operator sitting in front of a screen can fire a weapon so accurate that it doesn’t need to explode, but just to kill with its kinetic energy and tear the target to pieces is a new standard of military automation. Some of the course time itself or said. Because the US armed forces and the CIA have used the R9X to corrupt—and not necessarily in a figurative sense—leaders of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda for years, since its existence was only known when the Wall Street Journal revealed it in 2019. According to that newspaper, the United States of America considered using this weapon to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, but ruled out the option because the weapon was in the development phase.
Neither the Department of Defense nor the CIA nor the manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, has confirmed or denied the existence of the weapon, which in these cases implies that the missile exists. Apparently, it is so real that, although it has no name beyond the R9X, the military and drone operators and the CIA aircraft have given it two nicknames: “ninja bomb” and “flying ginsu”, this in comparison to very It is a popular kitchen knife in that area.
The existence of “ginsu” solves a problem that defense experts could not explain: How is it possible that in some of the pictures of the Islamic State Al Qaeda and the Islamic State killed in the assassination targets there were no signs of explosions or fire? The best-known case is al Qaeda’s number two Egyptian Abu Khayr al Masri, who was killed in February 2017 in a CIA drone strike in the Syrian province of Idlib. Most of the photos of the Al Masri car show a hole in the roof of the vehicle and cracks in the windshield, but no sign of an explosion or fire. In fact, the windshield wipers are still intact.
This “flying dagger” is actually a variant of the anti-tank missile “Hellfire” (or “Hellfire”), a weapon that has never captured a submarine, but changed the course of history in the last two decades. AX ended up sending airplanes and helicopters to Germany in World War II, which fortunately never existed, to send divisions against the Warsaw war in Germany, which “Hell” went up in 2001 with US drones. He began to use it that year. Afghanistan So when the weapon was conceived as a Soviet tank destroyer, it became the terror of Islamist fanatics around the world. Now, with the R9X, ‘Hell’ has entered the realm of legend.
The long-standing dream of the US military began with the use of the first laser-guided bomb in Vietnam 51 years ago and accelerated in the 1980s, when that country changed its military doctrine in the event of an eventual war. with the Soviet Union they went on to highlight the liquidation of the country’s leader.
During this time, the US has developed more and more accurate bombs, which allows saving in weapons that are more explosive, while they are smaller -, also something important in a democracy: minimizing the number of civilian casualties that can be. to undermine the public aid of the enemy.
So the Pentagon came to drop bombs without weapons, but loaded with cement, on anti-terrorist batteries in Iraq since 1999. Later, during the occupation of the country, Washington used similar weapons in battles in urban areas. The US and France have also used inert cement-filled bombs in Libya. According to journalist Mark Bowden, from the Atlantic magazine, the United States also has a drone that, because of its camera, literally functions as a flying vessel that operates thousands of kilometers away. The existence of that techno-sniper has not been confirmed. For now we only have a remote guillotine container.
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