“Helicopters over Abbottabad at one in the morning. It is a rare event ». Exactly ten years have passed since the night of May 2, 2011, when the Navy Seal and a US Army helicopter pierced Osama Bin Laden’s bunker in Pakistan in the night, to kill the head of the terrorist organization al Qaeda and director of the 9/11 attack.
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of that event, of which an iconic photo and a chronicle told in numerous films remains, the war on terror enters a new phase. With the decision of President Joe Biden to complete the withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan by the twentieth anniversary of the massacres, on 11 September 2021, in addition to the perplexities of some of the American military leaders, who consider the times “not ripe”, al Qaeda has sent a message of challenge. Two exponents of the terrorist organization, in an interview with Cnn, they talked about “Ongoing contacts with the Taliban” and promised that once the Americans leave, they will have the green light on the territory, making twenty years of occupation useless. “The Americans have lost,” they explain. «But Afghanistan – they add – will not be used as a base for new terrorist attacks. We don’t need it and there is no intention.
Inside the Abbottabad shelter
But not only. Ten years after the killing of what is considered the King of Terror, jihadist groups still operate and kill, in the shadow of the Isis cartel.
But today is also the time to retrace the steps of what is considered the longest manhunt in history. Having identified Bin Laden’s bunker, the CIA had rented a house a few kilometers away. For months, they had hoped to intercept the figure of the number one in world terrorism. The 007 Americans will never be able to photograph him, but the order to act was taken that day in early May, of which the photo remains in the White House in the “Situation Room”, an image that Donald Trump will somehow trace following the operation of the Special forces in Syria to kill Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Born in Riyadh in March 1957, the seventeenth of 54 children, the young Osama is said to have been struck by his encounter with Allah during a pilgrimage to the holy places of Mecca and Medina. What is certain is that the death of his rich father, the tycoon Mohammed Bin Laden, in a plane crash in 1968, allows the boy, just 11, to inherit a real fortune, estimated at around 80 million dollars. 1979 is the year of the turning point: Soviet troops invade Afghanistan and Osama, who graduated in engineering from Jeddah, approaches the mujahideen fighting against Red Army soldiers.
The photo taken in the Situation Room at the White House
Responding to calls for holy war, in 1984 the young Saudi arrives in Afghanistan where he finances and takes control of a network of 20,000 Islamic fighters recruited from all over the world. An experience that will allow him to return to his homeland acclaimed as a hero. American dollars, which flowed into the context of the Cold War, helped forge his mujahideen network, with the blessing of the men of Langley. Thus, during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Osama offers his “soldiers” to Riyadh, which nevertheless prefers to rely on the US, welcoming 300,000 American troops (including many women). From then on, the man with the long beard will become little more than a ghost, on which rumors and stories of all kinds will multiply: perhaps sick, perhaps dead, perhaps suffering from a kidney disease that forces him to commute between the cave where he is hiding and the hospital. In addition to the exploits of his mujahideen, a series of messages in which the Sheikh of Terror takes responsibility for terrorist acts and lashes out against the leaders of half the world, including Benedict XVI and Barack Obama, are talked about. The latest video is from January 2011, in which Bin Laden issues a stern warning to France, threatening to kill some transalpine hostages if Paris does not withdraw from Afghanistan.
The demolition of the Abbottabad compound
Bin Laden himself will provide, in October 2001, in an interview with Al Jazeera, the explanation of the origin of the name, which in Arabic means “The Base”. «The name of Al Qaeda was established a long time ago by chance – the sheik of terror will explain – The late Abu Ubayda al-Banshiri created training camps for our mujahideen against Soviet terrorism. We used to call them Al-Qaeda. The name remained ». Expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1994, Bin Laden finds refuge in Sudan, where he begins planning operations in a big way. On February 23, 1998, together with Emir Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama signs his first fatwa: the religious proclamation states that “killing Americans and their allies is a duty for every Muslim”. Six months later, two bombs hit US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. 224 people die and at least 5,000 are injured. Bin Laden is suspect number 1 and his name appears on the FBI’s most wanted list. In addition to the “African” bombs, the Red Primrose is believed to be involved in a series of other attacks, including that of the World Trade Center in New York (6 dead) in 1993. And it is a spectacular new attack on the financial heart of the world, on 11 September 2001, to make Bin Laden enter the legend of terror. George W. Bush declares war on him and a $ 25 million bounty is imposed on his head. Its last location dates back to 2001, when American and Pakistani intelligence reported it in the Kandahar area, in Afghanistan. Moreover, the CIA has always believed that the Sheikh of Terror was hiding between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the mountains of Tora Bora.
shadow carousel
Unpublished photos of Osama Bin Laden and his refuge
The most powerful secret services in the world, the American ones, took ten years to find it, a hunt in which they used the most sophisticated technology and means, but in which the human factor was also vital. In the end, the key to finding him was the messenger: the clue that led to Bin Laden’s hiding place in Abbottabad (Pakistan) it was a phone call intercepted by the US, made by the trusted messenger of the leader of Al Qaeda, Abu Ahmed to Kuwaiti. Al Kuwaiti served as a link between Bin Laden and his militants, because the three-story residence occupied by the Al Qaeda leader had no telephone lines or internet. But whenever Al Kuwaiti or other people in Bin Laden’s entourage wanted to talk on the phone, they drove for more than an hour and a half before putting the battery in their cell phones. However, it was through him that the American spies managed to locate the Abbottabad residence: they noticed then that there was a person who every day went for a walk in an inner courtyard of the house, but never went out. Thanks to satellite images, US intelligence was able to gather enough information to identify the walking man as Bin Laden (they did this thanks to his complexion and height, because it was not possible to obtain a sufficiently clear image of the face).
Once the objective was identified, all that remained was to wait for the optimal conditions to occur to decide the date of the US military operation: May 2, 2011. That night in Abbottabad there was a waning moon and a temperature of 32 degrees. William H. McRaven, who oversaw the operation, said in a recent interview with the magazine CTC Sentinel of the prestigious West Point Military Academy, that his men wanted it to be as dark as possible and that the temperature was not too high.
With his son Hamza, later killed
According to some, in reality, if it took ten years, it is because he was looking for himself in the wrong place: it was thought that he was hidden in a remote place, and not in Abbottabad, just 60 kilometers from Islamabad. That hunt was one of the most important operations in the history of espionage in the United States and lessons have been drawn from it that have been applied in recent years, for example in the raid to kill the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi., in 2019 during a US operation in northern Syria. What is certain is that, ten years after the death of Bin Laden and after that of the head of the self-proclaimed “Caliphate”, in 2019, the two organizations still survive but are very weakened. And those responsible for US intelligence now have other priorities than terrorism, in a world where, for example, the US is competing for world hegemony with China.
The current head of Al Qaeda, the less charismatic Ayman al-Zawahiri, is reduced to a virtual presence, rarely heard, but the network is still in operation and distributed between Yemen, Syria, Somalia and North Africa.
The balance of these ten years is therefore in chiaroscuro.
The Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001
May 2, 2021 (change May 2, 2021 | 09:16)
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