LONDON: The killing of Osama Bin Laden is no secret to the world, despite various accounts and statements from US officials who carried out the operation on the fateful night of May 1, 2011.
While the story of the night when the ‘Operation Neptune Spear’ to kill Al-Qaueda founder Osama Bin Laden has been told recurrently, there was still no concrete account on how the vicious trailblazer – who orchestrated 9/11 – was killed, until now.
A book titled ‘The Exile: The Flight of Osama bin Laden about the last few minutes of the 9/11 mastermind’s life’ co-authored by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy documents the disconsolate night when the US special forces carried out the operation.
The writers record the story based on the account provided by Bin Laden’s fourth and youngest wife Amal.
The Sunday Times, on May 14, published an excerpt from the book, titled Watching Daddy Die where details of shooting Bin Laden has been vividly described. Amal narrates the fear she saw on Bin Laden’s face when the US military Black Hawk helicopter landed on the compound in Pakistan’s Abbottabad where they were hiding for six long years.
At the time Bin Laden was shot, he was with his four wives and their children.
On May 1, 2011, at around 10 pm, the emir of Al-Qaeda had finished eating dinner with his family, following which he and his wife, Amal, prayed as per routine and sloped to bed. By 11pm, Bin Laden was fast asleep.
Soon after, there was a power cut in the region, but it was so frequent in the scanty town in the outskirts of Abbottabad that Bin Laden’s family – living in a secret compound – couldn’t care less.
However, little did the dwellers of “Waziristan Palace” – as locals would refer to Bin Laden’s house – know that it was not a regular electricity outage.
Sickening screech of betrayal
Just a few minutes past midnight, Amal, her mind filled with worries from the future, woke up to a gust of wind. She heard the throbbing sound as it grew stronger. Chop, Chop, Chop, she heard as the sound now came from inside the compound.
At first, she thought it was the sound of thunder and that it was nothing alarming, but a glimpse outside the window, and she found out that the sound was too mechanical to be thunder.
She saw the yellow-flowered curtains by the window started swirling from a strong gust that was emanating from the premises of their secret hideout. By that time, Bin Laden had woke up, a fearful look on his face.
As Amal clutched him in fear, they both felt the helicopter-like object flapping its blades above, and when it landed they heard a sickening screech. From that point onwards, they sort of predicted what had struck them.
As per the book, Bin Laden and his youngest wife jumped out of bed, when they heard the chopper land and meandered through the darkness towards the balcony door.
“It was a moonless night and difficult to see,” Amal recalls in the book.
On that night, two military Black Hawk helicopters landed in the area – one 150 feet away from the compound, the other in a field. Both the war helicopters were carrying special Seal 6 teams of the US military.
As America’s avengers swarmed in, Amal, who was in the second-floor bedroom, was certain that they had been ratted out by one of their own.
While this account has been given by the members of Bin Laden’s family who survived the onslaught, the real story which led to the discovery of his location and his execution dates back to months or, probably years.
The excerpts from the book make it clear that there was a riveting sense of tension among the members living in the secret compound, leading to the death of the dangerous Al-Qaeda leader.
As mentioned earlier, Bin Laden had four wives – Najwa, Khairiah, Seham and Amal. Najwa left him just a couple of days after 9/11 and was out of the picture ever since, despite having 11 children with him.
His second wife Khairiah was a child psychologist, who was treating Najwa’s children, before marrying the “Sheikh”. She had to live in exile in Iran after 9/11 for eight years before meeting her husband. Seham, the third, also fled after 9/11 but reunited with Bin Laden in 2004.
The youngest, Amal, who was not liked by the elder wives, had been with him in Pakistan for the longest – from 2002 to the day he was executed.
The book highlights the fact that Bin Laden, though happy, had severe doubts in his mind when Khairiah was set to return from Iran. He was particularly worried as he thought that she may have been monitored by Iranian Intelligence agencies.
“We need to know if they intended to send you in this direction so they can follow your movement,” he had written to her according to the book.
A thousand thoughts crossed his mind but his love for her, caught him off guard. He couldn’t bear to stay away from one of his wives.
On February 12, 2011, roughly two months ahead of May 1, Khairiah united with her husband but things still appeared suspicious. She had an air of bossy attitude that coated her real self, thought Amal, wondering if something had changed. She, too, was suspicious if intelligence agencies were monitoring Khairiah.
Several thoughts crossed Amal’s mind – “Was she a traitor or was she a bait?” her mind raised a series of critical questions. The situation even more apprehensive when Khairiah’s son Hamzah arrived on April 29 with his wife only to stay for a day, as if he came to confirm something. Who would’ve known that 90 minutes’ flying time away in Afghanistan, 24 seals were standing by for the green signal. Hamzah left with his wife on April 30, a day before the operation.
On April 30, US President Barack Obama stamped his approval on the operations and gave the team waiting in Afghanistan the much-awaited green signal.
Back to May 1
Soon after the outage, Bin Laden and the dwellers of the secret hideout realised that their location had been compromised. Seham and her son Khalid, 22, who were on the second floor saw the Seal teams march towards their compound. “Come up!” They suddenly heard Bin Laden’s voice.
Khalid responded quickly and sprinted with an AK-47 to the floor above. “Americans are coming,” said the nervous boy who had last fired a weapon when he was 13. In his mind, he and his father knew that they had no escape.
Meanwhile Amal and Seham went to console the younger children, who were shell-shocked, and in tears. When they went to call Khairiah, they found her room to be firmly shut from inside.
The main gate of the safe house had been blown open by then, and the Seal teams had already started intruding the “Waziristan Palace”.
Bin Laden’s family united on the top floor of the house and started praying collectively. “They want me, not you,” said the tattered “Sheikh”, instructing his wives to go downstairs with the children.
“After six years of isolation, Amal realised with cold dread that there was no emergency procedure aside from some euros sewn into her husband’s underwear along with emergency numbers for his deputies in Waziristan. Since neither she nor her husband had a mobile phone, what use were they?” a paragraph in the book read.
Amal suddenly realised the cold truth that it was only a matter of time before they would have had to face such a situation. It became clear as the blue sky that the safe house was a trap and someone had finally betrayed them.
The Seal team stormed in with their automatic weapons and broke any barrier that shielded them from getting to Laden. They first killed Bin Laden’s son Khalid who was trying to protect his father.
“Climbing over his body, the advancing Seals reached the top floor. The point-man flicked aside a door curtain and caught sight of a ghostly face peeking out from a doorway 10ft ahead. He fired and the head jerked back,” adds the excerpt.
The seal team then encountered two daughters of Bin Laden – Mariam and Sumaiya – who were screaming. Both of them were pinned to the wall by the point-man who was watching the corners before the team could proceed.
Finally, the seal Robert O’Neill who admitted to killing Laden, rolled past and into the bedroom where Bin Laden was hiding with Amal and her 11-year-old daughter Safiyah.
Despite Amal’s pleads, O’Neill fired two shots targeting Bin Laden’s head, till then Amal had passed out from a leg bullet wound.
“O’Neill recalled raising his weapon — with its red laser beam — extra high to meet the target’s head. “He’s going down,” he thought as he loosed off a round. “The tall man crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again. Bap! Same place,” the excerpt read.
As the rest of the seal team marched towards the room, a volley of muffled shot had already ended the operation successfully. They held Mariam and Sumaiya over the dead body of their father and asked for confirmation.
“What is his name?” one from the seal team asked in Arabic. “The Sheikh,” replied Mariam replied. However, she soon had to disclose that it was none other than Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist who was responsible for uncountable deaths.
