The acre of land enclosed within the walls contained a small farm that produced apples, vegetables, grapes, and honey and housed chickens and even cows — food that was apparently being consumed by unseen residents. That was enough for Panetta.
On Dec. Agents never managed to capture a clearly identifiable image of bin Laden to prove they had finally uncovered his hiding place. Obama was convinced. He ordered the US Navy to begin planning the operation that would ultimately, on May 1, , snuff out the terror master at age 54 — a decision that might never have been made if Osama bin Laden had thought to give his wives a clothes dryer.
July 31, am Updated July 31, pm. Osama bin Laden was hiding out, but his family's clothing on the washing line gave him away, a new book reveals.
NY Post photo composite. Although his family almost never came out, a bodyguard spotted by a US informant unwittingly led the CIA back to the home.
Share This Article. And then came Osama the mujahid. A long uncomfortable silence follows, as Hassan struggles to explain the transformation from zealot to global jihadist. He reached superstardom on a global stage, and it was all for nothing.
Very good at school. He really liked to study. He spent all his money on Afghanistan — he would sneak off under the guise of family business. I did not want any of this to happen. Why would he throw it all away like that? The family say they last saw Osama in Afghanistan in , a year in which they visited him twice at his base just outside Kandahar.
He was showing us around every day we were there. He killed an animal and we had a feast, and he invited everyone. Ghanem begins to relax, and talks about her childhood in the coastal Syrian city of Latakia, where she grew up in a family of Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Syrian cuisine is superior to Saudi, she says, and so is the weather by the Mediterranean, where the warm, wet summer air was a stark contrast to the acetylene heat of Jeddah in June.
Ghanem moved to Saudi Arabia in the mids, and Osama was born in Riyadh in She divorced his father three years later, and married al-Attas, then an administrator in the fledgling Bin Laden empire, in the early s. Instead, she blames those around him. She only knows the good boy side, the side we all saw.
She never got to know the jihadist side. We knew from the beginning [that it was Osama], within the first 48 hours. From the youngest to the eldest, we all felt ashamed of him. We knew all of us were going to face horrible consequences. Our family abroad all came back to Saudi. They tried as much as they could to maintain control over the family.
Nearly two decades on, the Bin Ladens can move relatively freely within and outside the kingdom. In , Abdul Wahhab had made a pact with the then ruler Mohammed bin Saud, allowing his family to run affairs of state while hardline clerics defined the national character.
The modern day kingdom, proclaimed in , left both sides — the clerics and the rulers — too powerful to take the other on, locking the state and its citizens into a society defined by arch-conservative views: the strict segregation of non-related men and women; uncompromising gender roles; an intolerance of other faiths; and an unfailing adherence to doctrinal teachings, all rubber-stamped by the House of Saud.
Many believe this alliance directly contributed to the rise of global terrorism. This he sees as essential to the survival of a state where a large, restless and often disaffected young population has, for nearly four decades, had little access to entertainment, a social life or individual freedoms.
There have been changes to the labour markets and a bloated public sector; cinemas have opened, and an anti-corruption drive launched across the private sector and some quarters of government. The women pinned up woollen rugs as insulation and plumped thin foam mattresses with old clothes, inspecting the bedding for scorpions and snakes. Narrow alleys that connected the apartments to a tin toilet outhouse were swilled out, and in the rudimentary kitchen area someone fixed the water pump and got an old generator running.
The women would cook on a traditional Afghan bukhar open stove ; the three nursing mothers were to have the best pickings. Two years earlier, she had been married in a double wedding with her year-old half-sister Fatima. Their husbands, two Saudi brothers in their 30s who both had wives and children already, were mujahideen fighters.
Without any adult male relatives to protect them, only al-Qaida guards who could not enter the same room, the wives had been instructed by Osama to blow themselves up if the situation became critical. Even nine-year-old Ladin had a role. He was to lie on his back, staring up into the sky, scouting for enemy jets, as war with America now appeared inevitable.
At night they huddled under a blanket with a Kalashnikov and a stash of grenades, wondering what would befall those friends and family left behind in the cities, and when they would next see their husband and sons. At Tarnak Qila, the wives shared a cordoned-off yard that they turned into a small allotment and where they reared rabbits and chickens.
But lately there had been dissonance. Many al-Qaida members had witnessed the screaming rows Osama had with Omar, the teenage son he had been training as his heir, who bore a striking resemblance to his father. He had gone to his mother, Najwa, pleading with her to come with him. But she had never disobeyed her husband, so Omar had slipped away alone. But by the end of August , Najwa had a change of heart. Najwa had never intended to be a jihadi bride. Glamorous and beautiful, she was a Ghanem, from an old, cultured Syrian family, and had grown up in the cosmopolitan seaside resort of Latakia, where women wore bikinis.
She had married Osama in , when she had just turned 16 and he was still forging a reputation as a demon soccer player at his university, and for driving fast cars recklessly. Osama had taken other wives before. His second had not seen eye to eye with Najwa, and she and Osama later divorced. Two had hydrocephalus water on the brain , and her third son, Saad, was autistic. But Osama refused conventional treatment for them, preferring to put his fate in desert remedies and the hands of God.
Najwa had sought help for her sons at a clinic in Jeddah, where she met Khairiah, a child psychologist, seven years older than Osama. It was in her room in Kandahar that everyone gathered to resolve disputes and discuss impending changes, or to lobby for an extra sack of rice, basic medicine or schoolbooks. Unlike Najwa, Khairiah was devout, and had married Osama in , when he was already well on the path to jihad. She had worked as a teacher before she married Osama, in , at which point she too set herself the task of having as many children as she could.
The children remember how Osama would occasionally interrupt, conducting impromptu maths and English tests, with his children lined up in order of size. Osama expected all his children to play their part in jihad.
Rather than celebrating birthdays, the boys were videotaped brandishing weapons or visiting the scenes of battle. As they drove away, headed for Syria, Najwa turned to see the rest of her family enveloped in the dust. Khairiah and Seham stayed, but froze out Amal. Seham and Khairiah were ecstatic, murmuring prayers and thanks to the Prophet.
But this was not a lingering reunion. Osama urged them to pack immediately. US forces and their Afghan allies were advancing, so he was heading for his olive farm in Melawa Valley, the gateway to Tora Bora, his base in the high mountains of north-eastern Afghanistan. Only his sons Othman and Mohammed would remain with him. Hamzah, Khalid and Ladin would be expected to take care of the women and youngest children; as the oldest male family member, older brother Saad would nominally lead the convoy, which also consisted of in-laws and grandchildren.
He left behind suitcases containing clothes and gold coins. Dressed in tribal robes, his family would travel through the night and attempt to cross into Pakistan at a remote checkpoint, using documents provided by the Sudanese authorities during the time they lived there in the 90s. Their old Saudi passports were sealed in brown envelopes and hidden away. B y December , war with America was raging across Afghanistan, and Osama was missing, last seen facing off a fierce US aerial bombardment at Tora Bora.
America was determined to dismantle al-Qaida and remove the Taliban from power, and anyone connected to Osama or his movement was a target. Al-Qaida desperately needed to find another bolthole, one that was secure and accessible.
But he was not interested in being a chaperone. CIA agents were closing in everywhere. US helicopters flew along the Pakistan border. He needed to escort his charges to somewhere that was completely off limits to America. In the end, they reached an unlikely conclusion: send the wives and children of Osama bin Laden, leader of an outlawed Sunni militia, to seek asylum in Iran, the centre of Shia power.
Choosing to trust Iran appeared, on the surface, a foolhardy plan. The regime was unpredictable, mercenary and self-serving.
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