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BBC MUNDO RADIO
Last Updated: May 4, 2011
Some called him a murderer whose death would reduce violence in the Middle East. For others he was a hero who stood up to a country viewed as a ruthless invader.
The reactions on the Arab street yesterday to the killing of Osama bin Laden were as diverse as the views - from approving praise to bitter hostility - of America's involvement in the Middle East.
Many who condemned the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan doubted that the al Qa'eda leader had been killed, and accused Washington of fabricating his death to boost Barack Obama's image at home and abroad.
Maha, a 27-year-old accountant in Damascus, said: "Obama is facing an election very soon and is looking for any victory to convince his people to vote for him."
Maryam S, a 24-year-old from Abu Dhabi, said bin Laden should not have been executed without a trial. "Doesn't the world follow a law? If they follow the law, then they should take him to court, even if the ruling is for him to be beheaded," she said.
"I think the US distorted bin Laden's image as a terrorist until it reached the minds of people that he was a terrorist."
Others hoped that bin Laden's death might signal a shift from violence towards the peaceful protests that have characterised the revolutions across the region as a way to trigger change, and said it provided a boost for the US-led fight against terror.
Lama Ali, a 20-year-old history student at Damascus University, said he was "so happy" when he heard of the US raid. "The United States attacked Afghanistan and Iraq under the slogan of fighting terrorism and bin Laden. His death has sent a big message for all terrorists in the world that one day, even if after 10 years, they will get their punishment," he said.
But other supporters of the US operation were concerned that bin Laden's death was not enough to eradicate al Qa'eda.
Sheikh Obeid al Jabouri, a tribal leader from the Iraqi city of Ramadi, said it was a “moral victory” for those fighting against al Qa’eda’s ideology.
“But with his death, the fight is not over. Every time an al Qa’eda leader is killed, another comes along to replace him.”
Some were sceptical because the US had not shown bin Laden’s body, but buried it at sea.
Sami, who tweets under the name jar7_mansy, wrote: “There are two things in life which you will never see: 1) a video of Osama bin Laden dead 2) the recording for the black box for the September 11 planes.”
Mohammed Rahman Youssef, a 25-year-old Egyptian graduate student, was one of many sceptics in Cairo yesterday.
“There is a missing link in this chain of events. Where is the body? And the story of them tracking the courier is just unbelievable,” he said.
Salma Al Suleimany, a fashion designer in Oman’s capital, Muscat, said: “The US would have made a show of his body by inviting international media, especially Al Jazeera – which many of us believe – if it was genuine news.”
Shayma B, a university student in Al Ain, said the killing was a sign of defeat.
“Of course many family and friends agree with this,” she said. “We are not happy at all.” She feared the death heralded a war against Muslims.
Some were fearful of revenge attacks by al Qa’eda.
Firas Abu Assi, 32, who sells parking tickets at a public park in Jordan, said he felt “tense because the reaction to bin Laden’s death may be very violent”.
At a cafe in Zarzis, the port city in southern Tunisia, a man who identified himself as Bashir said, as he sat with two friends and drank coffee: “Even if Osama bin Laden was the most savage person in the world, as long as he is against the Americans then I support him.”
His friend Khalid said: “He at least did something to represent Islam in the face of the Americans.”
There was discontent at the jubilant tone of the reaction in America.
Hazza Mubarak from Dubai, who tweets under the name Hazza3M, wrote: “Is it appropriate to be happy about Christians killing a Muslim, even if he was wrong?”
He said Muslims should respect a fellow Muslim.
newsdesk@thenational.ae
Bin Laden's long-time deputy set to become al Qa'eda leader
Last Updated: May 4, 2011
A frail, bespectacled and mumbling Egyptian surgeon with a $25 million (Dh91.8m) US bounty on his head is set to become al Qa'eda's new leader.
Ayman al Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden's long-serving deputy, most trusted mentor and the terror network's organisational brains and chief ideologue.
But the grey-bearded 59-year-old lacks bin Laden's charisma. And his ability to inspire is highly questionable at a time when the message of jihadi militancy has been drastically undermined and discredited by the Arab Spring, whose democratic and peaceful values have fired the masses in a way that al Qa'eda failed to do.
With al Qa'eda now a diffuse and regionally dispersed network of largely autonomous groups, Zawahiri could find himself challenged - or simply ignored - by the leaders of a younger generation of its affiliates who may consider themselves better suited to assume bin Laden's mantle.
The most lethally potent of these terror "franchises" is the Yemen-based al Qa'eda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), US experts say.
Bin Laden's death is a "catastrophe", an AQAP member said yesterday.
"At first we did not believe it, but we got in touch with our brothers in Pakistan who confirmed it," he told Agence France-Press.
AQAP's alarm and dismay are understandable, but exaggerated. Al Qa'eda has already adapted itself to survive and function without its founder, who in recent years was more of a mythic and spectral figurehead than a hands-on leader.
AQAP's leader is Naser Abdul-Karim al-Wahishi, also known as Abu Basir. He born in Yemen in 1976 and once served as bin Laden's secretary.
But its most high-profile figure and key recruiter is Anwar al Awlaki, a radical cleric with fluent English. A dual US and Yemeni citizen, he was born in New Mexico in 1971 and served as an imam in California and Virginia before basing himself in Yemen where he gained a following with his lurid if eloquent internet sermons.
US counter-terrorism officials have branded him one of al Qa'eda's most dangerous leaders and Washington last year took the unusual step of authorising the CIA to kill him after freezing his assets.
Awlaki is said to have inspired a thwarted Christmas Day attack aboard a US airliner in 2009 and an attempt last year to blow up two US-bound cargo planes with toner cartridges packed with explosives.
In Yemen, meanwhile, he was tried by a court in January and sentenced to 10 years in jail for inciting the killings of foreigners, although, of course, he never showed up for the hearings.
Experts, however, say Zawahiri remains al Qa'eda's most likely candidate to replace bin Laden. His hectoring, schoolmasterly manner and lack of charisma are seemingly more than compensated for by his seniority and quarter-century-old relationship with bin Laden.
Zawahiri is said to have ensured al Qa'eda's survival after the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan smashed the organisation's safe haven in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Many of its fighters and leaders were scattered, killed or captured.
Zawahiri rebuilt al Qa'eda's leadership in the Afghan-Pakistan border region - where he is thought to be hiding - and installed his allies as new lieutenants in key positions.
He was born in 1951, the son of an upper middle-class family of doctors and scholars in the wealthy Cairo suburb of Maadi. His grandfather was the grand imam of Al Azhar, the centre of mainstream Sunni Muslim teaching.
Unlike bin Laden, who found his jihadist calling as an adult, Zawahiri began his activism in his mid-teens, when he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed, non-violent group seeking the creation of a single Islamic state.
He graduated from Egypt's most prestigious medical school in 1974. In the late 1970s, deciding that the Muslim Brotherhood was too moderate, Zawahiri helped found the militant Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He was jailed for the unlicensed possession of a pistol after President Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981, but released three years later.
He then made his way to Pakistan where he worked with the Red Crescent treating fighters wounded in the Afghan war against Soviet occupation, and first met bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in the mid-1980s.
In 1998, both men signed an infamous fatwa calling for attacks on American targets worldwide. Zawahiri was indicted later that same year for the bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
In December 2001, his hatred of the US became deeply personal when his wife, Azza, and three daughters were reportedly killed in a US air strike on the Afghan city of Kandahar.
The last video of Zawahiri with bin Laden was in 2003 when they called for jihad and praised the September 11 hijackers.
As bin Laden faded from public view for long stretches, Zawahiri went on to become al Qa'eda's most prominent spokesman, appearing in some 40 videotapes, most of them virulent rants against the US. In 2008 he held an unprecedented question and answer session online with al Qa'eda sympathisers who repeatedly questioned him over the group's killing of civilians in Iraq.
Zawahiri's most recent videotape was in April when, clearly alarmed that al Qa'eda had been made to look like an irrelevant spectator at the pro-democracy uprisings sweeping the Arab world, he urged Muslims to fight Nato and American forces in Libya.
US Special Forces did shoot the messenger
Al Qaida leader trusted courier with his life and died because of it
- New York Times News Service
- Published: 00:00 May 4, 2011
- Image Credit: EPA
- A soldier inspects part of the wreckage of a US helicopter that crashed during the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout.
Washington: For years, the agonising search for Osama Bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the CIA drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car's licence plate.
The man in the car was Bin Laden's most trusted courier, and over the next month CIA operatives would track him throughout central Pakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said, he led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 48km from the Pakistani capital.
On a moonless night eight months later, 79 US commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound, the officials said. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in Washington, scrambled jets as the US commandos rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation.
Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial recognition programme. And just like that, history's most expansive, expensive and exasperating manhunt was over.
The inert frame of Osama Bin Laden, America's enemy No 1, was placed in a helicopter for burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again. A nation that spent a decade tormented by its failure to catch the man responsible for nearly 3,000 fiery deaths in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, at long last had its sense of finality, at least in this one difficult chapter.
For an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism for a string of intelligence failures over the past decade, Bin Laden's killing brought a measure of redemption. For a military that has slogged through two, and now three vexing wars in Muslim countries, it provided an unalloyed success.
And for a president whose national security leadership has come under question, it proved an affirming moment that will enter the history books. The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, including the interrogation of CIA detainees in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where sometimes what was not said was as useful as what was.
Intelligence agencies eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mails of the courier's Arab family and pored over satellite images of the compound in Abbottabad to determine a "pattern of life" that might decide whether the operation would be worth the risk. As more than a dozen White House, intelligence and Pentagon officials described the operation on Monday, the past few weeks were a nerve-racking amalgamation of what-ifs and negative scenarios.
"There wasn't a meeting when someone didn't mention 'Black Hawk Down'," a senior administration official said, referring to the disastrous 1993 battle in Somalia in which two US helicopters were shot down and some of their crew killed in action. The failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1979 also loomed large.
Administration officials split over whether to launch the operation, whether to wait and continue monitoring until they were more sure that Bin Laden was really there, or whether to go for a less risky bombing assault. In the end, Obama opted against a bombing that could do so much damage it might be uncertain whether Bin Laden was really hit, and chose to send in commandos.
A "fight your way out" option was built into the plan, with two helicopters following the two main assault copters as backup in case of trouble. On Sunday afternoon, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the Situation Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it unfolded.
Much of the time was spent in silence. Obama looked "stone-faced," one aide said. Vice President Joe Biden fingered his rosary beads. "The minutes passed like days," recalled John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief. The code name for Bin Laden was "Geronimo."
The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency's headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in far-away Pakistan. "They've reached the target," he said. Minutes passed. "We have a visual on Geronimo," he said. A few minutes later: "Geronimo EKIA." Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room. Finally, the president spoke up. "We got him."
FILLING IN THE GAPS
Years before the September 11 attacks transformed Bin Laden into the world's most feared terrorist, the CIA had begun compiling a detailed dossier about the major players inside his global terror network. It wasn't until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up Al Qaida operatives - and subjecting them to hours of brutal interrogation sessions in secret overseas prisons - that they finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers and money men Bin Laden relied on.
Prisoners in US custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man's pseudonym past two top-level detainees - the chief planner of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad; and Al Qaida's operational chief, Abu Faraj Al Libi - the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure. As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and the intense criticism for using waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods that critics said amounted to torture.
By 2005, many inside the CIA had reached the conclusion that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency's top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency's counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more CIA case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With more agents in the field, the CIA finally got the courier's family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools - the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and email messages between the man's family and anyone inside Pakistan.
From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the CIA spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, US intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big, perhaps even Bin Laden himself.
It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding place. Rather, it was a three-story mansion ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and protected by two security fences. Back in Washington Panetta met with Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates.
The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn't even list the topic-in their alerts to each other. That day, Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his presumed hiding place. "It was electric," an administration official who attended the meeting said. "For so long, we'd been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is."
Still, there was still guesswork about whether Bin Laden was indeed inside the mansion. What followed was weeks of tense meetings between Panetta and his subordinates about what to do next. While Panetta advocated an aggressive strategy, to confirm Bin Laden's presence, some CIA clandestine officers worried that the most promising lead in years might be blown if bodyguards suspected the compound was being watched and spirited the Al Qaida leader out of the area.
For weeks last fall, spy satellites took detailed photographs, and the NSA worked to scoop up any communications coming from the mansion. It wasn't easy: the compound had neither a phone line nor internet access. Those inside were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather than put it on the street for collection.
In February, Panetta called Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to give him details about the compound and to begin planning a military strike.
McRaven, a veteran of the covert world who had written a book on US Special Operations, spent weeks working with the CIA on the operation, and came up with three options: a helicopter assault using US commandos, a strikes with B-2 bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint raid with Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told about the mission hours before the launch.
WEIGHING THE OPTIONS
On March 14, Panetta brought the options to the White House. CIA officials had been taking satellite photos, establishing what Panetta described as the habits of people living at the compound. By now evidence was mounting that Bin Laden was there.
The discussions about what to do took place as US relations with Pakistan were severely strained over the arrest of Raymond A. Davis, the CIA officer imprisoned for shooting two Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore in January.
Some of Obama's top aides worried that any military assault to capture or kill Bin Laden might provoke an angry response from Pakistan's government, and that Davis could end up dead in his jail cell.
Davis was ultimately released on March 16, giving a freer hand to his colleagues. On March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinion on the options. Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling it risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial bombardment using smart bombs.
But a few days later, the officials returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000 pounds each. And how could the US officials be certain that they had killed Bin Laden? "It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn't have given us a body," said one US intelligence official.
A helicopter assault emerged as the favoured option. The Navy Seals team that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at training facilities on both US coasts, which were made up to resemble the compound. But they were not told who their target might be until later.
Last Thursday, the day after the president released his long-form birth certificate - such "silliness," he told reporters, was distracting the country from more important things - Obama met again with his top national security officials.
Panetta told the group that the CIA had "red-teamed" the case - shared their intelligence with other analysts who weren't involved to see if they agreed that Bin Laden was probably in Abbottabad. They did. It was time to decide.
Around the table, the group went over and over the negative scenarios. There were long periods of silence, one aide said. And then, finally, Obama spoke: "I'm not going to tell you what my decision is now - I'm going to go back and think about it some more." But he added, "I'm going to make a decision soon."
Sixteen hours later, he had made up his mind. Early the next morning, four top aides were summoned to the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could brief the president, he cut them off. "It's a go," he said. The earliest the operation could take place was Saturday, but officials cautioned that cloud cover in the area meant that Sunday was much more likely.
The next day, Obama took a break from rehearsing for the White House Correspondents Dinner that night - to telephone McRaven to wish him luck. On Sunday, White House officials canceled all West Wing tours so that unsuspecting tourists and visiting celebrities wouldn't accidentally run into all the high level national security officials holed up in the Situation Room all afternoon monitoring the feeds they were getting from Panetta.
A staffer went to Costco and came back with a mix of provisions - turkey pita wraps, cold shrimp, potato chips, soda. At 2:05pm, Panetta sketched out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the CIA director began his narration, via video from Langley. "They've crossed into Pakistan," he said.
ACROSS THE BORDER
The commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a base in Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan. The goal was to get in and get out before Pakistani authorities detected the breach of their territory by what were to them unknown forces and reacted with possibly violent results.
In Pakistan, it was just past midnight on Monday morning, and the Americans were counting on the element of surprise. As the first of the helicopters swooped in at low altitudes, neighbours heard a loud blast and gunshots. A woman who lives two kilometers away said she thought it was a terrorist attack on a Pakistani military installation.
Her husband said no one had any clue Bin Laden was hiding in the quiet, affluent area. "It's the closest you can be to Britain," he said of their neighbourhood. The Seal team stormed into the compound - the raid awakened the group inside, one US intelligence official said - and a firefight broke out.
One man held an unidentified woman living there as a shield while firing at the Americans. Both were killed. Two more men died as well, and two women were wounded. US authorities later determined that one of the slain men was Bin Laden's son and the other two were the courier and his brother.
The commandos found Bin Laden on the third floor, wearing the robes known as a shalwar kamiz, and officials said he resisted before he was shot above the left eye near the end of the 40-minute raid. The US government gave few details about his final moments. "Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don't know," said Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief.
But a senior Pentagon official, briefing on the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Bin Laden "was killed by US bullets." US officials insisted they would have taken Bin Laden into custody if he did not resist, although they considered that likelihood remote.
"If we had the opportunity to take Bin Laden alive, if he didn't present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that," Brennan said. One of Bin Laden's wives identified his body, US officials said.
A picture taken by a Seal commando and processed through facial recognition software suggested a 95 per cent certainty that it was Bin Laden. Later, DNA tests comparing samples with relatives found a 99.9 per cent match. But the Americans faced other problems.
One of their helicopters stalled and could not take off, officials said. Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, the commandos moved the women and children to a secure area and blew up the malfunctioning helicopter. By that point, though, the Pakistani military was scrambling forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani territory.
"They had no idea about who might have been on there," Brennan said. "Thankfully, there was no engagement with Pakistani forces." As they took off at 1:10 am local time, taking a trove of documents and computer hard drives from the house, the Americans left behind the women and children.
A Pakistani official said nine children, from 2 to 12 years old, are now in Pakistani custody. The Obama administration had already determined it would follow Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours to avoid offending devout Muslims, yet concluded Bin Laden would have to be buried at sea, since no country would be willing to take the body.
Moreover, they were not anxious to create a shrine for his followers. So the Al Qaida leader's body was washed and placed in a white sheet in keeping with tradition. On the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, it was placed in a weighted bag as an officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker, according to the senior Pentagon official.
The body then was placed on a prepared flat board and eased into the sea. Only a few sailors watching from one of the large elevator platforms that move aircraft up to the flight deck were witness to the end of America's most wanted fugitive.
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