The multi-year operation of CIA agents to uncover the hideout of the former al-Qaeda leader in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has finally reached an important clue that reached Osama bin Laden‘s extended family.
According to the New York Post, Osama bin Laden, a former al-Qaeda leader who believed in polygamy, was living in Afghanistan with his three wives at the age of 44 at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Khairia Saber, 52, was a child psychologist who quit her job to marry him, and Saham al-Sharif, 44, was a poet with a doctorate in Quranic grammar who edited his wife’s lectures and encouraged her global jihadist programs. Bin Laden’s third wife was a 17-year-old Yemeni girl named Amal al-Sada.
Osama’s large family was in danger following the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,977 people. The al-Qaeda founder, who launched a war against the West, hid in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan to avoid law enforcement. But in 2004, when the United States became embroiled in developments in Afghanistan and Iraq, bin Laden felt that the pursuit of his pursuit had diminished.
It was at this time that bin Laden ordered his bodyguard, Ibrahim Saeed Ahmad Abdul Hamid, to buy land, hire an architect, and build a mansion with enough space for his family in Abitabad, Pakistan. Ibrahim bought $ 50,000 worth of land in his name and prepared it for his boss. The three-story mansion had a total of eight bedrooms on the first and second floors. The third floor had a bedroom with a bathroom, a study room and a balcony for bin Laden to use. In 2005, his family gradually moved there.
Ibrahim, who ostensibly owned it, his brother Abrar and their wives and children came and went. But they lived in a small house in the yard, not in the main building.
The two brothers took special security measures. They used public telephones in major cities for important calls and removed the batteries of their cell phones so that they could not be traced home. Bin Laden’s family rarely left the mansion, except for Amal al-Sada, who twice went to a local hospital for childbirth under a false name and threw himself at Kerry to avoid possible questions.
But in 2010, the CIA acquired a trace. A Pakistani informant in the populous city of Peshawar saw a man who thought Ibrahim was bin Laden’s trusted bodyguard.
In August 2010, Ibrahim’s white jeep took CIA agents to a high-walled mansion with barbed wire on top of its walls. In this house lived bin Laden’s three wives with their eight young children and four grandchildren, including two and three year old children.
The mansion had strange signs that made CIA analysts think. Bin Laden’s mansion did not have a telephone line or Internet service, although it was clear that the mansion was for a wealthy man who had enough money to provide such facilities. The main building did not have many windows, and the third-floor balcony was covered with a high wall on all sides.
“Who’s building a wall around a private balcony?” Asked CIA Director Leon Panetta. One analyst said: “You are exactly right.”
The CIA provided a safe house near the mysterious mansion to monitor the “lifestyle” of its occupants. While the residents of the neighborhood dumped their garbage, the residents of the mansion burned their own garbage inside. Inside the mansion were apple and grape trees, vegetables were planted, honey was harvested, and chickens and even cattle were eaten by invisible residents.
But the last clue was the clothesline inside the mansion, which was filled with women’s clothing, “kumiz” pants used by Pakistani men, clothes and old children every day, and these clothes were more than the clothes needed by the family members of the bodyguard who wanted to wear.
According to CIA agents, among the invisible occupants of the house were an adult man, several adult women, and at least nine children, and these signs matched the characteristics of the man they were looking for.
After living in hiding for nine years, Osama bin Laden was eventually exposed by his own family. That was enough for the then CIA director to go to then-US President Barack Obama on December 14, 2010.
CIA agents were never able to obtain a picture of bin Laden to prove that they had finally found the al-Qaeda leader’s hiding place. “But they never came up with evidence to disprove the hypothesis that bin Laden lived there,” said Peter Bergen, a national security analyst and former CNN member.
Obama was convinced and ordered the operation, which was finally found on May 1, 2011, at the age of 54. If Osama bin Laden had thought of providing a clothes dryer for his wives, the decision would never have been made!