Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Osama bin Laden's family's Bel Air estate listed for $28M

house osama bin laden

Photographs inside the house showed excessive clutter and modest furnishings. After the American mission, there was extensive interest in and reporting about the compound and its design. To date, the Pakistani government has not responded to any allegations as to who had built the structure. Bin Laden was shot in his bedroom, another part of the story which is difficult to verify.

Execution of the operation

Even as the Americans prepared to launch their attack on the compound, relationships were breaking down inside its walls. Exhausted by meeting the needs of a fluctuating but steadily expanding number of confined bin Laden family members and those of their own growing families, the al-Kuwaiti brothers gave the al Qaeda chief an ultimatum. They would start looking for loyalists to replace them in their roles as secretary/caretaker/courier/liaison with the outer world—and Osama would agree not to add a fourth wife to the menage or otherwise increase the number of those the brothers were responsible for. Bin Laden devoted hours each day to monitoring the news of conflict in both Iraq and Afghanistan, disturbed only by the racket made by the compound’s small children.

house osama bin laden

He Had the Compound Custom-Built

Meanwhile, the CIA and other intelligence officials searched in vain for his hiding place. The famous image of former President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden sitting with several members of their cabinet and U.S. military officials in the Situation Room on May 1, 2011, is a picture that history will forever remember. It documented the reactions of top government officials watching the capture of Osama bin Laden (via History). What was happening on the other side of that image was the entire room watching live video footage of SEAL Team Six — a combat mission performing the covert military operation — carrying out their task to either capture or kill the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, says Military. Together with Donilon, Brennan had been tasked with trying to conceive what the Abbottabad raid would look like. In spite of his support for a mission that was in part his brainchild, his knuckles were white throughout the entire attack.

Watch President Obama's final State of the Union address.

What Osama bin Laden's compound looks like today - New York Post

What Osama bin Laden's compound looks like today.

Posted: Sat, 14 Aug 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Some tell of a firefight inside, while others say that there was no return fire and bin Laden and others were killed without reply. After 'interrogating' captured al-Qaeda members in Guantanamo Bay, the US identified who they believed to be bin Laden's courier, tracking him to Abbottabad. After reconnaissance on a compound, it was suspected that bin Laden was hiding inside. With everything in place by 2011, the US made their strike on bin Laden's compound in one of the most famous historical events of the 2010s. Cooking equipment was shown on the floor, the decor seemed shabby, medicines were left on a shelf with no cabinet and the pantry seemed rudimentary.

CIA cache of computer files

Massood Khan is a local lawyer, a friend of a friend, who showed up elegantly dressed in a black vest that many Pakistanis favor. He gestured across the grassy lot to a concrete slab about the size of a house. The fourth paragraph originally stated that the bound and gagged woman was possibly Bin Laden's doctor from Yemen. The text has also been updated to include a reference to one of the dead, possibly a guard or household retainer; mention of this person was accidentally dropped from the original story. The growth of the organization was attributed in part to bin Laden’s charisma.

U.S. forces retrieved valuable intelligence from the compound.

In the universe of historic photographs, few reign more iconic than the image of key White House policymakers watching and waiting for confirmation that SEAL Team Six had succeeded in capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. Now you can watch the entire NBA season or your favorite teams on streaming. Hearst Television participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.

Intelligence gathering

Across the room stood another woman, hands tied behind her back and mouth taped, aged around 30 and initially identified as a Yemeni doctor for Bin Laden's wife and children. After this bombing, al-Qaeda was reported to have developed its justification for the killing of innocent people. Due to the increasing pressure on Sudan from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States, Bin Laden was permitted to leave for a country of his choice.

The team began intense training for the operation, which included practicing in a life-sized replica of the compound. Around 2007, U.S. intelligence officials discovered the name of one of bin Laden’s closest couriers, whom they speculated may have been involved in supporting or harboring the terrorist. Despite not having concrete proof that bin Laden himself was at the location, President Obama was confident in the hunch and approved the mission to capture or kill. In late April 2011, after eight months of secretly organizing, SEAL Team Six had the authorization, and the mission was officially active when the team took off from a U.S. military base in Afghanistan en route to Abbottabad (via Biography).

According to Reuters, "the pornography recovered in the Abbottabad compound consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive.” Multiple Freedom of Information requests for the release of the files have been denied, so their exact contents remain a mystery. After 9/11, the bin Laden family spent several years on the run, moving from one sympathetic Pakistani locale to another—including the frontier city of Peshawar and the rural Swat Valley, among others. When his supporters decided it was time for the family to settle, they chose Abbottabad, which bin Laden had visited and liked. It took nearly a decade following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. For American intelligence authorities to realize that al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden—mastermind of the 9/11 plot—hadn’t been skulking in a cave or a remote tribal area of Pakistan.

This account states that by September 2010, these leads followed a courier to the Abbottabad compound, where the U.S. began intensive multiplatform surveillance. According to journalist Seymour Hersh and NBC News, the U.S. was tipped off about bin Laden's location by a Pakistani intelligence officer who offered details of where the Pakistani Intelligence Service held him in detention in exchange for a bounty. Back at the US military base in Afghanistan, comparison with pictures gave US intelligence officers a 95% certainty they had got Bin Laden, and a DNA check against family members gave a "virtually 100% DNA match", White House officials said. Bin Laden was among a group of thirteen fugitive terrorists wanted on that latter list for questioning about the 1998 embassy bombings. Bin Laden remains the only fugitive ever to be listed on both FBI fugitive lists.

It was at Donilon’s suggestion that Webb and his video feed had been based in the smaller conference room. Although this photo is known as the “Situation Room” picture, White House photographer Pete Souza actually took it squeezed into a corner of the small adjacent conference room into which President Barack Obama had stepped in order to watch the video feed in real time. A plate of sandwiches and other snacks, fetched earlier in the day from Costco by a White House staffer, was abandoned in the main Situation Room.

SEAL celebrity Rob O'Neill claims in his book that he muscled to the front of the group before shooting bin laden twice in the head. He has made a successful career out of his claims during the operation. Other members of the team give different versions of events, and it is difficult to verify who did what when the SEALs were inside. But the official said the woman who was with Bin Laden was injured and not killed.

By tracking his courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti to the compound, U.S. officials surmised that bin Laden was hiding there. During a raid on 2 May 2011, 24 members of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group arrived by helicopter, breached a wall using explosives, and entered the compound in search of bin Laden. After the operation was completed and bin Laden was killed, Pakistan demolished the structure in February 2012. Even in the frenzy of the post-September 11 “global war on terror,” bin Laden eluded capture. For almost 10 years, he remained in hiding, issuing fatwas and taunts over radio and television, recruiting enthusiastic young jihadis to his cause and plotting new attacks.

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