40 minutes of battle, and two shots to the head

40 minutes of battle, and two shots to the head
Osama bin Laden's death was the denouement of a decade-long search for America's public enemy number one

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Declan Walsh, Esther Addley, Ewen MacAskill
guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 May 2011 21.29 BST
Article history

The compound where Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Photograph: Reuters
The helicopters swooped in the dead of night, flying in formation across the lower ranges of the Himalayas, then dropping precipitously on their target, a three- storey house on an acre of land in a wealthy suburb of Abbottabad, the training ground of Pakistan's powerful military officer corps.

In one of the houses nearby Omar Nazeer, a 30-year-old official at Pakistan's petroleum ministry, was up late, working on his laptop. As the MH-60 Black Hawks thundered overhead he gave a start, spilling coffee on to the keyboard. "Our windows were shivering because the helicopters were so close," he said.

The aircraft – three or four, according to different reports – carried soldiers from the US navy's elite Seal Team Six, a highly secretive counter-terrorism unit that works closely with the CIA. One hovered over the target house; al-Qaida militants fired on it with a rocket-propelled grenade. Then disaster struck: the chopper stalled and slumped towards the ground.

Thousands of miles away in the US, officials watching on live video feeds had a heart-stopping moment. Some thought of "Black Hawk Down" – the infamous 1993 debacle in Somalia that precipitated America's withdrawal from that country. But the pilot put his craft down safely and the Seals tumbled out, pressing towards their target, the 54-year-old Saudi fugitive who had eluded them for over a decade, now closer than ever.

The Americans had been led there by one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted men: a courier, first identified by detainees at Guantánamo Bay through his nom de guerre. He was said to be protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged architect of the 9/11 attack. The Americans discovered his name four years ago, and discovered that he lived in the Abbottabad region with his brother two years ago.

Last August they narrowed his location to this compound in Abbottabad, an affluent military town about 35 miles north of Islamabad named after its first deputy commissioner, the British officer Major James Abbott. At first the Americans were puzzled: the compound, built in 2005 and valued at $1m (£600,000), was no ordinary home. Perimeter walls up to six metres (18ft) high were topped with barbed wire, there was no internet or telephone connection and few windows. Oddly, the inhabitants burned their rubbish inside the compound instead of leaving it outside.

The neighbours knew the owners of the house – the courier and his brother, described as ethnic Pashtuns – as secretive types. They dispatched children to buy food at local shops, and although they regularly prayed at a local mosque, they didn't engage in small talk.

Salman Riaz, a film actor, said that five months ago he and a crew tried to do some filming next to the house but were told to stop by two men who came out. "They told me that this is haram [forbidden] in Islam," he said. He did not know that he had stumbled across a bespoke terrorist hideaway "custom-built to hide someone of significance", according to a US official.

Monitoring the house with satellite technology and other spy tools, the CIA determined that a family was living in the house with the two men. Last February the CIA determined "with high probability" that it was Bin Laden and his clan. Officials scrambled to formulate a plan to kill him.

The first idea was to bomb the house using B2 stealth bombers dropping 2,000-pound JDAMs (joint direct attack munitions), according to ABC News. But Barack Obama rejected it, saying he wanted definitive proof that the Saudi was inside. "The helicopter raid was riskier," said one US official. "[But] he didn't just want to leave a pile of rubble."

An air assault plan was formulated. The Seal Team Six, officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group and based in Virginia, held rehearsals on a specially constructed compound in early April. Meanwhile Obama officials engaged in regular meetings, chaired by national security adviser, Tom Donilon, and counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, to determine when – and how – to strike.

On 28 April, shortly after he nominated CIA director, Leon Panetta, to replace Robert Gates as defence secretary, Obama held a final meeting. In the secrecy of the White House situation room, he listened to recommendations from all sides, but reserved the final decision. Finally last Friday morning, with the eyes of the world glued on the royal wedding in London, he signed off on the air assault.

Only a tiny handful of people within the administration were aware of the operation. US officials say that no other country including Pakistan – as far as some were concerned, especially Pakistan – was informed, even though the US helicopters would essentially be invading Pakistani airspace. Pakistani officials agreed on Monday that they knew nothing.

"Not a thing," said an official with the ISI spy agency.

But there are signs that statement may be untrue: some reports on the strike, sourced in Washington, suggest the Seals took off from Ghazi airforce base at nearby Tarbela Dam. If true, that suggests a convenient contrivance so that Pakistan could avoid ownership of an operation certain to rankle with the notoriously anti-American public.

Obama handed control of the assault to Panetta – still CIA director until July – who transformed the conference room at its headquarters into a command centre from where could be in constant contact with the Seal leaders – an unusual case of a civilian spy leading a military team.

Saturday came, the day of the planned assault, but bad weather conspired against the Americans. On Sunday, Obama spent part of his day on the golf course, but cut short his round to return to the White House for a meeting where he and top aides reviewed final preparations. Hours later the Seals took off – probably from Jalalabad or Bagram airbases in Afghanistan, the ISI official said – and entered Pakistani airspace.

What happened next is subject to the American account only. Local residents reported three large blasts shortly after the helicopters passed overhead. The al-Qaida fighters holed up inside fought back, trading gunfire for nearly 40 minutes, as the US troops cleared the compound floor by floor, Pentagon officials said.

The Pashtun courier – he has not been identified – and his brother were killed, as was one of Bin Laden's adult sons, possibly Hamza, who was a senior al-Qaida member. One woman reportedly died and two others were injured.

The Americans then reached Bin Laden – the man with a $25m bounty, the embodiment of the national terrorist nightmare, the subject of greater American passions and frustrations than perhaps any other figure of the past decade.

According to the Pentagon he was identified by name by one of his own wives. As the raiding party closed in on the last unsecured room in the compound, Bin Laden himself seized a gun and started firing back.

US officials say – and there is no independent verification of this fact – he was shot twice in the head. "Done in by a double tap – boom boom – to the left side of his face," wrote Marc Ambinder of the National Journal, a beltway insider's journal. Word of the kill went up the chain of command. Thousands of miles away, at the CIA in Virginia and at the White House, cheers erupted.

The Americans scoured the house for intelligence, took photos of the body, using facial recognition technology to compare it with pictures. It was him. Before withdrawing, the Seals blew up the wreckage of the helicopter. An orange fireball lit up the night sky over Abbottabad.

Bin Laden's body was taken to the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the Arabian Gulf. Back in Abbottabad, the wounded were taken to the Combined Military hospital in Abbottabad. Omar Nazeer, the government official cowering in his house, said six children and three women had been wounded. He knew, he said, because his brother, a military official, worked at the hospital.

Hours later, Bin Laden's body was wrapped in white cloth, and – after, it is said, the administration of Islamic burial rites – it was weighted and dropped from a plank into the sea. The location was not revealed. "We don't want a bunch of people going to the shrine for ever," an official told the Washington Post.

Obama called former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to inform them of the news. Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff to Bush's defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted. "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn."

Then Obama gave a press conference, and gave the news to the rest of the world. "No matter how long it takes," he said. "Justice will be done."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/02/osama-bin-laden-killed-abbottabad-raid