Osama bin Laden - Mastermind of September 11th Documentary

to obtain weapons of mass destruction and was a supporter of Bin Laden. Bin Laden had often cited the crippling economic sanctions that the United States had imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War as one of his grievances against the United States, but there is no substantial evidence to show that the Hussein regime ever materially supported Bin Laden significantly. . The invasion unfolded much like he had done in Afghanistan. A quick victory was won over Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime, and within two months President Bush announced America's victory in the war. But it was not that simple and, as in Afghanistan, a cruel counterinsurgency campaign began in the summer of 2003 that lasted for years as many elements inside Iraq attempted to withdraw US forces from the country.

Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were involved in this internal conflict. His methods focused on trying to sow divisions between the Sunni Muslim minority and the Shia Muslim majority in an effort to foment a civil war throughout Iraq. Traditional terrorist methods were used, such as the bombing of the Al-Askari Shrine in the city of Samara on February 22, 2006. While this action did not result in widespread loss of life, it did result in the destruction of one of the sites. most sacred. places in Iraq for Shiite Muslims and triggered days of sectarian violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in which at least a thousand people lost their lives.

Finally, in the late 2000s, the war in Iraq began to stabilize as a major U.S. troop surge in 2007, combined with political reforms, served to quell the worst of the violence. However, Al-Qaeda continued its campaign and from Pakistan Bin Laden authorized bomb attacks in Baghdad and a suicide attack against the Shiite shrine of Imam Husayn in the city of Karbala in March 2008, which left 42 dead and dozens of wounded. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Bin Laden had moved into a new purpose-built compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad. Construction had evidently begun shortly after Bin Laden arrived in the country in early 2002 and was completed in 2005.

The complex was built on a 38,000 square foot estate and was surrounded by a concrete perimeter fence up to five and a half feet high. meter high and topped with barbed wire. There were few windows here and plenty of screens to block views of the interior, including a screen on a third-floor balcony tall enough to ensure privacy for bin Laden, who stood six feet, four inches tall. It's hard to believe that authorities didn't recognize how unusual the new property was and that it was clearly built with safety in mind. Bin Laden probably lived there from 2006 onwards with some of his wives, children and followers in a city not far from Islamabad, Pakistan's capital.

While Bin Laden's compound protected him in Pakistan for many years, eventually his over-reliance on it would be his undoing. In 2009, U.S. intelligence determined that Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a close confidant of Bin Laden who is believed to have been with him in the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when the terrorist leader narrowly avoided arrest by United States, had begun to work as a trusted courier for Bin Laden while he was hiding in Pakistan. In 2009, the CIA determined that Al-Kuwaiti was living in Abbottabad. Additional information gathering led them to identify Bin Laden's compound as a peculiar building in the city.

Tens of millions of dollars were obtained from the US Congress to fund the establishment of a CIA field team in Abbottabad that in 2010 began monitoring the complex and those entering and leaving it. Despite this extensive initiative and the use of the most sophisticated surveillance devices and drones available in the world, the team was never able to obtain a photograph or any other evidence that concretely established that bin Laden was living inside the compound. But by early 2011, the range of circumstantial evidence was such that they were convinced this was the hideout of the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

US President Barack Obama authorized what was codenamed Operation Neptune Launches on May 1, 2011. It was lunchtime in Washington, D.C. but just half an hour later, at almost 11 p.m. in Afghanistan, two Black Hawk helicopters took off carrying two dozen Navy Seals. from a US air base in Afghanistan and crossed the border into Pakistan. Just over an hour and a half later, midnight on May 2 in Pakistan, the helicopters landed at the Abbottabad complex. One of the helicopters crashed during landing, but none of the Navy Seals were injured. Fighting began as soon as they landed with a brief shootout with some of Bin Laden's followers.

The Navy Seals then entered the main compound. Back in Washington D.C., President Obama and senior government and defense officials viewed live footage of the attack from the White House Situation Room. On the second floor, Navy Seals found and shot one of Bin Laden's many adult children, as well as another follower, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whose presence in Abbottabad had first suggested to the security services that Bin Laden could be taking refuge in the city. Then, as they climbed the stairs again, they found Bin Laden on the third floor. His orders were to kill the Al Qaeda leader instead of arresting him.

There are conflicting accounts about what happened then, as different Navy Seals have tried to claim credit for killing Bin Laden, but it seems more likely that it was Matt Bissonnette who shot Bin Laden at 39 minutes after midnight, time locally, in the body and head. at his bedroom door and then staggered back into the room and fell dead on the floor. Bin Laden was discovered to have 500 euros and two mobile phones sewn into his tunic, no doubt to use if he was fleeing an attack on the compound like the one that led to his death. It was a pretty pathetic disappearance.

The decision had been made in advance that Bin Laden's body would be quickly disposed of somewhere where his resting place would never be identified and turned into a sanctuary for Islamic fundamentalists and jihadists. So, shortly after his death and the compound was fully secured, the Navy Seals placed the Al-Qaeda leader's body in a body bag and then carried it to the still-intact helicopter. After a sweep of the compound to gather intelligence that might be useful in countering future terrorist attacks or establishing a more concrete idea of ​​what Bin Laden had been up to over the years, the team left the compound with the body in the only helicopter in operation.

A backup helicopter was called in to pick up some of the remaining Navy Seals. At 8 p.m., in Washington, it was confirmed that the body was that of Bin Laden. President Obama addressed the nation a few hours later to announce the news of the raid's success. While he did so, they took Bin Laden's body to some undisclosed location in the sea and dumped it there,

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with iron chains and rocks to ensure he sank to the bottom of the sea. This was done within 24 hours of his death to comply with Islamic tradition. Unfortunately, the death of Osama bin Laden did not lead to any reduction in the threat that Islamic fundamentalists and jihadists posed to the Western world or, indeed, to the majority of Muslims in the Islamic world.

As brutal as its tactics were, al Qaeda was already being eclipsed by more extreme jihadist movements at the time of bin Laden's death. In 2004, a Jordanian jihadist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had become an associate of Al-Qaeda in Iraq during the early stages of the counterinsurgency against the US occupation. In 2006, Al-Zarqawi and several of his closest allies merged to form what they called the Islamic State of Iraq. In the years that followed they went from strength to strength, but his methods also became increasingly brutal, including the use of vicious tactics against Muslims who refused to live by anything other than the harshest forms of Sharia.

As US forces withdrew from Iraq in the early 2010s, Al-Qaeda was increasingly reluctant to tolerate this approach to jihad in the Middle East and a complete split occurred between the two organizations in the years following the death of Bin Laden under the new Al-Qaeda government. leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. Incredibly, in the 2010s, Al-Qaeda, the organization that carried out the 9/11 attacks, was seen as too moderate by many Islamic fundamentalists and the Islamic State of Iraq group was now gaining many more followers among challengers. to jihadists. In the years that followed, the Islamic State of Iraq burst into the consciousness of the entire world.

After the 2011 Arab Spring, a brutal civil war broke out in Syria, while the US withdrawal from neighboring Iraq left significant parts of the country outside the control of the government in Baghdad. In this environment, the Islamic State, under its new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was able to begin to take direct control of a vast swath of territory in northern Iraq and eastern Syria. Over the course of 2014 and 2015, the newly named Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, drew international attention when it declared the establishment of an Islamic caliphate over the lands it had taken control of;

ISIL took Islamic jihad to a new level of brutality from which even Al Qaeda distanced itself. Gradually, control over eastern Syria and northern Iraq was wrested from ISIL between 2014 and 2017, when the United States sent troops back to the region. In the early 2020s, Islamic fundamentalism would appear to be on the decline, driven in part by rapidly improving living standards in the Middle East, a diminished inclination toward nation-building by the United States in the region, and a warming of relations between Israel. and many of their Muslim neighbors. Indeed, the main threat from Islamic fundamentalism appears to have shifted from the Middle East to the Sahel, the region along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert where jihadist groups have undermined the stability of nations such as Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso.

The Taliban have also returned to power in Afghanistan following the US withdrawal in 2021. Osama bin Laden was arguably the most important figure in the history of modern Islamic fundamentalism. Beginning in the 1970s he gradually became radicalized through his exposure to the ideas of Islamist scholars such as Sayyid Qutb. This growing radicalism, combined with the financial power at his disposal through Bin Laden's enormous business empire in Saudi Arabia, and the connections he enjoyed throughout Saudi society, ensured that when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began in 1979, could provide broad powers. to train and equip the mujahideen to fight the Russians during the 1980s.

If his career opposing non-Muslim incursions into the Islamic world had ended there, he would simply be a footnote in history . But once the war against the Soviets ended, he committed himself to a broader program of Islamic fundamentalism. His actions during the Gulf War highlighted his growing anti-Americanism and his willingness to break with Muslim regimes such as that of the Saudi royal family if they engaged in actions he considered antithetical to Islam. Thus, in the 1990s a more extreme version of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda was emerging, as reflected in the increasingly brutal bombing campaigns that were launched, the most serious being the bombings of the United States embassy.

United States in 1998, which killed hundreds of people and injured thousands. But ultimately, it is the 9/11 attacks on the United States that have made Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda most famous. On that fateful morning in September 2001, 19 hijackers acting on bin Laden's orders launched attacks that killed more than 2,700 people in the space of a few hours, while thousands more saw their lives cut short in the years that followed as a result of secondary injuries. Equally damaging was the psychological impact. Most people have clear memories of where they were and what they were doing on September 11, 2001, when news of the attacks emerged and images of the planes hitting the Twin Towers appeared in the media.

Life changed in many ways that day as additional security measures were imposed across the Western world to combat future attacks. Wars ensued in the Middle East, and for years news of a major incident in Afghanistan, Iraq, or somewhere barely spent a week on the front pages of newspapers. All of this culminated in the rise of ISIL and a migration crisis in the Mediterranean whenMillions of people tried to flee Syria and Iraq. By then, Bin Laden was dead, killed in a rather ignominious end in a fortified compound where he had been hiding, in Abbottabad, for half a decade, but the world had changed enormously because of his violent extremism.

What do you think of Osama bin Laden? Would it have been better for him to have been captured alive and tried for his crimes? Let us know in the comments section and in the meantime, thank you so much for watching.