How US Navy SEALs shot dead Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani military town

Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, wrote for The Guardian in 2005: “Bin Laden was a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians”.

But things changed in the 1990s. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, bin Laden lobbied the Saudis to let him deal with Saddam’s forces. However, the king invited the Americans instead. As more than 500,000 American troops arrived in the Gulf, bin Laden openly expressed his displeasure at non-Muslims being based in the Holy Land.

By 1992-93, bin Laden and his al-Qaeda, were training anti-American militants in Somalia, supporting the Islamic Revolution in Sudan, and engaging in terrorist activities targeting Americans, including the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993.

By 1996, bin Laden was already among the most wanted men on the planet, and sought shelter with the Taliban in Afghanistan. What made him a household name, however, were the bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 220 people in 1998. The World Trade Centre attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, took place three years later.

The decade-long manhunt

Almost immediately after the September 11 attacks, the US government identified Osama bin Laden as the perpetrator. Peter Bergen, in Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Osama bin Laden (2012), wrote that CIA director George Tenet, upon meeting US President George Bush on the afternoon of September 11, said that the attacks “looked, smelled, and tasted like bin Laden.”.

But bin Laden’s precise whereabouts were not known. The Bush administration immediately demanded that he be handed over to the Americans, but to no avail. Thus, in October 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan. The Americans would remain in Afghanistan till 2021, and although they quickly managed to remove the Taliban from power in Kabul, their departure saw the Taliban take back power just as quickly.

The invasion, however, got the US no closer to finding bin Laden. In fact, it would take years of covert operations, enhanced interrogation in the dreaded Guantanamo Bay prison, highly sophisticated surveillance work, and some good old luck to locate the al-Qaeda supremo.

In 2007, the CIA learnt the name of bin Laden’s most trusted courier. It took the agency another two years to locate the approximate area where he lived in northern Pakistan, and almost another year to pinpoint his house — a seemingly innocuous compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad, a two-hour drive away from Islamabad. Looking at the large, secluded and secured compound analysts concluded that it must be sheltering a high value target, and by late 2010, they believed with some certainty that it was bin Laden.

Operation Neptune Spear

But an operation to kill bin Laden would not be easy. After all, Abbottabad lies at the very heart of Pakistan’s military establishment. Bin Laden’s compound was located in a quiet suburb largely housing retired Pakistani military personnel. Just 1.3 km away from the compound lay the Pakistan Military Academy, accessible by a straight road. The city also had a military airport.

The compound in which bin Laden was hiding. (Wikimedia Commons)

Suspecting that the Pakistani establishment might be involved in protecting bin Laden, the Americans decided to conduct a covert operation, deep inside Pakistan, ostensibly an ally, in the middle of the night on May 1/2.

On the night of May 1, four helicopters carrying 79 Americans left from the US-controlled Jalalabad air base in Afghanistan. They arrived at the Abbottabad compound on May 2, at approximately 1 am local time. One helicopter’s tail hit the compound wall and crashed, forcing a change of plans. Rather than a team of SEALs rappelling down onto the roof of Osama’s house, all the fighters would mount a ground assault.

After a brief firefight which killed bin Laden’s courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and his wife, the commandos entered the main building, where they killed al-Kuwaiti’s brother, and bin-Laden’s son Khalid as he lunged towards them. Finally, as they reached the third floor of the building, the SEALs found and shot dead Osama bin Laden. They pick up his body and hurriedly leave the scene. Pakistani forces reached the compound mere minutes after the final Navy Helicopter took to the air.

Bin Laden was buried in the Arabian Sea less than 12 hours after the Navy SEALs op.