Need to know: Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is dead. The leader of Al Qaeda was killed in a firefight in Pakistan, President Obama announced on Sunday. Bin Laden's body was flown to Afghanistan, then buried at sea. The administration wanted to prevent the creation of a shrine to him. Bin Laden was at the top of the U.S. "Most Wanted" list. The U.S. has put its embassies on alert, warning of the possibility of Al Qaeda reprisal attacks. (Watch Obama's speech.) Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the 17th child, among 50 or more, of his father. Raised in Saudi Arabia, he was educated in Wahhabism, the puritanical, ardently anti-Western strain of Islam. His militancy was shaped at King Abdulaziz University, where he became involved with the Muslim Brotherhood. He arrived on the Afghan border within two weeks of the 1979 Soviet occupation. In the 1980s, he moved between Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Sudan, where he began setting up legitimate businesses that would help finance Al Qaeda. In 1994, Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden's citizenship and his family publicly denounced him. He fled to Afghanistan in 1996 and in February 1998 called for attacks on Americans anywhere in the world. He was linked to several deadly attacks before 9/11, including suicide missions against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the USS Cole in Yemen. (Obits from the NYT and Washington Post and a timeline of his life from the Guardian.) Follow GlobalPost's coverage of the death of Osama bid Laden. |
| Want to know: The big break came last August. Detainees at Guantanamo Bay had provided the pseudonym of a trusted courier of bin Laden to American interrogators. Four years ago officials learned the courier's real name and two years ago they found the rough location where the courier lived in Pakistan. Then in August they narrowed his location to a compound about 35 miles north of Islamabad. CIA analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound. By September, they had determined there was a "strong possiblity" that bin Laden was there. Many months of intelligence work followed, and over the course of March and April, President Obama held five national security meetings to go over plans for the operation. A drone stike was considered but ruled out because of the high risk of civilian causalties. At 8:20 on Friday morning, Obama met with key advisers and signed off on the final plan to send intelligence operatives into the compound. |
| Dull but important: What now for Al Qaeda? To answer that question, break down the network into its constituent elements: the hardcore leadership, the various affiliated groups that have some kind of organizational link to Al Qaeda and the ideology, Al Qaeda-ism. The most likely scenario in the future is continuing low-level violence and threat shifting around the periphery of the Islamic world depending on local circumstances and the emergence of new leaders. (See a list of Al Qaeda's remaining leaders.) |
| Just because: When U.S. officials traced a courier of bin Laden's to a compound about 35 miles north of Islamabad, they immediately realized this was no normal residence. The walls were 12- to 18-feet high, topped with barbed wire. Access to the compound was severely restricted. The main part of the residence was three stories high but had few windows. It was valued at about $1 million but had no phone or internet connection. Unlike their neighbors, occupants of the compound burned all their rubbish. (Watch video of the suspected compound.) |
| Just because: A man in Abbottabad, the town where bin Laden was killed, inadvertently live-tweeted the attack as it started. The man, who uses the Twitter handle "ReallyVirtual", identifies himself as Sohaib Athar, "an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops." Athar first tweeted about a helicopter hovering above him at 1 a.m., saying it was a "rare event" for Abbottabad. Still, Mr. Athar seems to have thought of it as a mere annoyance, as his next tweet was "Go away helicopter - before I take out my giant swatter :-/" (View his Twitter feed.) |
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