Manhunt

by Peter L. Bergen

  However, by the time al-Qaeda militants abducted Heshmatollah Attarzadeh-Niyaki, an Iranian diplomat, in late 2008 near his home in the western Pakistani city of Peshawar, the Iranian regime had long given up on making any accommodation with the United States. After holding the diplomat for more than a year, the militants quietly released him back to Iran in the spring of 2010. This was part of a deal that finally allowed bin Laden’s family to end their years of house arrest in Iran.

  Sometime during the blazing summer of 2010, Khairiah, now in her early sixties, managed to travel from western Iran to North Waziristan, a flinty, remote tribal region of Pakistan that lies more than fifteen hundred miles to the east of Tehran; the journey took her across tough mountain ranges and through some of the harshest deserts on Earth. She then traveled on to Abbottabad to reunite with her husband after almost a decade. Her one disappointment was that her only child, Hamza, who had traveled with her from Iran, remained in the remote Pakistani tribal regions that were then home to many of al-Qaeda’s leaders.

  The next wife in seniority in the bin Laden compound was Siham bin Abdullah bin Husayn, an exact contemporary of the fifty-four-year-old al-Qaeda leader, who, like his oldest wife, Khairiah, hailed from a distinguished Saudi family that claimed descent from the Prophet. For bin Laden, who tried—at least in his own mind—to model his life on that of the Prophet, this direct connection to the founder of Islam through his wives no doubt had special meaning. Living in the Abbottabad compound with his mother and father was Siham’s first son, Khalid, age twenty-three.

  Siham had been a student at King Abdulaziz University in the holy city of Medina, pursuing a degree in religious studies, when bin Laden first proposed marriage to her in the mid-1980s. She insisted on completing her education as a condition of accepting his proposal, a request that bin Laden acceded to only reluctantly. Siham’s parents opposed the match because bin Laden already had other wives, but she went ahead with the marriage anyway because she had a steadfast belief in bin Laden’s burgeoning jihad project, fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. By the time they were married, bin Laden was well on his way to becoming an authentic jihadist war hero; Siham found this intriguing. When bin Laden gave her the gold jewelry that is traditional for the wedding dowry, Siham donated it all to the Afghan jihad.

  Siham went on to obtain her MA while studying in Medina, and later her PhD in Koranic grammar while she was living with bin Laden in Sudan in the mid-1990s. A poet and an intellectual, she would often edit bin Laden’s writings. As a result of her husband’s only grudging acceptance of her pursuit of a graduate education, she dedicated her PhD dissertation not to him, but to her children. Her brother says that she was “chained” to bin Laden only because of her intense love for them.

  The slot for the fourth wife that is sanctioned by Islamic law had opened up for bin Laden when he was living in Sudan in the mid-1990s. One of his more senior wives, a Saudi named Khadija, confronted him in the flyblown Sudanese capital of Khartoum, telling him that she hadn’t signed up for the life of jihad and poverty-stricken exile that the Saudi billionaire’s son had recently adopted, and that she wanted a divorce. Bin Laden granted her request, and soon started thinking about the qualities he was looking for in his new wife.

  According to the Yemeni cleric who made the match, “She had to be religious … and young enough not to feel jealous of the Sheikh’s [bin Laden’s] other wives.” The cleric told bin Laden he had in mind someone to whom he had given religious instruction. She was very pious, he said; she came from a modest family, so she could deal with the hardships that life with the leader of al-Qaeda would obviously entail; and she “really believed that being a dutiful and obedient wife would give her a place in heaven.” Her name was Amal Ahmed al-Sadah.

  Bin Laden sent an envoy in 1999 to speak to Amal’s mother in her home in the provincial backwater of Ibb, a small town some one hundred miles south of the Yemeni capital. At first the marriage proposal was couched as coming from a businessman from the Yemeni province of Hadramaut. There was an element of truth to this, as the bin Laden family owns a major construction business in the Middle East and originally hails from Hadramaut, but as the marital negotiations continued, the envoy let it be known that the suitor was in fact Osama bin Laden. This didn’t elicit much reaction, for bin Laden wasn’t yet a household name and al-Qaeda had not yet dispatched a bomb-laden boat to try to sink the USS Cole as it anchored off the coast of Yemen, as the organization would do a year later.

  Amal, a pretty, pale, smiling teenager with an unruly mop of black hair and little in the way of education, eventually consented to the union with the mysterious Mr. bin Laden, saying, “God has blessed it.” Bin Laden dispatched one of his most trusted bodyguards from Afghanistan with a $5,000 dowry, some of which was used to buy Amal gold jewelry and festive clothes. Her cousin later recalled, “We agreed that he could marry Amal because we knew that bin Laden was a good Muslim, very pious, but we did not know much more,” adding that the dowry was “very modest.” (This would have been no surprise to anyone who had dealt with al-Qaeda’s leader before. As is the case with the offspring of some rich families, he was notoriously cheap.)

  In 2000 the excited young bride, together with some of her male relatives, made the long journey from Yemen to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, where bin Laden was then living. There, bin Laden hosted a well-attended wedding party—all male, of course—where poems were declaimed, lambs were slaughtered for the marriage feast, and fusillades of “happy fire” were shot into the air. The women had their own, more modest party as well.

  Initially, bin Laden’s other wives were furious about his new consort, who was barely seventeen. Bin Laden had told his family that Amal was a “mature” woman of thirty, who knew the Koran by heart. It is not clear whether the Yemeni cleric who had arranged the match had simply fooled bin Laden, or whether bin Laden was lying to his other wives. Bin Laden’s chief bodyguard recalls that in the early days of his marriage to Amal, his boss “dragged around this fourth marriage like a ball and chain,” though bin Laden’s feelings would later change.

  Amal’s father traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan to look in on his daughter a year or so before the 9/11 attacks. After waiting in Pakistan, where al-Qaeda members seemed to be checking to see if he had been followed, and then enduring a tortuous trip through Afghanistan, he was taken to a house embedded in a cave system where his daughter was staying, likely in the mountains of Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan. On the second day of his visit, his son-in-law dropped by. Bin Laden, who was carrying a gun, seemed jumpy and worried that his father-in-law might be some kind of spy.

  Bin Laden regaled his father-in-law with stories of the various assassination attempts he had survived. Once these anecdotes were finished, he thanked Amal’s father effusively for the great job he had done raising his daughter, saying, “Thank you for this great upbringing. I didn’t expect an upbringing like this. She is like me.” Bin Laden splurged, slaughtering a bull in honor of his father-in-law’s visit. And Amal, now fully aware of whom she had married, told her father that she wanted to be a martyr at bin Laden’s side.

  When she was a teenager, Amal told one of her male cousins that when she grew up she wanted to “go down in history.” Her cousin retorted, “Your history is in the kitchen,” to which Amal tartly shot back, “You mean history is reserved for you men?” Now, with bin Laden as her husband, she had a real chance at a place in the history books, an opportunity that an obscure town in rural Yemen would never have provided.

  Bin Laden married Amal when he was forty-three, but the twenty-six-year age difference between them did not stand in the way of what seemed to be a real love match. Their firstborn, Safia, came into the world a year or so before the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden told acquaintances that he named her after the Safia who was a seventh-century contemporary of the Prophet Mohammed and had killed a Jew. He explained that he hoped that his daughter Safia would also grow up to kill Jews. Amal went on to
bear four more children, including two while she and her husband were living in Abbottabad.

  His family life in Abbottabad was a source of genuine solace for bin Laden, who believed deeply that polygamy and procreation were religious obligations. To his close male friends he often repeated a saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed: “Marry and increase in number because with you I increase the nation [of Muslims].” To other friends, he joked, “I don’t understand why people take only one wife. If you take four wives you live like a groom.” (This seems to be the only recorded joke bin Laden ever made.)

  Life in the Abbottabad compound certainly wasn’t luxurious, but for Amal it wasn’t much different from the life she had known while growing up in rural Yemen. For their meat consumption, the more than a dozen members of the bin Laden family—together with the trusted Kuwaiti, his brother, and their families—subsisted on two goats a week, which were slaughtered inside the compound. Milk came from cows that were housed in concrete sheds, eggs from some one hundred chickens kept in cages, honey from bees in a hive, and vegetables, such as cucumbers, from the spacious kitchen garden. This homegrown produce was supplemented by cans of Sasso olive oil and cartons of Quaker Oats bought locally.

  If their diet was relatively meager, their social life was nonexistent. Separated from other homes by green fields, the compound was approachable by a single dirt road. The building’s twelve-foot-high walls, barbed wire, and security cameras gave it the look of a minimum-security prison, and did little to encourage casual visitors. If neighborhood kids accidentally hit a cricket ball over the walls of the compound, they were given fifty rupees (sixty cents) and told to buy a new one. If they summoned the courage to knock on the main gate of the compound, eager to play with the many children who lived inside, they would have to knock for ten or twenty minutes before anyone came out. The children who eventually did come out would not give their names and were notably religious, stopping their play when the call to prayer issued from nearby mosques.

  Inside its walls the compound was bare of paint, and in keeping with bin Laden’s ultrafundamentalist beliefs, there were no pictures. It had no air-conditioning and only a few rudimentary gas heaters—in an area where summers can top a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and winters mean snow. As a result, the electricity and gas bills for a compound of its size and the two dozen or so who lived there were minuscule, averaging fifty dollars a month. Beds for the various family members were made from boards hammered together. It was as if the compound’s inhabitants were living at a makeshift but long-term campsite.

  Living an austere life was nothing new for the bin Laden family. For decades al-Qaeda’s leader had embraced a survivalist ethic, rejecting all the conveniences of modern life. When bin Laden moved to scorching Sudan, he insisted that his family didn’t need air-conditioning, and when he later moved to the deserts of Kandahar, the family compound had no running water. A Libyan militant who was once close to bin Laden remembers the leader of al-Qaeda telling his followers, “You should learn to sacrifice everything from modern life, like electricity, air-conditioning, refrigerators, gasoline. If you are living the luxury life, it’s very hard to evacuate and go to the mountains to fight.”

  With the exception of one of the courier’s sons, who attended a madrassa, the children living in the compound did not go to school, so bin Laden’s two older wives, both academics, taught them the fine points of Arabic and the Koran in a bedroom on the second floor of the main building, which served as a makeshift classroom. Using a whiteboard, the two wives routinely administered tests of the children’s knowledge, and bin Laden, who fancied himself something of a poet, taught them poetry. And almost every day, bin Laden, a strict disciplinarian, delivered an address to all his family about how the children should be brought up, outlined dos and don’ts for family members, and preached a religious sermon.

  Bin Laden had long given serious thought to how best to conduct the polygamous life that his hiding place in Abbottabad afforded him. As a university student, he had had lengthy discussions with his best friend about how properly to manage more than one wife and to do so in a God-fearing “Islamic way.” The two friends agreed that they would never follow the path that bin Laden’s own father had chosen, which was constantly to divorce and remarry—so many times that he ended up having some twenty wives. The friend recalls bin Laden saying that he would marry only the four wives sanctioned by Islam and would treat each one absolutely equally. “You have to be fair, you have to give equal justice between all of them, you have to divide the time, to give each one what is enough for her,” the two friends agreed.

  By virtue of her age and stern temperament, the oldest wife, Khairiah, was highest in the pecking order, but there was little fighting among bin Laden’s spouses. All of them had gone into marriage knowing that it would be a polygamous arrangement, something they believed to be sanctioned by God. To ensure harmony—whether in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, Sudan in the early ’90s, or later in Afghanistan and Abbottabad—bin Laden created a dedicated living space for each wife in all his homes. On the Abbottabad compound, each wife had her own separate apartment with its own kitchen (featuring an exhaust system that was nothing more than an upside-down metal bucket suspended over a stove, with crude pipes funneling kitchen smells to the outside). The third floor of the main building was Amal’s domain, while on the floor beneath her lived the two much-older wives.

  For someone who maintained ultra-fundamentalist views about the proper role of women in society, bin Laden accorded his wives some respect, telling them that if they found his life of holy war too hard, they could leave him. He approvingly quoted the Koranic verse “Husband and wife should live together equitably, or separate in kindness.” And he never raised his voice in anger at his wives, perhaps because, as her only child, he had had an exceptionally close relationship with his mother. As an adult, he still doted on his mother, kissing her hands and feet whenever he saw her, and (when he was still able to do so) calling her often to make small talk about what she was cooking that day.

  A clue as to how the fifty-four-year-old bin Laden was able to give each wife “what is enough for her” may be the Avena syrup—a sort of natural Viagra made from wild oats—that was found at the compound after his death. Since bin Laden refused to ingest chemicals in any form, any medicine he took was made of herbs or other natural sources.

  Although they lived on the Abbottabad compound with bin Laden, his trusted courier “the Kuwaiti,” the Kuwaiti’s brother, and their wives and children lived in abject poverty. Bin Laden paid the courier and his brother about 12,000 rupees a month each, a little more than $100, a reflection not only of bin Laden’s usual stinginess but also of the fact that al-Qaeda’s coffers were nearly empty. In jewelry stores in Abbottabad and in the nearby city of Rawalpindi, one of the brothers occasionally bought and sold gold bangles and rings in transactions totaling about $1,500. No doubt this helped them make ends meet.

  A modest one-story building housed the Kuwaiti and his family. A seven-foot-high wall separated it from the main house, where bin Laden lived. The Kuwaiti’s wife, Mariam, rarely went into the big house except to do cleaning; only once, in the spring of 2011, did she catch a glimpse of a strange, tall man speaking Arabic in the big house. Her husband had explained to her years earlier that there was a stranger living on the compound and had instructed her never to talk about him. Bin Laden was hiding even from some of the people living on his own compound.

  In his top-floor sanctuary, bin Laden whiled away the days with Amal. Whitewashed walls and large glass windows that looked out only over the small, high-walled terrace kept things relatively bright in their bedroom, but the space was cramped for a man as tall as bin Laden. The bedroom ceiling was low, no more than seven feet high. A tiny bathroom off to the side had green tile on the walls but none on the floor; a rudimentary toilet that was no more than a hole in the ground, over which they had to squat; and a cheap plastic shower. In this bathroom bin Laden regularly app
lied Just for Men dye to his hair and beard to try to maintain a youthful appearance now that he was in his mid-fifties. Next to the bedroom was a kitchen the size of a large closet, and across the hall was bin Laden’s study, where he kept his books on crude wooden shelves and tapped away on his computer.

  The tight living quarters in Abbottabad somewhat replicated his country retreat in the mountains of Tora Bora, a modest mud house he had built with his own hands and lived in for the latter half of 1996 and several months in early 1997. It was there that bin Laden had seemed happiest. In Tora Bora, about a three hours’ bumpy drive from the nearest small city, he and his closest followers had grown their own crops, baked their own bread, and lived a back-to-the-earth lifestyle. But in Tora Bora bin Laden had roamed freely across the mountains, breathing the alpine air, which he told visitors was one of his great satisfactions.

  In Abbottabad, bin Laden was now forced to stay indoors and, of course, had a great deal of time to kill. He almost certainly kept up the religious practices of his youth, rising before dawn and praying seven times a day, twice more than is required in traditional Islam. A news junkie, he monitored Al Jazeera television and BBC radio closely. In a bare room on the ground floor of his house, he sat wrapped in a blanket against the winter cold, reviewing old videos of himself on a cheap TV. He also watched press conferences being given by the hated U.S. president Barack Obama, whom the leaders of al-Qaeda despised as much as they had President George W. Bush. Bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, publicly referred to Obama as a “house Negro,” implying that he was a slave who received better treatment from his white masters than that meted out to a slave who worked in the fields.