The Jihad and Reform Front warned bin Laden that God would hold him to account “for blessing the work done by the al-Qaeda in Iraq organisation without disavowing the scandals that are committed in your name”. The letters also show bin Laden was stunned by the Arab uprisings that erupted across the region from 2010 and urged his deputies to seize the moment of “revolution” and rally Muslim youth.Īl-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, which would later morph into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL) group – and which now increasingly overshadows al-Qaeda – also came up in the documents.īin Laden and his then deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, received a scathing rebuke in a letter from some Iraqi supporters, who demanded they denounce the bloodletting in Iraq. The correspondence reflected bin Laden’s “worry that disunity within the global jihadist movement could spell its demise,” said a senior US intelligence analyst. “We should stop operations against the army and the police in all regions, especially Yemen,” he wrote. He laid out plans to groom a new cadre of leaders willing to risk the dangers of joining al-Qaeda, and his associates discussed arrangements for smuggling bin Laden’s favourite son and likely heir, Hamza, to Pakistan.Ĭiting domestic US public opposition to the Vietnam War, bin Laden argued that the only way to alter US foreign policy was to “start striking America to force it to abandon these rulers and leave the Muslims alone”.īut the documents also highlight deep divisions among his followers over how to wage their campaigns.īin Laden warned that conflict with regimes in the Middle East would distract the fighters from hitting hard at what as far as he was concerned was the real enemy – the US. He scolded his followers for gathering in large groups and fretted about a microscopic bug being inserted in his wife’s clothes. Mindful of drone raids taking out senior leaders, bin Laden frequently referred to security headaches and advised against communicating by email. The release came shortly after US journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that Washington’s official account of the hunt for bin Laden and the raid that led to his death was a lie.īut CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani said the declassification had been long planned and had not been intended as a response to Hersh’s report.įrom the strategic and theological discussions to the mundane details of domestic funding and security measures, the documents show Bin Laden once again attacking the West in a spectacular fashion. The documents are CIA translations of the originals in English, and AFP had no way to independently verify the materials or the accuracy of the translation.ĪL JAZEERA INVESTIGATES: Pakistan’s Bin Laden Dossier (25:00) It was also in accordance with a law obliging the spy agencies to review all the bin Laden materials for possible release, he said. Jeff Anchukaitis, spokesman for the US Director of National Intelligence’s office, said the release of “a sizeable tranche of documents recovered during the raid” was in keeping with US President Barack Obama‘s call for “increased transparency”. The AFP news agency was given exclusive access to the documents in advance of their release. US intelligence agencies have now declassified more than 100 of these documents taken from bin Laden’s archive, after politicians ordered the move and critics accused the CIA of withholding material. The letter was among thousands of files found by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011, when they descended on bin Laden’s hideout in the garrison town of Abbottabad and shot him dead. “The focus should be on killing and fighting the American people and their representatives,” bin Laden wrote in one of the documents revealed on Wednesday. Hunkered down in his Pakistani compound, bin Laden pleaded with his followers to stay focused on attacking the US instead of being dragged into Muslim infighting. The US has published a trove of declassified documents that shed new light on the mindset of Osama bin Laden, the late al-Qaeda leader, before he was killed by US Navy Seals in 2011.
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