The secret documents of Osama bin Laden, 20 years after the attacks of the Twin Towers

Osama Bin Laden believed that the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon would allow him to resuscitate the Public (“Community of Believers in Islam”) and thus achieve the expansion of the Muslim world. I can not. The response of the United States and its allies thwarted their plans. Then internal fighting began within the Al-Qaeda network, a division that quickly spawned other branches, such as ISIS.

This, along with the degrading detention of Bin Laden’s son in Iran, stems from a lengthy investigation by a Middle East specialist, Dr Nelly Lahoud, of the thousands of files declassified by the CIA in 2017, which were so far unknown.

It is audios, videos, texts with proclamations and personal letters. Priceless material he found the SEAL control group at home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, when he assassinated Bin Laden.

“I have analyzed more than 96,000 of these files, including nearly 6,000 pages of Arabic text which constitute a recording of the Al-Qaeda internal communication between 2000 and 2011 ”, explains Lahoud in an article published on the organization’s website. Foreign Affairs.

A treasure”

In this “treasure trove of information”, as the specialist calls it, are many letters written by family members from the leader of Al Qaeda.

Also a handwritten notebook 220 pages, “Particularly revealing”.

The first idea of ​​carrying out a major attack on American soil appeared at the end of October 2000.

From there, plans are drawn up, in detail, already search for members of the suicide squad.

One of Bin Laden’s manuscripts reveals his reasoning at the time.

“The entire Muslim world is subject to the reign of blasphemous regimes and American hegemony,” he said. So a major attack could “Break the fear of this false god and destroy the myth of American invincibility, ”in the words of the Islamic leader himself.

A decisive blow against the great Empire, believed Bin Laden, would allow him to revive the “umma”, the “community of the believers in Islam”, and thus to spread the Moslem religion in the whole world.

“Your brothers in the land of the two holy places (Mecca and Medina) and in Palestine ask you for help and ask you to participate in the fight against the enemy, your enemy: Israelis and Americans», He summons in one of the documents.

The impact of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, They gave the al-Qaeda leader flight in the Muslim world. He succeeds in getting many young people to join the “cause” against the United States in various ways.

Emboldened, Bin Laden seized the opportunity to deliver one of his strong proclamations: no one who lives there will benefit from the security until security becomes a reality for us who live in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad. “

A serious miscalculation

According to Lahoud, documents found at his home in Abbottabad show that there was a “serious miscalculation” by the terrorist leader: “He predicted that following the attack, the American people would take to the streets, reproducing the protests against the war in Vietnam and asking his government to withdraw from countries with a Muslim majority ”.

“Bin Laden never intended that the United States would go to war in response to the onslaught“He adds. And he maintains that, contrary to what he expected,” the Americans supported President George W. Bush and its war on terrorism ”.

Ultimately, the contested invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 thwarted Al Qaeda’s plans and ended up dismantling the organization.

With coalition troops in Afghan territory, Bin Laden took refuge in the mountains and had to leave the leadership in the hands of other leaders.

A new September 11

It was not until 2004 that he reconnected and sent letters with plans to conduct “martyrdom operations similar to the September 11 attack in New York.” And he clarified that if they were not possible, which in fact could not be done, he had “alternative plans to target railways “.

But the systematic attacks by the United States and its allies against the leadership of Al Qaeda bore fruit and the terrorist network began to falter.

One of his secondary bosses named Tawfiq sent a letter to Bin Laden reflecting the situation.

“Our afflictions and our problems were heartbreaking, and the weakness, failure and lack of direction that occurred against us was also heartbreaking,” he wrote.

“We Muslims were Tainted, desecrated and our state was brokenHe said in reference to the invasion. “Our lands have been occupied, our resources have been plundered. This is what happened to jihadists in general, and to us in Al-Qaeda in particular, “he adds.

Escape to Iran

Through the documents, it was established that many Al Qaeda leaders and members of Bin Laden’s family, such as his son Saad, fled Afghanistan through Iran (a predominantly Shiite country) at the start. from 2002.

There they received help to hide from some Sunni families who “They helped them rent houses using false documents.”

However, in a few months Iranian services discovered them and they were sent to a secret underground prison. “They were then transferred to a heavily guarded compound, along with their relatives and children.”

Bin Laden’s papers also included a letter from his son Saad, who in 2008 fled Iran. He tells the story of the ordeal he suffered at the hands of the Shiites.

“Calamities have accumulated and psychological problems have increased,” he said in the text. He recounts, punctually, that when his pregnant wife had to be induced, they did not take her to the hospital. until “the fetus stops moving”. “She was forced to give birth to him after she died.”

For Saad, the Iranians “were masters in the art of making us lose our nerves and they took pleasure in torturing us psychologically. “

From 2003 things started to rebuild, although this was going to be temporary. The United States invades Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a movement that leads to the dissolution of the Iraqi army and the Sunni minority government.

These Sunni sectors, now marginalized, started to get closer to Al-Qaeda and to form jihadist groups of this Islamic current.

In this scenario, a brutal man, a Jordanian religious extremist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Initially, Al Zarqawi sought to establish himself within the protective wing of the Al Qaeda network, which was famous and enabled it to recruit people and raise funds from powerful Islamic sectors in the Gulf.

Both have shared the opportunity to wage a holy war, and bin Laden accepts the merger of his network with that of Al-Zarqawi, says Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which was later renamed “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”.

In the early years, he helped rebuild the morale of the terrorist network, with attacks in different locations. But it all quickly fell apart as Al-Zarqawi and his group turned out to be extremely bloodthirsty.

They committed massive killings. They attacked and killed Iraqi civilians, especially Shiites, whom they despised. Bin Laden was discouraged that his idea was to make Al Qaeda famous as enemy of the Americans and of Israel, not other Muslims.

The new generation of jihadists, bin Laden concluded, “I had lost my way.

The unification of the different jihadist currents has not been achieved either. On the contrary, the divisions were more and more marked.

Al-Zarqawi fell out with another powerful group, “Ansar al-Sunna”, which questioned its bloodthirsty methods.

A secondary al-Qaeda leader at the time, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman wrote to bin Laden that something had to be done with Al Zarqawi. “We cannot let the brother act on the basis of his judgment,” says the text.

ISIS was born

The situation got worse and worse in 2006, when Al-Zarqawi was wiped out by a precision airstrike the United States.

The successors of this jihadist leader have decided to separate from Al-Qaeda. From 2007, they stopped responding to Bin Laden and his Islamic leaders.

The group begins to form what would be the Islamic State or ISIS, and that he would later establish the bloody caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Bin Laden’s ostracism deepens and seek refuge in Pakistan. The United States, tired of the tricks of the Pakistanis who denied the existence of the leader of Al-Qaeda on their territory, launched the “Gerónimo” operation.

On May 2, 2011, a SEAL commando entered his home in Abbottabad and murdered him in two shots. Then, to prevent his tomb from becoming a “Mecca”, his body was thrown into the sea.

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