On 2 May 2011, a small team of elite US Navy Seals stormed a three-storey house within the town of Abbottabad, thirty-five miles north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Its objective – to kill Osama bin Laden.
The twenty-four Seals took off from their Afghan base in Bagram in Black Hawk helicopters specially modified to reduce rotor noise. Flying in low to avoid radar detection, the helicopters swooped into the compound.
The Seals had been practising on a mock-up of the triangular compound, fortified on all sides by a twelve-foot wall topped with barbed wire.
In a thirty-eight-minute operation, the climax of which was a seven-minute firefight, three men and a woman were quickly dispatched, while the Seals homed in on their target. (Among the victims was bin Laden’s 22-year-old son, Khalid.)
Bin Laden and a woman (later confirmed as one of his wives) were found in his bedroom unarmed and wearing pyjamas. Having shot his wife in the calf, the Seals shot bin Laden first in the chest (the ‘stop shot’), then the head (the ‘kill shot’). The pyjamas were later found to have 500 euros sewn within.
Thousands of miles away, in Washington DC, President Obama and his staff (pictured below) watched the proceedings via cameras mounted on the helmets of the Seals. ‘Geronimo EKIA,’ (enemy killed in action) reported back a Seal, using their codename for bin Laden. ‘We got him,’ said the President.
US president Barack Obama and with members of the national security team, awaiting updates on the operation to eliminate Osama bin Laden, 1 May 2011
Having confirmed through DNA the identity of bin Laden, the body was flown out to the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier, waiting outside the port of Karachi. Bin Laden was not to be buried anywhere that could become a shrine. After the reading of Islamic passages, his body was buried in the North Arabian Sea.
President Obama addressed the nation and America celebrated. It may have taken nine years, seven months and twenty-three days but the US had finally got justice over a man who had cast such a long shadow over their recent history. Osama bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was dead.
The longer-term impact and the effect the psychological blow of having lost their symbolic and spiritual leader remain to be seen but in the short term, Al-Qaeda and its Taliban colleagues will seek retaliation. Within days the Taliban, which even before bin Laden’s death had announced a ‘spring offensive’, attacked Afghan government offices in Kandahar. In a statement, the Taliban announced that the ‘martyrdom of Sheikh Osama bin Laden will give a new impetus to the current jihad against the occupiers’.