RIP: 911-OBL

Istri Tua Bin Ladin Cemburu terhadap Istri Muda
Minggu, 22 Mei 2011 | 15:15 WIB


TEMPO Interaktif, Islamabad - Pemimpin jaringan Al-Qaidah mendiang Usamah Bin Ladin boleh saja menganggap ketiga istrinya yang hidup seatap di Kota Abbottabad, Pakistan, akur-akur saja. Apalagi, dari hasil penyelidikan terungkap Bin Ladin selalu bergiliran tidur dengan mereka.


Selama lima tahun bersembunyi di Abbottabad, Bin Ladin, 54 tahun, tinggal bersama Khaira Husain Sabir, 62, Siham Abdullah bin Husain, 54, dan Amal Ahmad al-Sadah, 29, dalam sebuah rumah berlantai tiga. Khaira dan Siham yang sama-sama dari Arab Saudi menempati lantai dua, sedangkan Amal di lantai tiga.

Namun, gambaran itu tidak benar sama sekali. Perempuan mana yang mau dimadu. Walhasil, kata seorang pejabat Pakistan, Khaira dan Siham meenyalahkan Amal sebagai penyebab terbongkarnya persembunyian Bin Ladin.

Khaira dan Siham menuding Amal telah bekerja sama dengan Amerika, sehingga lokasi persembunyian Bin Ladin ketahuan. Atau paling tidak, saat bergabung dengan Bin Ladin di Abbottabad, jejak Amal terendus agen rahasia Amerika. “Tuduhan itu keji,” kata seorang pejabat Pakistan yang mengetahui proses pemeriksaan terhadap ketiga janda Bin Ladin.

Khaira adalah istri ketiga yang dinikahi pada 1980-an. Sebelum mendampingi Bin Ladin, sarjana bahasa Arab ini bekerja sebagai guru bagi anak-anak tuli. Ia akrab disapai sebagai Umi Hamzah. Putranya itu dikabarkan berhasil kabur saat pasukan khusus Angkatan laut Amerika, SEAL, menyerbu rumah mereka 1 Mei lalu.

Sedangkan Siham, doktor bidang yurisprudensi Islam, merupakan istri keempat. Guru bahasa Arab ini adalah ibu dari Khalid yang terbunuh dalam serbuan SEAL. Khaira dan Siham membentuk sebuah ruang kelas bagi cucu Khiara.

Bin Ladin sempat menikah lagi, tapi hanya bertahan 48 jam. Ketika berusia 43 tahun, ia menikahi Amal yang saat itu berumur 18 tahun. Pasangan ini dikaruniai tiga anak, termasuk sepasang kembar. Dua istri pertama Bin Ladin adalah Najwa Ghanim dan Khalifah.

Menurut pejabat Pakistan yang lain, ketiga istri Bin Ladin itu menyatakan merekalah yang berupaya mati-matian melindungi suami mereka dari pasukan SEAL. “Fakta ini sudah diketahui banyak orang, jika Anda memiliki dua istri tua dan yang muda usianya setengah dari umur mereka, tentu saja yang tua tidak suka,” ujarnya.

Yang pertama kali bergabung dengan Bin Ladin di Pakistan adalah Khaira, disusul Siham, dan terakhir Amal.

Amal saat ini berada di sebuah rumah sakit militer di Kota Rawalpindi. Sedangkan Kahira dan Siham menjalani interogasi di sebuah rumah di Ibu Kota Islamabad.

THE AUSTRALIAN/FAISAL ASSEGAF
Gereja Katolik Doakan Arwah Usamah Bin Ladin
Rabu, 18 Mei 2011 | 15:49 WIB


TEMPO Interaktif, Florida - Sebuah gereja Katolik di daerah West Palm Beach, Negara Bagian Florida, Amerika Serikat, Ahad mendatang berencana mendoakan sekaligus memberi penghormatan terhadap arwah pemimpin jaringan Al-Qaidah, Usamah Bin Ladin.


Bin Ladin, 54 tahun, terbunuh dalam serangan pasukan khusus Angkatan Laut Amerika, SEAL, 1 Mei lalu. Ia tewas dengan dua luka tembak, di dada dan atas mata kiri. Serbuan itu juga menewaskan empat orang lainnya, termasuk putra Bin Ladin, Khalid, 22 tahun.

Doa bersama buat Bin Ladin ini direncanakan berlangsung pukul 12.00 siang waktu setempat atau tepat saat salat Zuhur di Indonesia. Agenda doa buat pria Arab Saudi berdarah Yaman itu telah dijadwalkan dalam buletin mingguan gereja bernama ‘The Holy Name of Jesus'.

Rencana mendoakan arwah Bin Ladin ini muncul pekan lalu. Sekretaris gereja awalnya mengira itu sekadar lelucon. Bahkan beberapa jemaat tertawa mendengar rencana itu.

Seorang jemaat bernama Lois Pizzano menilai doa buat Bin Ladin itu sama saja dengan mengorbankan agama. "Saya pikir ini benar-benar salah. Ia bukan milik agama Katolik. Atas apa yang telah diperbuat terhadap rakyat Amerika, ia tidak pantas di mana-mana,” katanya.

Namun, Pastor Gavin Badway yang mengepalai gereja itu menganggap jemaat yang tidak setuju lantaran berpikir emosional. “Yesus telah mengajarkan kita untuk mencintai dan memaafkan (orang lain),” ujarnya.

Sejumlah penganut Nasrani di sana mendukung rencana doa buat Bin ladin itu. “Saya tahu kenapa mereka mau melakukan itu karena Injil mengajarkan untuk mencintai musuhmu dan berdoa bagi orang yang membencimu,” kata Aaron Wormus.

Sampai sekarang masyarakat Amerika sendiri belum pernah melihat jasad Bin Ladin yang dicap sebagai otak serangan 11 September 2001. Presiden Barack Hussein Obama menolak desakan untuk mempublikasikan mayat ayah 25 anak itu. Militer Amerika mengklaim sudah mengubur jenazah Bin Ladin secara Islam di wilayah utara Laut Arab beberapa jam setelah ia terbunuh.

WPTV | FAISALASSEGAF
Big Love in Abbottabad: How Osama bin Laden Kept Three Wives Under One Roof
By Tim McGirk Thursday, May 12, 2011


Osama bin Laden once crowed to an interviewer, "Believe me, when your children and your wife become part of your struggle, life becomes very enjoyable." The late al-Qaeda chief uttered those words before 9/11, when he was able to keep his four wives and many children living comfortably in separate houses across Afghanistan. Every few weeks or so, bin Laden would drop in on a wife to fulfill his husbandly duties.

But at the end, his rosy portrayal of being married to jihad was sorely tested. His family must have driven him nuts. During his last days in Abbottabad, Pakistan, bin Laden had to contend with three wives and 17 noisy children under one roof. He had no escape from the din, save for furtive pacing around the garden late at night or vanishing into his so-called Command and Control Center, a dank, windowless room. Swathed against the Himalayan chill in a woolen shawl, he recorded rants that displayed an ever widening disconnect with the daily grind of terrorism: his last oddball offerings were on climate change and capitalism. (See a photo album of the bin Laden family.)

Bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist, was also a family man. An Arab woman married to an al-Qaeda fighter told TIME that after 9/11, bin Laden and his lieutenants made provisions for their families to flee the impending NATO invasion of Afghanistan. His youngest wife, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, may have escaped to Yemen via Pakistan, while bin Laden's other wives are thought to have fled through Iran. But the terrorist got lonely. After setting up camp in Pakistan and breaking his own orders, he summoned back three wives: the most recent addition, al-Sadah, plus two Saudi women he'd wed in the 1980s. The Saudis were mature, educated women — Khairiah Sabar was a child psychologist and Siham Sabar a teacher of Arabic grammar. (They converted a room in the Abbottabad compound into a classroom.) Bin Laden had been their husband for 25 and 27 years, respectively. U.S. counterterrorism experts, who are eager to interrogate the wives, now in Pakistani custody, will surely want to know how al-Qaeda smuggled the boss's wives and their kids to Abbottabad to ease his solitude.

Under Islam, polygamy is allowed but only if the husband is able to treat all his wives equally. Muslim law also states that a man may have only four wives at a time. Bid Laden married six times, but one marriage ended in divorce and the other was annulled. While in Afghanistan, the wives were able to steer clear of one another. According to a 2002 interview that "AS," presumed to be al-Sadah, gave to the magazine Al Majalla, the women "did not live in one house. Each wife lived in her own house. There were two wives in Kandahar, each with her own house. The third wife had a house in Kabul, and the fourth in the Tora Bora mountains." Even then, a polygamous family is not without its frictions. When al-Sadah joined the growing clan in 2000, "bin Laden's other wives were upset, and even his mother chastised him," according to Lawrence Wright, journalist and author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden's Pakistan hideout.)

Judging by the blueprints of the Abbottabad compound, bin Laden tried to keep his three families separate but equal. Each wife and her children were allotted their own floor, and bin Laden would spend time with each group. When U.S. Navy SEALs raided the compound, they found bin Laden on the third floor with al-Sadah. Initial White House accounts say she was shot in the leg while trying to shield her husband.

In all, bin Laden had six wives.

Wife No. 1: Najwa Ghanem, a Syrian and a first cousin, was 15 when she married bin Laden, scarcely two years her elder. Back then, bin Laden was a rich and well-connected Saudi youth, and Ghanem had every reason to believe she was destined for a cushy life of luxury. Instead, she ended up raising 11 children on the run, struggling to keep her good looks in the scorching deserts of Afghanistan. (Bin Laden didn't believe in air conditioning or iced drinks, say his former comrades.) After 9/11, she fled Afghanistan with a mentally disabled son and is thought to have returned to her native Syria. Still married at the time of bin Laden's death, she is technically his fourth widow, although she is not in custody. (See "The Real Housewife of Abbottabad: What bin Laden's Spouse Knows.")

Wife No. 2: Khadijah Sharif was a teacher and nine years older than bin Laden when they were wed in 1983. She reportedly bore him three children before they were divorced sometime between 1993 and 1996, when they were living in Sudan and bin Laden fell afoul of the Saudi regime.

Wife No. 3: Khairiah Sabar, whom bin Laden wed in 1985, was the "spiritual mother" of the sprawling family, according to a woman who knew the bin Ladens in Afghanistan. "She was very openhearted. Everybody went to her for advice," she says. This source claims that after 9/11, Sabar fled through Iran, where she was detained under house arrest before the Iranians allowed her to return to Saudi Arabia. From there, she slipped back into Pakistan to rejoin the al-Qaeda chief in Abbottabad.

Wife No. 4: Siham Sabar, who was also captured in the Abbottabad house, wed bin Laden in 1987. Militant sources say that after 9/11, she may have slipped into Pakistan, remaining there in hiding until it was safe for her to answer her husband's summons. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.)

Wife No. 5: Bin Laden's fifth marriage is a mystery. He rashly wed a woman of unknown nationality in Khartoum in 1994, but the marriage was annulled before it was consummated within 48 hours.

Wife No. 6: Amal Ahmed al-Sadah may have been as young as 15 when a $5,000 price was paid to her Yemeni family before she was shipped off to marry bin Laden, nearly 30 years her elder, in Kandahar. Wed in 2000, they had one daughter, Safiyah, who was allegedly in the bedroom with her father and mother when the Navy SEALs shot him dead. (See pictures of neighbors gawking at the bin Laden compound.)

So far, Pakistan has not charged bin Laden's three widows of any crime. Pakistan has said it will eventually expel the three to Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and will grant direct access to U.S. interrogators when the trio "is ready." As for useful intelligence information, an Arab woman with ties to al-Qaeda tells TIME that al-Qaeda militants aren't big on pillow talk. "They tend not to tell their wives anything about their operations," she says. Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, who interviewed bin Laden in 1997, recalls, "Osama once told me men should never share their secrets with women." Nevertheless, these three women all have vital stories to tell of how al-Qaeda's network in Pakistan managed to smuggle them back to their forlorn terrorist husband and keep them hidden for so long. As widows, under Islam, they are free to marry again, if they wish. But few suitors are likely to step forward. Marrying the widow of the world's most wanted man has its own complications.

Tim McGirk, a former TIME bureau chief, is a fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's investigative reporting program.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2070880,00.html#ixzz1MMfVg38k

Bin Laden Hideout Contained 'Fairly Extensive' Porn Collection
By Doug Aamoth on May 13, 2011


Well, well, well… what have we here? Seems U.S. officials have found many things while searching Osama bin Laden's million-dollar Abbottabad hideout. And what have they found most recently? Yep. Porn.

Reuters reports:

"The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity."

There's no word as to where the smut was discovered or who might have been viewing said smut but, hey, does it really matter? "Specifically, the officials said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials," says Reuters. He would have totally denied it anyway, right?

Apparently this isn't out of the ordinary, as Reuters relays, "Three other U.S. officials familiar with evidence gathered during investigations of other Islamic militants said the discovery of pornography is not uncommon in such cases."

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/05/13/bin-laden-search-finds-modern-electronically-recorded-porn/#ixzz1MMbG8pjx

Minggu, 08/05/2011 10:35 WIB
Growing Up Bin Laden
Osama, Al Qaeda dan Perseteruan Dua Tokoh yang Menentukan
Nograhany Widhi K - detikNews


harus diakui bahwa diam-diam BARAT sendiri yang MEMPERSIAPKAN CALON TERORIS demi kepentingan GEOPOLITIK MEREKA




Jakarta - Pimpinan Al Qaeda Osama bin Laden terlecut semangat jihadnya saat ada invasi Uni Soviet ke Afghanistan pada tahun 1979. Nah, bagaimana dia mendirikan Al Qaeda hingga menghadapi perseteruan dua tokohnya, Abdullah Azzam dan Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri yang menentukan arah Al Qaeda selanjutnya?

Penulis Jean Sasson memberikan catatannya dalam buku 'Growing Up Bin Laden'. Buku ini ditulis oleh istri pertama Osama, Najwa Ghanem, bersama putra keempatnya, Omar bin Laden, dan Jean Sasson, penulis terkenal New York Times, diterbitkan pada 2009 oleh St Martin's Press New York. Di Indonesia, buku setebal 543 halaman ini diterbitkan Literati pada April 2010.

Saat Osama menikah pada 1974, dia masih duduk di sekolah percontohan Al Thager dan melanjutkan ke Universitas King Abdul Azis pada 1976, mengambil ekonomi dan manajemen. Namun menurut Najwa, kuliah Osama tak pernah selesai.

Selama masa pendidikan formal Osama, umat Muslim di Timur Tengah mengalami kebangkitan Islam yang disebut Salwa, bermula dari perang Israel dengan Mesir, Yordania dan Suriah pada 1967. Negara Timur Tengah mengalami kekalahan. Ribuan pemuda Arab mempertanyakan pemimpin mereka dan menuntut perubahan.

Semangat Osama untuk jihad, atau perang suci telah terbentuk. Pada awal tahun 1979, Osama ditemani Najwa, pergi ke Indiana, AS, dan bertemu salah satu mentornya, Abdullah Azzam. Azzam, pria kelahiran Hartiyeh, Palestina, tahun 1941, saat Palestina dijajah Inggris.

Azzam belajar di Khadori College, bekerja sebagai guru di Yordania, mengambil BA bidang syariah di Damaskus, Suriah. Saat Israel menduduki Tepi Barat setelah memenangkan perang 6 hari, Azzam lari ke Yordania dan bergabung dengan Persaudaraan Muslim Palestina.

"Abdullah Azzam berkeras bahwa peta Timur Tengah yang dibuat Inggris Raya dan Prancis setelah Perang Dunia I harus ditulis kembali oleh bangsa Arab," tulis Sasson di halaman 48.

Saat gerilyawan Muslim meluncurkan jihad melawan Rusia, mereka didukung AS, Inggris Raya dan negara muslim lain. "Terpikat dengan pesan politik Abdullah Azzam, Osama siap secara mental untuk merespons invasi Soviet di Afghanistan," jelas Sasson pada halaman 49.

Saat itu Osama meninggalkan bangku kuliah dan menghabiskan waktunya bekerja atas nama pejuang perlawanan Afghan, Mujahiddin. Azzam menjadi partner Osama.

Dari tahun 1980-1985, ada 9 serangan besar Rusia yang mengakibatkan pertarungan hebat. Pada 1985, Azzam dan Osama mendirikan Kantor Layanan, yang menerima sukarelawan Muslim, melakukan pelatihan dan menjadi satuan pejuang di Afghanistan. Osama tak hanya mengumpulkan uang dan mengatur logistik, tapi juga mendirikan kamp pelatihan, membangun jalan dan membentuk satuan perlawanan, dan terjun dalam pertempuran.

Osama bertemu kelompok jihad utama Mesir yang berpandangan sama, membangun kembali dunia Muslim setelah Soviet dikalahkan. Mereka adalah: Mohammed Atef, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, dan Omar Abdel Rahman, kiai buta Mesir.

Pada April 1988, 9 tahun 4 bulan setelah serangan Soviet di Afghanistan, perwakilan Afghanistan, Uni Soviet, AS dan Pakistan bertemu. Mereka sepakat meneken kesepakatan: Rusia menarik pasukan dari Afghanistan, Afghanistan dan Pakistan tak saling campur tangan urusan politik dan militer, AS mengakhiri dukungan pada kelompok anti-Soviet di Afghan.

Azzam menjadikan kasus itu menjadi dasar yang lebih luas, bahwa umat Muslim bisa mewujudkan dunia Islam yang sempurna. Dengan kesepakatan penuh, Osama menyerukan rapat perencanaan yang akan dinamai Al Qaeda-al-Askariya, atau 'pusat militer' yang kemudian dikenal dengan Al Qaeda saja, yang berarti 'pusat' atau 'fondasi'. Rapat pertama, di rumah Osama, di Peshawar, Pakistan.

Dalam perjalanan Osama memimpin Al Qaeda, ketegangan terlihat di antara pengikutnya, yang paling kasat mata, antara Azzam dan al-Zawahiri. Keduanya berebut dukungan dan dana dari Osama.

Azzam tidak mendukung aksi kekerasan kepada sesama muslim, sementara Zawahiri sebaliknya. Pasca penarikan pasukan Soviet sepenuhnya 15 Februari 1989, Al Qaeda mengklaim kemenangan terbesar dan berusaha menjadikan gerakan global sejak saat itu.

Ada beberapa percobaan pembunuhan pada Azzam, hingga pada 24 November 1989, Azzam (49) dan dua anak lelakinya terbunuh dalam ledakan ranjau darat saat karavan motor membawa mereka ke masjid di Peshawar untuk salat. Tak ada pihak yang bertanggung jawab, spekulasi merebak, namun diyakini, Zawahiri menjadi dalang pembunuhan tersebut.

Azzam lah yang diyakini menjadi satu-satunya orang yang bisa mencegah Osama melakukan serangan-serangan terhadap penguasa Arab Saudi dan AS di masa mendatang.

"Osama segera kembali ke Jeddah, sebagai pria yang visi politik, relijius, dan militannya telah sepenuhnya bangkit. Sejak saat itu, dia terus mendorong pertumbuhan Al Qaeda dan aktif mengadakan pertemuan dengan warga Arab lain yang mempunyai pandangan sama," tulis Sasson di halaman 132.

(nwk/nrl)

Usamah Bin Ladin Dikhianati Wakilnya
SABTU, 07 MEI 2011 | 15:05 WIB


TEMPO Interaktif, Riyadh - Terkuaknya lokasi persembunyian pemimpin jaringan Al-Qaidah, Usamah Bin Ladin, setelah lima tahun menetap di Kota Abbottabad, Pakistan, ternyata lantaran dikhianati oleh wakilnya Ayman al-Zawahiri. Klaim ini dilaporkan surat kabar terbitan Arab Saudi, Al-Watan.

Mengutip seorang sumber, koran itu melaporkan pada Kamis lalu bahwa Zawahiri yang diyakini bakal menggantikan posisi Usamah mendesak lelaki 54 tahun itu keluar dari persembunyiannya dalam sebuah gua di Pegunungan Tora Bora, perbatasan Afganistan-Pakistan. Ia meyakinkan Usamah untuk membangun sebuah rumah di Abbottabad.

“Faksi Al-Qaidah Mesir secara de facto menjalankan organisasi sekarang dan sejak ia (Usamah) sakit pada 2004 mereka berupaya mengambil kewenangan penuh,” tulis Al-Watan Kamis lalu.

Sumber yang tidak disebutkan identitasnya ini mengungkapkan kurir yang ikut tewas dalam serbuan pasukan khusus Angkatan Laut Amerika Serikat, SEAL, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, adalah orang kepercayaan Zawahiri. Ia menambahkan Kuwaiti juga tahu ia diikuti oleh CIA (dinas rahasia luar negeri Amerika) dan ia sengaja mengarahkan mereka ke tempat persembunyian Usamah.

Usamah terbunuh Ahad dini hari lalu di sebuah rumah berlantai tiga. Dua korban tewas lainnya adalah istri dan saudara kandung Kuwaiti. Amerika mengklaim sudah menguburkan jenazah buronan nomor wahid sejak serangan 11 September 2001 itu di wilayah utara Laut Arab dalam hitungan jam setelah ia dibunuh.

Zawahiri bertemu Usamah pada pertengahan 1980-an dan sejak itu mereka bersahabat. Para pengamat menggambarkan pria kelahiran Mesir ini merupakan komandan operasi dan strategi Al-Qaidah serta mentor terdekat Usamah.

DAILY MAIL | FAISAL ASSEGAF
Bin Laden’s $1 Million ‘Fortress’ Lacks Luxuries of Wealth
By David Lerman and Anwar Shakir - May 5, 2011
As U.S. officials tell it, Osama bin Laden was living in a $1 million mansion when he was killed this week, undermining his image as an ascetic warrior holed up in a cave near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

“Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound; living in an area that is far removed from the front; hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield,” said John Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism adviser, in a May 2 news conference. “I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

Yet the large compound in Abbottabad, outside of Islamabad, has none of the luxuries that a million-dollar-plus price tag brings to mind. A view of the three-story structure from outside shows unpainted walls streaked with black mold that commonly grows on bare concrete in Pakistani summers. Video of the interior featured rooms with basic, inexpensive furniture. More luxurious homes in Abbottabad are listed for less than $500,000.

Bin Laden chose to live in seclusion far from the tribal border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, prime staging ground for al-Qaeda and the Taliban fighters. Abbottabad, nestled in a valley about 38 miles as the crow flies from the capital of Islamabad, is a different world, with its upscale homes for retired military officers and a nearby golf course.

The house value, part of the initial narrative of the raid, was cited separately in briefings by officials. In subsequent days, the administration has stood by its house-value figure while revising other details of the raid. Officials retracted an early statement that bin Laden used one of his wives as a human shield.

Comparables

The estimated value of $1 million cited by U.S. officials was based on a comparison with other real estate prices in the area, the size of the compound and the size of the buildings on it, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday. The official wasn’t authorized to comment by name and affiliation.

The compound covers about 1.5 acres on a triangular lot. The perimeter walls run a total of almost 800 feet around the property and rise between 10 to 20 feet, dwarfing the neighbors who walk past on the dirt roads outside.

The complex is roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters in a May 2 conference call. He described the home as custom-built to hide someone of significance.

Clearly Different

“It clearly was different than any other house out there,” Brennan said at a later briefing. “It had the appearance of, you know, sort of a fortress.”

The purported million-dollar price tag aside, it was not luxury living, even by Pakistani standards. For less than half that amount, home buyers in the Abbottabad area can snap up luxury residences complete with drawing rooms, gardens, TV lounges, central air conditioning and multiple bedrooms with en- suite bathrooms, according to listings posted on Zameen, a Pakistani real estate web site.

A 7,200-square-foot, two-story home with six bedrooms was listed for $416,500, fully furnished. Another two-story home, with eight bedrooms and 5,400 square feet, was listed for $291,550. There were no homes in Abbottabad listed for over $500,000 on the Zameen website.

Some of the properties listed this week were priced as low as $60,000, although these were on lots as small as one-fortieth the size of bin Laden’s compound.

Land Value

The four original plots of land that were joined to create the bin Laden compound were purchased for $48,000 in 2004 and 2005, the Associated Press reported.

In Bilal Town, bin Laden’s neighborhood of new villas being built amid plots of farmland on the northeastern edge of Abbottabad, that land today would cost $200,000, said Muhammad Sabir Abbassi, a real estate dealer in Abbottabad who spoke by phone.

The property values show the relative affluence of Abbottabad in a country where per capita income, adjusted for purchasing power, was $2,400 in 2010, according to the CIA World Factbook. Nearly a quarter of the population lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day, according to Unicef.

Much of the interior of bin Laden’s compound is empty space that allowed the al-Qaeda leader’s guards a clear view of anyone who might scale the perimeter walls and try to reach the main house. Walls inside the compound create a 30-meter-long alleyway that a vehicle would have to traverse from the exterior gate to a second gate before reaching any of the buildings.

Satellite Dish

The three-story main house is surrounded by several single- story buildings, one with a satellite dish on its roof. The compound has four gas meters and four electricity meters.

Bin Laden provided spacious homes with gardens for his family when he could, though he disdained any reliance on physical comforts or luxury, according to a 2009 book by his first wife, Najwa, and his fourth son, Omar, written with American author Jean Sasson.

Living in Khartoum, Sudan, after he was exiled from his native Saudi Arabia during the 1990s, bin Laden put his wives and children into a group of comfortable three-story homes with gardens in a guarded compound, they wrote.

After being expelled to Afghanistan, Omar wrote, bin Laden kept his family in a series of rock huts “fit for nothing more than sheltering livestock,” in the mountainous Tora Bora area along the Pakistani border.
Selasa, 03/05/2011 16:29 WIB
Sebelum Perintahkan Penyerangan Osama, Obama Harus Pilih 1 dari 3 Opsi
Rita Uli Hutapea - detikNews

Washington - Sepekan sebelum operasi yang menewaskan Osama bin Laden pada Minggu, 1 Mei waktu AS, Presiden Barack Obama menggelar rapat krusial. Dalam rapat pada 28 April waktu setempat itu, para penasihat Obama membahas tiga opsi untuk menindaklanjuti informasi rahasia mengenai mansion di Pakistan yang diyakini sebagai tempat persembunyian Osama.

Rapat itu berlangsung sekitar 2 jam di Situation Room, Gedung Putih. Obama dihadapkan pada tiga opsi, yakni: mengerahkan tim pasukan khusus AS untuk menangkap atau membunuh Osama, melancarkan serangan udara atau menunggu perkembangan informasi intelijen berikutnya.

Dalam rapat itu, Obama dan para penasihatnya membahas pro dan kontra masing-masing opsi tersebut. Keburukan dari opsi serangan udara adalah meski tidak akan membahayakan personel AS namun itu bisa menimbulkan korban jiwa warga sipil yang lebih besar. Juga hanya akan meninggalkan sedikit bukti untuk mengidentifikasi siapa yang tewas.

Demikian diungkapkan pejabat senior AS yang tidak disebutkan namanya seperti diberitakan kantor berita AFP, Selasa (2/5/2011).

Dikatakan pejabat tersebut, opsi untuk mengirimkan pasukan khusus dengan helikopter memang bisa memperbesar kemungkinan untuk mendapatkan bukti identitas Osama. Namun langkah itu bisa membahayakan nyawa prajurit dan berpeluang menimbulkan kemarahan Pakistan karena masuknya helikopter-helikopter AS di atas wilayahnya.

Sementara opsi ketiga yakni menunggu perkembangan lebih lanjut, juga berisiko kaburnya Osama. Sebab jika dibiarkan terlalu lama, Osama bisa mengetahui bahwa dirinya telah berada dalam pengintaian sehingga akan mencoba untuk kabur.

Dikatakan pejabat AS itu, dalam rapat tersebut, para penasihat Obama punya pendapat berbeda-beda mengenai opsi mana yang sebaiknya dipilih. Akhirnya Obama butuh waktu semalam untuk memutuskan soal itu.

Kemudian pada Jumat pagi, 29 April waktu setempat, Obama menyampaikan kepada para pembantunya bahwa dirinya telah memutuskan untuk mengerahkan pasukan khusus. Dan pada Minggu, 1 Mei waktu Amerika, operasi rahasia dilancarkan pasukan khusus Angkatan Laut, SEAL ke Pakistan yang berakhir dengan kematian Osama.

(ita/nrl)

Selasa, 03/05/2011 13:33 WIB
Arab Saudi Tolak Jasad Osama bin Laden video foto
Rita Uli Hutapea - detikNews

Washington - Jasad Osama bin Laden telah dibenamkan ke laut. Langkah itu pun menimbulkan kontroversi. Namun pemerintah Amerika Serikat beralasan, salah satu penyebab adalah tak ada negara yang bersedia menerima jasad pemimpin jaringan teroris Al Qaeda itu.

Menurut pejabat-pejabat AS seperti diberitakan CBS, Selasa (3/5/2011), pemerintah AS telah berniat menyerahkan jasad Osama ke Arab Saudi. Namun kerajaan itu tidak bersedia menerima jasadnya.

Osama yang lahir di Saudi itu tadinya memang merupakan warga negara Saudi. Namun pemerintah Saudi telah mencabut kewarganegaraannya pada tahun 1994.

Osama tewas dalam operasi rahasia yang dilancarkan pasukan khusus Angkatan Laut AS, SEAL pada Minggu, 1 Mei lalu. Presiden AS Barack Obama telah mengumumkan langsung kematian pemimpin teror itu dalam pidatonya di Gedung Putih. Menurut Obama, dengan kematian Osama maka keadilan telah ditegakkan.




(ita/nrl)
Selasa, 03/05/2011 04:01 WIB
Umat Muslim AS Sambut Kematian Osama bin Laden
Hery Winarno - detikNews


Jakarta - Warga muslim Amerika menyatakan kegembiraannya atas tewasnya pemimpin Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. Tewasnya Osama dinilai mampu membuang stigma buruk yang melekat pada komunitas mereka sejak serangan 11 September 2001 lalu.

"Ini adalah hal terbaik yang telah terjadi. Setiap orang merayakan," kata Sam Elhaf (44), di Dearborn, Michigan, tempat di mana komunitas Muslim terbesar di AS berada, seperti dikutip dari Reuters.com, Selasa (3/5/2011).

Komunitas Muslim di AS selama ini selalu dikaitkan-kaitkan dengan Al Qaeda dan Osama bin Laden. Stigma bahwa islam mengajarkan kekerasan melalui jihad selama ini kerap menghantui mereka.

"Ini adalah mimpi buruk, karena kami terus menjelaskan kepada orang Amerika bahwa kita tidak terkait dengan bin Laden. Kami telah berusaha keras untuk meyakinkan masyarakat bahwa umat Islam tidak satu pemikiran dengan mereka," kata Imam Muhammad Musri dari Islam Society of Central Florida.

"Kami juga korban ideologi kebencian dari bin Laden. Orang itu membajak agama kami, kejahatan dilakukan atas nama agama kami, dan menyebabkan kerusakan terbesar bagi komunitas Muslim Amerika dan Islam," terangnya.

Musri dan beberapa Muslim lainnya menyatakan dengan tewasnya bin Laden oleh pasukan AS pada Senin (2/5) kemarin di Pakistan, memberikan Muslim Amerika dan orang Amerika lainnya kesempatan untuk memperbaiki kesalahpahaman dan perbedaan.

"Muslim.. terus menjadi korban dalam pertumbuhan Islamofobia di sini, sehingga tewasnya bin Laden, tentu pada tingkat simbolis, dalam jangka pendek, bisa mengurangi tekanan itu," kata profesor agama dan urusan internasional John Esposito, di Georgetown University.

Setidaknya 7 juta umat Muslim di Amerika Serikat telah merasakan perlakuan yang tidak adil. Mereka selalu disamakan dengan muslim Arab yang merencanakan dan melaksanakan serangan mematikan 11 September kelabu itu.


(her/adi)
Beginilah Bin Ladin Tewas
SENIN, 02 MEI 2011 | 13:43 WIB


TEMPO Interaktif, Pakistan - Keberhasilan pasukan khusus Amerika membunuh Usamah bin Ladin jelas merupakan hasil operasi intelijen yang cukup rumit. Bin Ladin terkenal piawai bersembunyi dan mengecoh pasukan pembunuhnya. Sudah beberapa kali dia berhasil lolos, bahkan diduga tewas, namun tak lama kemudian tampil di televisi, seolah meledek Amerika.

Tapi kali ini, nasibnya tak lagi beruntung. Operasi gabungan antara dinas intelijen Amerika, CIA, dengan intelijen Pakistan (ISI) berhasil mengendus jejaknya. Berbeda dengan informasi-informasi sebelumnya, bin Ladin ternyata tidak bersembunyi di gua-gua di perbatasan Afganistan-Pakistan. Dia diketahui bersembunyi di sebuah desa bernama Abottabad.

Informasi ini mengejutkan. Sejak lama, CIA dan ISI menduga bin Ladin akan menyusup ke Pakistan untuk menyiapkan serangan memperingati 10 tahun kehancuran menara kembar WTC. Tapi, mereka tak mengira bin Ladin ternyata menyusup ke desa yang begitu dekat dengan ibu kota Pakistan, Islamabad.

Abottabad adalah ibu kota distrik Hazara, provinsi Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Desa ini tergolong ramai. Hanya berjarak sekitar 150 kilometer dari Islamabad, desa ini terkenal karena pemandangannya yang indah.Tak heran, desa ini juga ramai dikunjungi wisatawan lokal maupun asing. Desa ini juga tidak tergolong miskin seperti umumnya pedesaan perbatasan Pakistan-Afganistan. Di sini, ada banyak sekolah, bahkan instalasi militer. Jelas, bin Ladin cukup cerdik dengan bersembunyi di desa ini. Dia berharap, kehadirannya tak terlalu mencolok karena desa ini sudah biasa menerima kunjungan orang asing.

Tak kalah mengejutkan adalah tempat persembunyian yang digunakan. Dia bersembunyi di sebuah rumah yang sudah disiapkan selama lima tahun oleh para pengikutnya. Rumah itu berpagar tinggi, di beberapa tempat diamankan dengan pagar kawat berduri. Rumah ini juga tidak dilengkapi telepon apalagi Internet. CIA memperkirakan biaya pembangunan rumah ini sebesar 1 juta dolar Amerika. Melihat besarnya biaya itu, ada kemungkinan rumah ini dibangun menjadi semacam benteng pertahanan.

Rumah inilah yang diintai oleh agen-agen CIA dan ISI sebelum penyerbuan dilakukan. Presiden Obama, dalam pidatonya saat mengumumkan kematian bin Ladin menyebut bahwa ini merupakan operasi gabungan Amerika-Pakistan. Tapi, yang tidak disebut Obama, rincian penyerbuan, mulai dari kapan hari-H, berapa pasukan yang turun, dan dari mana penyerbuan dilakukan, sama sekali tidak dibagi oleh Amerika ke intelijen Pakistan. Bahkan di Amerika sendiri, rincian operasi ini hanya diketahui oleh sangat sedikit orang. Amerika rupanya belajar dari kegagalan penyerbuan sebelumnya karena operasi yang mereka lakukan sering bocor.

Akhirnya, hari H itu pun tiba. Pasukan khusus Amerika datang menggunakan helikopter. Tim lain menyusup lewat jalan darat. Sebuah insiden nyaris membatalkan operasi itu, ketika helikopter yang digunakan harus mendarat darurat akibat kegagalan mesin. Namun, tak ada yang cedera sehingga operasi tetap berlangsung. "Untuk keamanan, kami hancurkan sekalian helikopter yang jatuh," kata sumber intelijen Amerika yang tak dikutip namanya kepada kantor berita CNN.

Diperlukan waktu 40 menit sebelum pasukan pembunuh ini memutuskan menyerbu masuk. Mereka harus memastikan benarkah yang berada di dalam adalah orang yang sudah 10 tahun mereka buru. Saat komando diberikan, serempak mereka menyerbu. Toh operasi tak berjalan mulus. Pengawal bin Ladin yang berjaga memberi perlawanan sengit. Terjadi tembak-menembak. Pasukan pengawal bin Ladin bahkan menggunakan seorang perempuan--tak disebut siapa dia--sebagai perisai hidup. Dalam tembak menembak inilah bin Ladin tewas. Timah panas menembus kepala orang yang paling ditakuti ini. Dalam penyerbuan, selain bin Ladin, ikut tewas tiga pengawalnya, juga perempuan malang yang menjadi tameng tadi. Di pihak Amerika, tak seorang pun tewas.

Tak jelas pula berapa tim pembunuh yang menyerbu masuk. Pejabat militer Departemen Pertahanan Amerika hanya menyebut, "Kami menurunkan sebuah tim kecil." Tidak juga disebut dari detasemen mana pasukan khusus itu. Namun, diduga tim yang turun adalah tim andalan angkatan laut Amerika, NAVY SEAL.

DARU PRIYAMBODO | CNN | AL JAZEERA
Osama bin Laden killed
US president confirms that al-Qaeda leader has been killed in operation in Pakistan and that his body is in US custody.
Last Modified: 02 May 2011 03:31
Afghan officials confirm that al-Qadea leader Bin Laden has died [GALLO/GETTY]

Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, is dead.

US president Barack Obama said bin Laden, the most-wanted fugitive on the US list, has been killed in a US operation in Pakistan.

"Tonight, I can report to the people of the United States and the world, the United States had carried an operation that has killed Osama Bin Laden, a terrorist responsible for killing thousands of innocent people," Obama said in a statement.

A US source told the Reuters news agency that bin Laden had been killed in a house outside Islamabad in a US operation. His body is apparently in the possession of the US.

Qais Azimy, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Kabul, said that Afghan officials have confirmed that bin Laden had died and that his body was with the United States.

The officials said the death of the al-Qaeda leader was more of a "symbolic victory", as he was no longer directly connected to the group's field operations, Azimy reported.

It is a major accomplishment for Obama and his national security team. Obama's predecessor, George Bush, had repeatedly vowed to bring to justice the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, but never did before leaving office in early 2009.

He had been the subject of a search since he eluded US soldiers and Afghan militia forces in a large-scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains in 2001. The trail quickly went cold after he disappeared and many intelligence officials believed he had been hiding in Pakistan.

While in hiding, bin Laden had taunted the West and advocated his views in videotapes spirited from his hideaway.

Besides September 11, Washington has also linked bin Laden to a string of attacks -- including the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen.

Having the body may help convince any doubters that bin Laden is really dead.
Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

May 1, 2011, 11:29 pm
Bin Laden Dead, U.S. Official Says
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden has been killed, two United States officials said. President Obama was expected to make an announcement on Sunday night, almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

One of the officials said that American forces, acting on intelligence, launched a “targeted assault” that killed Mr. Bin Laden, whose ability to elude capture for so long deeply frustrated the Bush administration.

The news of the death of the leader of Al Qaeda was bound to electrify the world, particularly as it comes a full decade after American forces, under President Bush, launched their all-out assault to find the man responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Senin, 02/05/2011 10:01 WIB
Osama bin Laden Dikabarkan Tewas
Rita Uli Hutapea - detikNews


Washington - Setelah bertahun-tahun diburu otoritas Amerika Serikat, kini ada berita mengejutkan tentang Osama bin Laden. Pemimpin jaringan teroris Al Qaeda itu dikabarkan tewas. Jasadnya telah ditemukan otoritas Amerika Serikat.

Presiden Amerika Serikat Barack Obama akan menyampaikan perihal kematian Osama itu dalam pidatonya yang akan disampaikan sebentar lagi. Demikian seperti diberitakan CNN, Senin (2/5/2011).

Berita kematian Osama telah ramai digunjingkan di Twitter. Seorang reporter CBS berkicau di akun Twitter-nya tentang kematian Osama.

"Pembantu komite Intelijen DPR mengkonfirmasi bahwa Osama bin Laden tewas. AS mendapatkan jasadnya," kicaunya.


(ita/nrl)

May 1, 2011
BIN LADEN DEAD, U.S. OFFICIAL SAYS
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Osama bin Laden has been killed, two United States officials said. President Obama was expected to make an announcement on Sunday night, almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

One of the officials said that American forces, acting on intelligence, launched a “targeted assault” that killed Mr. Bin Laden, whose ability to elude capture for so long deeply frustrated the Bush administration.

The news of the death of the leader of Al Qaeda was bound to electrify the world, particularly as it comes a full decade after American forces, under President Bush, launched their all-out assault to find the man responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Source: Al-Qaida head bin Laden dead, US in possession of body; Obama to speak Sunday night



By Associated Press,

WASHINGTON — Al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden is dead and the United States has his body, a person familiar with the developments says.

President Barack Obama is expected to make that announcement from the White House late Sunday night.

channelnewsasia:
Breaking News
US media reports say Al Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden killed in Northwest Pakistan. His body has been recovered by US authorities.

Osama Bin Laden Tewas
Egidius Patnistik | Senin, 2 Mei 2011 | 09:54 WIB


WASHINGTON, KOMPAS.com - Presiden Amerika Serikat (AS), Barack Obama, Minggu (1/5/2011) waktu AS, akan mengumumkan bahwa pemimpin jaringan terosis Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, sudah meninggal, hampir 10 tahun setelah serangan 11 September, kata seorang pejabat senior AS kepada AFP.

Pejabat itu, yang tidak mau disebut namanya, mengatakan bahwa Bin Laden sudah meninggal, tetapi tidak memberikan rincian tentang bagaimana kematiannya terjadi. Namun menurut laporan CNN, Osama tewas dalam serbuan tentara AS di sebuah rumah di luar kota Islamabad, Pakistan, Minggu malam waktu setempat.

Masih menurut pejabat AS tersebut, pengumuman itu akan disampaikan Obama melalui siaran televisi pada Minggu malam waktu AS (atau Senin pagi ini WIB).

Osama bin Laden: 9/11 author who defied Bush, Obama
Photo
11:15pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Challenging the might of the "infidel" United States, Osama bin Laden masterminded the deadliest militant attacks in history and then built a global network of allies to wage a "holy war" intended to outlive him.

The man behind the suicide hijack attacks of September 11, 2001, and who U.S. officials said late on Sunday was dead, was the nemesis of former President George W. Bush, who pledged to take him "dead or alive" and whose two terms were dominated by a "war on terror" against his al Qaeda network.

Bin Laden also assailed Bush's successor, Barack Obama, dismissing a new beginning with Muslims he offered in a 2009 speech as sowing "seeds for hatred and revenge against America."

Widely assumed to be hiding in Pakistan -- whether in a mountain cave or a bustling city -- bin Laden was believed to be largely bereft of operational control, under threat from U.S. drone strikes and struggling with disenchantment among former supporters alienated by suicide attacks in Iraq in 2004-06.

But even as political and security pressures grew on him in 2009-2101, the Saudi-born militant appeared to hit upon a strategy of smaller, more easily-organized attacks, carried out by globally-scattered hubs of sympathizers and affiliate groups. Al Qaeda sprouted new offshoots in Yemen, Iraq and North Africa and directed or inspired attacks from Bali to Britain to the United States, where a Nigerian Islamist made a botched attempt to down an airliner over Detroit on Dec 25, 2009. While remaining the potent figurehead of al Qaeda, bin Laden turned its core leadership from an organization that executed complex team-based attacks into a propaganda hub that cultivated affiliated groups to organize and strike on their own. With his long grey beard and wistful expression, bin Laden became one of the most instantly recognizable people on the planet, his gaunt face staring out from propaganda videos and framed on a U.S. website offering a $25 million bounty.

Officials say U.S. authorities have recovered bin Laden's body, ending the largest manhunt in history involving thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers in the rugged mountains along the border.

Whether reviled as a terrorist and mass murderer or hailed as the champion of oppressed Muslims fighting injustice and humiliation, bin Laden changed the course of history.

ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

The United States and its allies rewrote their security doctrines, struggling to adjust from Cold War-style confrontation between states to a new brand of transnational "asymmetric warfare" against small cells of Islamist militants. Al Qaeda's weapons were not tanks, submarines and aircraft carriers but the everyday tools of globalization and 21st century technology -- among them the Internet, which it eagerly exploited for propaganda, training and recruitment.

But, by his own account, not even bin Laden anticipated the full impact of using 19 suicide hijackers to turn passenger aircraft into guided missiles and slam them into buildings that symbolized U.S. financial and military power. Nearly 3,000 people died when two planes struck New York's World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers rushed the hijackers. "Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs," bin Laden said in a statement a month after the September 11 attacks, urging Muslims to rise up and join a global battle between "the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels." In video and audio messages over the next seven years, the al Qaeda leader goaded Washington and its allies. His diatribes lurched across a range of topics, from the war in Iraq to U.S. politics, the subprime mortgage crisis and even climate change. A gap of nearly three years in his output of video messages revived speculation he might be gravely ill with a kidney problem or even have died, but bin Laden was back on screen in September 2007, telling Americans their country was vulnerable despite its economic and military power. MILLIONAIRE FATHER Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire businessman Mohamed bin Laden, he lost his father while still a boy -- killed in a plane crash, apparently due to an error by his American pilot. Osama's first marriage, to a Syrian cousin, came at the age of 17, and he is reported to have at least 23 children from at least five wives. Part of a family that made its fortune in the oil-funded Saudi construction boom, bin Laden was a shy boy and an average student, who took a degree in civil engineering. He went to Pakistan soon after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and raised funds at home before making his way to the Afghan front lines and developing militant training camps. According to some accounts, he helped form al Qaeda ("The Base") in the dying days of the Soviet occupation. A book by U.S. writer Steve Coll, "The Bin Ladens," suggested the death in 1988 of his extrovert half-brother Salem -- again in a plane crash -- was an important factor in Osama's radicalization. Bin Laden condemned the presence in Saudi Arabia of U.S. troops sent to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait after the 1990 invasion, and remained convinced that the Muslim world was the victim of international terrorism engineered by America. He called for a jihad against the United States, which had spent billions of dollars bankrolling the Afghan resistance in which he had fought.

TRAIL OF ATTACKS

Al Qaeda embarked on a trail of attacks, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six and first raised the specter of Islamist extremism spreading to the United States. Bin Laden was the prime suspect in bombings of U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 as well as attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 224. In October 2000, suicide bombers rammed into the USS Cole warship in Yemen, killing 17 sailors, and al Qaeda was blamed. Disowned by his family and stripped of Saudi citizenship, bin Laden had moved first to Sudan in 1991 and later resurfaced in Afghanistan before the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996. With his wealth, largesse and shared radical Muslim ideology, bin Laden soon eased his way into inner Taliban circles as they imposed their rigid interpretation of Islam. From Afghanistan, bin Laden issued religious decrees against U.S. soldiers and ran training camps where militants were groomed for a global campaign of violence. Recruits were drawn from Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and even Europe by their common hatred of the United States, Israel and moderate Muslim governments, as well as a desire for a more fundamentalist brand of Islam. After the 1998 attacks on two of its African embassies, the United States fired dozens of cruise missiles at Afghanistan, targeting al Qaeda training camps. Bin Laden escaped unscathed. The Taliban paid a heavy price for sheltering bin Laden and his fighters, suffering a humiliating defeat after a U.S.-led invasion in the weeks after the September 11 attacks.

ESCAPE FROM TORA BORA

Al Qaeda was badly weakened, with many fighters killed or captured. Bin Laden vanished -- some reports say U.S. bombs narrowly missed him in late 2001 as he and his forces slipped out of Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains and into Pakistan. But the start of the Iraq war in 2003 produced a fresh surge of recruits for al Qaeda due to opposition to the U.S. invasion within Muslim communities around the world, analysts say. Apparently protected by the Afghan Taliban in their northwest Pakistani strongholds, bin Laden also built ties to an array of south Asian militant groups and backed a bloody revolt by the Pakistani Taliban against the Islamabad government. Amid a reinvigorated al Qaeda propaganda push, operatives or sympathizers were blamed for attacks from Indonesia and Pakistan to Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Spain, Britain and Somalia. Tougher security in the West and killings of middle-rank Qaeda men helped weaken the group, and some followers noted critically that the last successful al Qaeda-linked strike in a Western country was the 2005 London bombings that killed 52. But Western worries about radicalization grew following a string of incidents involving U.S.-based radicals in 2009-10 including an attempt to bomb New York's Times Square. In a 2006 audio message, bin Laden alluded to the U.S. hunt for him and stated his determination to avoid capture: "I swear not to die but a free man."

(Editing by William Maclean)

Selasa, 03/05/2011 01:39 WIB
SEAL Team 6, Pasukan Khusus Pembekuk Osama foto
Adi Nugroho - detikNews


Jakarta - Osama bin Laden telah diburu selama sepuluh tahun. Ia akhirnya berhasil dilumpuhkan pasukan elit Amerika Serikat semalam. Seperti apa pasukan elit ini?

SEAL Team 6 (ST6), begitulah sebutan pasukan khusus anti teror ini. Seperti dilansir Business Insider, Senin (2/5/2011), nama resmi pasukan ini dirahasiakan dari publik, secara teknis tak ada pasukan bernama SEAL Team 6.

Pembentukan ST 6 ini bermula dari kegagalan penyelamatan sandera AS di Iran tahun 1980. Misi penyelamatan tersebut gagal total dan kemudian digagas untuk membentuk pasukan elit antiteroris yang beroperasi dengan kerahasiaan tinggi. Konon, waktu itu, tim ini diberi label 6 untuk membuat bingung agen intelijen Uni Soviet tentang jumlah total anggota tim.

Tim ini sangat spesial, sehingga tak seorangpun bisa mendaftarkan diri. Untuk merekrut anggotanya, mereka mengambil dari anggota pasukan elit angkatan laut AS (Navy) SEAL. SEAL sendiri merupakan kependekan dari Sea, Air and Land, yang menunjukkan bahwa pasukan ini dapat beroperasi di darat, laut maupun udara. Maka dapat dikatakan, ST 6 adalah pasukan elit dalam pasukan elit.

Operasi dari pasukan ini hampir selalu dirahasiakan. Mereka berada di luar protokol militer, terlibat dalam operasi militer tingkat tinggi dan seringkali berada di atas hukum internasional. Catatan operasi dari pasukan ini jarang disimpan. Ini dilakukan agar otoritas AS dapat menyangkal keberadaan dan keterlibatan pasukan ini.

Daftar anggota ST6 pun tak tersedia, namun dipastikan CIA telah banyak merekrut anggota untuk tim operasi khusus ini. Maka tak mengherankan mereka dilibatkan dalam misi CIA.

ST 6 biasanya beroperasi untuk misi militer di daerah maritim, seperti menyelamatkan kapal, kilang minyak, atau wilayah darat yang dekat dengan daerah perairan seperti sungai. Anehnya, lokasi penyergapan Osama, jauh dari laut bahkan sungai.

Saat mantan pejabat Angkatan Laut SEAL ditanyakan mengenai keberadaan tim ini, ia menyangkalnya.
"Anda tahu, saya sungguh ingin membantu anda, tapi saya tak dapat mengatakan apapun soal Team 6. Tidak ada yang namanya Team 6," katanya.

ST 6 menyergap Osama, Senin (2/5/2011) dini hari waktu Pakistan di sebuah rumah di kota Abbottabad, Pakistan. Bangunan megah itu dikelilingi oleh tembok-tembok yang tingginya mencapai 12-18 kaki atau sekitar 3,5 meter hingga 5,4 meter. Bangunan itu juga memiliki dua gerbang keamanan. Meski demikian, pasukan ST 6 hanya membutuhkan waktu 40 menit untuk melumpuhkan Osama. Mereka berhasil menembak Osama tepat di kepalanya meski dalang aksi teror itu telah menggunakan badan seorang perempuan sebagai tameng. Osama tewas bersama istri muda dan anaknya serta dua kurir beserta keluarganya.

(adi/her)

Selasa, 03/05/2011 14:55 WIB
Heli Ditembak Kubu Osama, Obama Sempat Cemas 'Black Hawk Down' Terulang
Nurul Hidayati - detikNews

Heli Ditembak Kubu Osama, Obama Sempat Cemas 'Black Hawk Down' Terulang
Black Hawk jatuh/Daily Mail


Washington - Senin (2/5/2011) sekitar pukul 01.00 waktu Abbottabad, Pakistan. Mendung tebal bergelayut. Itulah cuaca yang bagus untuk menyergap Osama bin Laden. Sehari sebelumnya, operasi dibatalkan karena cuaca cerah yang membuat gerakan pesawat AS akan mudah terdeteksi musuh.

Warga Abbottabad yang tengah nyenyak tidur, terbangun oleh suara gaduh empat helikopter militer yang diperkirakan dua Black Hawk dan dua Chinook. Demikian dilansir Daily Mail, Selasa (3/5/2011).

Empat heli itu memuat lebih 100 tentara komando dari pasukan elite yang telah berlatih intensif berhari-hari di markas mereka di Bagram, Afghanistan. Mereka berlatih di kompleks bangunan yang merupakan imitasi tempat persembunyian Osama, bikinan CIA. Setelah berlatih pada 7 April dan 13 April, mereka diterbangkan ke markas udara Tarbela Ghazi di barat daya Pakistan, di mana CIA telah diizinkan untuk menggunakannya.

Dari sana, mereka bergerak ke Abbottabad, kota yang yang didirikan oleh tentara Inggris, Mayor James Abbot, pada 1853, melewati kegelapan atap-atap penduduk, dengan mematikan lampu heli.

Begitu mengetahui apa yang sedang terjadi, penjaga Osama langsung melepaskan tembakan dari atap rumah dengan granat-berpeluncur-roket dan tampaknya berhasil menembak jatuh salah satu Black Hawk. (Versi pejabat AS sebelumnya menyebutkan, heli itu jatuh karena mengalami kerusakan mesin).

Seorang pejabat Gedung Putih menuturkan, itu adalah momen saat-jantung-berhenti bagi Obama -- yang menyaksikan secara langsung penyerbuan itu -- mengingatkan tragedi jatuhnya Black Hawk di Somalia pada 1993 yang menewaskan 18 tentara. Tragedi ini difilmkan oleh Hollywood dengan judul "Black Hawk Down", diperankan oleh Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, dan Eric Bana. .

Namun kali ini, para tentara bisa menyelamatkan diri tanpa terluka dan bergerak melanjutkan operasi penggerebekan, "meskipun mereka tidak tahu apakah mereka akan mendapat tumpangan pulang nantinya," kata pejabat itu.

Saat itulah warga kota yang mendengar keributan keluar dari rumah-rumah mereka untuk mengetahui apa yang terjadi. Agen-agen CIA berbahasa daerah Pastho menyuruh warga masuk rumah dan menutup pintu.

Dua lusin tentara pasukan khusus US Navy Seal memakai kacamata night vision kemudian turun dengan tali dari heli Chinook ke kompleks rumah berdinding tinggi. Mereka menyerbu masuk untuk mencari Osama dari ruangan ke ruangan, dengan kamera terpasang di helm yang merelai aksi itu kepada Presiden Obama dan Direktur CIA Leon Panetta, yang memantau operasi itu dari kantor pusat CIA di Langley, Virginia.

Obama yang memantau dari Situation Room Gedung Putih bersama jajarannya, digambarkan menyaksikan tayangan itu dengan wajah "membatu". Osama yang memiliki sandi Geronimo dinyatakan tewas setelah terdengar kata "Geronimo EKIA" (Enemy Killed in Action).

Jenazah Osama, yang tertembak di bagian kepala dan dada, dibawa terbang dengan salah satu helikopter. Sejumlah pria yang selamat diterbangkan dari lokasi, sementara empat anak dan dua perempuan, termasuk putri Osama bernama Sofia, dibawa masuk ambulans.





(nrl/nwk)
May 2, 2011
The Most Wanted Face of Terrorism
By KATE ZERNIKE and MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN

Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Monday, was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical, violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century.

With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters. He gloated on videotapes, taunting the United States and Western civilization.

“Do you want Bin Laden dead?” a reporter asked President George W. Bush six days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I want him — I want justice,” the president answered. “And there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ”

It took nearly a decade before that quest finally ended in Pakistan with the death of Bin Laden in a firefight with American forces who attacked a compound where officials said he had been hiding. He was generally believed to be 54.

The manhunt was punctuated in December 2001 by a battle at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan, where Bin Laden and his allies were hiding. Despite days of pounding by American bombers, Bin Laden escaped. For more than nine years afterward, he remained an elusive, shadowy figure frustratingly beyond the grasp of his pursuers and thought to be holed up somewhere in Pakistan and plotting new attacks.

Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man — what a longtime C.I.A. officer called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to the Philippines, under the banner of Al Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam.

Terrorism before Bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. From 1996 to 2001 he bought the protection of the Taliban, then the rulers of Afghanistan, and used the time and freedom to make Al Qaeda — which means “the base” in Arabic — into a multinational enterprise for the export of terrorism.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the names Al Qaeda and Bin Laden spread to every corner of the globe. Groups calling themselves Al Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali and blew up passenger trains in Spain.

To this day, the precise reach of his power remains unknown: how many members Al Qaeda could truly count on, how many countries its cells had penetrated — and whether, as Bin Laden had boasted, he was seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

He waged holy war with modern methods. He sent fatwas — religious decrees — by fax and declared war on Americans in an e-mail beamed by satellite around the world. Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CDs and communicated through encrypted memos on laptops, leading one American official to declare that Bin Laden possessed better communications technology than the United States. He railed against globalization, even as his agents in Europe and North America took advantage of a globalized world to carry out their attacks, insinuating themselves into the very Western culture he despised.

He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire’s son who gave up a life of privilege for the cause. But he was media savvy and acutely image-conscious. Before a CNN crew that interviewed him in 1997 was allowed to leave, his media advisers insisted on editing out unflattering shots. He summoned reporters to a cave in Afghanistan when he needed to get his message out, but like the most controlling of C.E.O.’s he insisted on receiving written questions in advance.

His reedy voice seemed to belie the warrior image he cultivated, a man whose constant companion was a Kalashnikov rifle that he boasted he had taken from a Russian soldier he had killed. The world’s most threatening terrorist, he was also known to submit to dressings down by his mother. While he built his reputation on his combat experience against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, even some of his supporters questioned whether he had actually fought.

And though he claimed to follow the purest form of Islam, many scholars insisted that he was glossing over the faith’s edicts against killing innocents and civilians. Islam draws boundaries on where and why holy war can be waged; Bin Laden declared the entire world as fair territory.

Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard.

“It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”

The Turning Point

For Bin Laden, as for the United States, the turning point came in 1989, with the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan.

To the United States, which had supported the Afghan resistance with billions of dollars in arms and ammunition, the Soviet retreat was the beginning of the end of the cold war and the birth of a new world order; to Bin Laden, who had supported the resistance with money, construction equipment and housing, it was an affirmation of Muslim power and an opportunity to recreate Islamic political power and topple infidel governments through jihad, or holy war.

He declared to an interviewer in 1998, “I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.”

In its place he built his own legend, modeling himself after the Prophet Muhammad, who in the seventh century led the Muslim people to rout the infidels, or nonbelievers, from North Africa and the Middle East. Just as Muhammad saw the Koran revealed to him amid intense persecution, Bin Laden regarded his expulsions from Saudi Arabia and then Sudan in the 1990s as signs that he was a chosen one.

In his vision, he would be the “emir,” or prince, in a restoration of the khalifa, a political empire extending from Afghanistan across the globe. “These countries belong to Islam,” he told the same interviewer, “not the rulers.”

Al Qaeda became the infrastructure for his dream. Under it, he created a web of businesses — some legitimate, some less so — to obtain and move the weapons, chemicals and money he needed. He created training camps for his foot soldiers, a media office to spread his word and even “shuras,” or councils, to approve his military plans and his fatwas.

Through the 1990s, Al Qaeda evolved into a far-flung and loosely connected network of symbiotic relationships: Bin Laden gave affiliated terrorist groups money, training and expertise; they gave him operational cover and furthered his cause. Perhaps the most important alliance was with the Taliban, who rose to power in Afghanistan largely on the strength of Bin Laden’s aid, and in turn provided him refuge and a base for holy war.

Long before Sept. 11, though the evidence was often thin, Bin Laden was considered in part responsible for the killing of American soldiers in Somalia and Saudi Arabia; the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993; the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and a foiled plot to hijack a dozen jets, crash a plane into the C.I.A. headquarters and kill President Bill Clinton.

In 1996, American officials described Bin Laden as “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremism in the world,” but he was not thought of as someone capable of orchestrating international terrorist plots. When the United States put out a list of the most wanted terrorists in 1997, neither Bin Laden nor Al Qaeda was on it.

Bin Laden, however, demanded to be noticed. In February 1998, he declared it the duty of every Muslim to “kill Americans wherever they are found.” After the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in August 1998, President Clinton declared Bin Laden “Public Enemy No. 1.”

The C.I.A. spent much of the next three years hunting him. The goal was to capture Bin Laden using recruited Afghan agents or to kill him with a precision-guided missile, according to the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission and the memoirs of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence from July 1997 to July 2004.

The intelligence was never good enough to pull the trigger. By the summer of 2001, the C.I.A. was convinced that Al Qaeda was on the verge of a spectacular attack. But no one knew where or when it would come.

The Early Life

Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventh son and 17th child, among 50 or more, of his father, people close to the family say. Many experts believe he was born in March of that year, though Steve Coll, in his book “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” reported that Bin Laden himself said he was born in January 1958.

His father, Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, had immigrated to what would soon become Saudi Arabia in 1931 from the family’s ancestral village in a conservative province of southern Yemen. He found work in Jidda as a porter to the pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca; years later, when he owned the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, he displayed his porter’s bag in the main reception room of his palace as a reminder of his humble origins.

The elder Bin Laden began his family’s rise by skillfully navigating the competing interests within and around the House of Saud in the 1950s. He first built palaces for the royal family and was then chosen to renovate holy sites, including those at Medina and Mecca. In 1958, when several Arab countries set about to renovate the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, on one of the holiest sites in Islam, he won the bid for the Saudis by offering to do the job at a loss. In interviews years later, Osama bin Laden would recall proudly that his father had sometimes prayed in all three holy places in one day.

By the 1960s, King Faisal decreed that all construction projects be awarded to the Bin Laden group.

All of the Bin Laden children were required to work for the family company, meaning that Osama spent summers working on road projects. Muhammad bin Laden died in a plane crash in 1967, when Osama was 10. The siblings each inherited millions — the precise amount was a matter of some debate — and led a life of near-royalty. Osama — the name means “young lion” — grew up playing with Saudi princes and had his own stable of horses by age 15.

But some people close to the family paint a portrait of Bin Laden as a misfit. His mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was from Syria, and was the only one not from Saudi Arabia. The elder Bin Laden had met her on a vacation, and Osama was their only child. Within the family, she was said to be known as “the slave” and Osama “the slave child.”

Within the Saudi elite, it was rare to have both parents born outside the kingdom. In a profile of Osama bin Laden in The New Yorker, Mary Anne Weaver quoted a family friend who suggested that he had felt alienated in a culture so obsessed with lineage. “It must have been difficult for him,” the family friend said. “Osama was almost a double outsider. His paternal roots are in Yemen, and within the family his mother was a double outsider as well — she was neither Saudi nor Yemeni but Syrian.”

According to one of his brothers, Osama was the only Bin Laden child who never traveled abroad to study. A biography of Bin Laden provided to the PBS television program “Frontline” by an unidentified family friend asserted that Bin Laden had never traveled outside the Middle East.

That lack of exposure to Western culture would prove a crucial distinction; the other siblings went on to lead lives that would not be unfamiliar to most Americans. They took over the family business, estimated to be worth billions, distributing Snapple drinks, Volkswagens and Disney products across the Middle East. On Sept. 11, 2001, several Bin Laden siblings were living in the United States.

Bin Laden had been educated — and, indeed, steeped, as many Saudi children are — in Wahhabism, a puritanical, ardently anti-Western strain of Islam. Even years later, he so despised the Saudi ruling family’s coziness with Western nations that he refused to refer to Saudi Arabia by its modern name, instead calling it “the Country of the Two Holy Places.”

Newspapers have quoted anonymous sources — particularly an unidentified Lebanese barber — about a wild period of drinking and womanizing in Bin Laden’s life. But by most accounts he was devout and quiet, marrying a relative, the first of his four wives, at age 17.

Soon afterward, he began earning a degree at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda. It was there that he shaped his militancy. He became involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamic radicals who believed that much of the Muslim world, including the leaders of Saudi Arabia, lived as infidels, in violation of the true meaning of the Koran.

And he fell under the influence of two Islamic scholars: Muhammad Quttub and Abdullah Azzam, whose ideas would underpin Al Qaeda. Mr. Azzam became a mentor to the young Bin Laden. Jihad was the responsibility of all Muslims, he taught, until the lands once held by Islam were reclaimed. His motto was, “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogue.”

The Middle East was becoming unsettled in 1979, when Bin Laden was at the university. In Iran, Shiite Muslims mounted an Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah and made the United States a target. Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. And as the year ended, Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan.

Bin Laden arrived in Pakistan-Afghanistan border within two weeks of the occupation. He said later that he had been asked to go by Saudi officials, who were eager to support the resistance movement. In his book “Taliban,” the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid said that the Saudis had originally hoped that a member of the royal family might serve as an inspirational leader in Afghanistan, but that they settled on Bin Laden as the next closest thing when no princes volunteered.

He traveled more like a visiting diplomat than a soldier, meeting with leaders and observing refugees coming into Peshawar, Pakistan. As the family friend said, it “was an exploratory rather than an action trip.” He returned twice a year for the next few years, in between finishing his degree and lobbying family members to support the Afghan mujahedeen.

Bin Laden began traveling beyond the border into Afghanistan in 1982, bringing with him construction machinery and recruits. In 1984, he and Mr. Azzam began setting up guesthouses in Peshawar, which was the first stop for holy warriors on their way to Afghanistan. With the money they had raised in Saudi Arabia, they established the Office of Services, which branched out across the world to recruit young jihadists.

The recruits were known as the Afghan Arabs, though they came from all over the world, and their numbers were estimated as high as 20,000. By 1986, Bin Laden had begun setting up training camps for them as well, and he was paying roughly $25,000 a month to subsidize them.

To young would-be recruits across the Arab world, Bin Laden’s was an attractive story: the rich young man who had become a warrior. His own descriptions of the battles he had seen, how he had lost the fear of death and slept in the face of artillery fire, were brushstrokes of an almost divine figure.

But intelligence sources insist that Bin Laden actually saw combat only once, in a weeklong barrage by the Soviets at Jaji, where the Arab Afghans had dug themselves into caves using Bin Laden’s construction equipment.

“Afghanistan, the jihad, was one terrific photo op for a lot of people,” Milton Bearden, the C.I.A. officer who described Bin Laden as “the North Star,” said in an interview on “Frontline,” adding, “There’s a lot of fiction in there.”

Still, Jaji became a kind of touchstone in the Bin Laden myth. Stories sent back from the battle to Arab newspaper readers, and photographs of Bin Laden in combat gear, burnished his image.

The flood of young men following him to Afghanistan prompted the founding of Al Qaeda. The genesis was essentially bureaucratic; Bin Laden wanted a way to track the men so he could tell their families what had happened to them. The documentation that Al Qaeda provided became a primitive database of young jihadists.

Afghanistan also brought Bin Laden into contact with leaders of other militant Islamic groups, including Ayman al-Zawahri, the bespectacled doctor who would later appear at Bin Laden’s side in televised messages from the caves of Afghanistan. Ultimately Dr. Zawahri’s group, Egyptian Jihad, and others would merge with Al Qaeda, making it an umbrella for terrorist groups.

The Movement

Through the looking glass of Sept. 11, it seemed ironic that the Americans and Osama bin Laden had fought on the same side against the Soviets in Afghanistan — as if the Americans had somehow created the Bin Laden monster by providing arms and cash to the Arabs. The complex at Tora Bora where Qaeda members hid had been created with the help of the C.I.A. as a base for the Afghans fighting the Soviets.

Bin Laden himself described the fight in Afghanistan this way: “There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.”

In truth, the Americans did not deal directly with Bin Laden; they worked through the middlemen of the Pakistani intelligence service.

In the revisionism of the Bin Laden myth, his defenders would say that he had not worked with the Americans but that he had only tolerated them as a means to his end. As proof, they insisted he had made anti-American statements as early as 1980.

Bin Laden would say in retrospect that he was always aware who his enemies were.

“For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers,” he told a French journalist in 1995. “I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against Communism or Western oppression. The urgent thing was Communism, but the next target was America.”

Afghanistan had infused the movement with confidence.

“Most of what we benefited from was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden told an interviewer. “Slumber and fatigue vanished, and so was the terror which the U.S. would use in its media by attributing itself superpower status, or which the Soviet Union used by attributing itself as a superpower.”

He returned to Saudi Arabia, welcomed as a hero, and took up the family business. But Saudi royals grew increasingly wary of him as he became more outspoken against the government.

The breaking point — for Bin Laden and for the Saudis — came when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bin Laden volunteered to the Saudis that the men and equipment he had used in Afghanistan could defend the kingdom. He was “shocked,” a family friend said, to learn that the Americans — the enemy, in his mind — would defend it instead. To him, it was the height of American arrogance.

The United States, he told an interviewer later, “has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the new world order.”

The Saudi government restricted him to Jidda, fearing that his outspokenness would offend the Americans. Bin Laden fled to Sudan, which was offering itself as a sort of haven for terrorists, and there he began setting up legitimate businesses that would help finance Al Qaeda. He also built his reserves, in 1992, paying for about 500 mujahedeen who had been expelled from Pakistan to come work for him.

The Terrorism

It was during that time that it is believed he honed his resolve against the United States.

Within Al Qaeda, he argued that the organization should put aside its differences with Shiite terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the better to concentrate on the common enemy: the United States. He called for attacks against American forces in the Saudi peninsula and in the Horn of Africa.

On Dec. 29, 1992, a bomb exploded in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had been staying while on their way to Somalia. The troops had already left, and the bomb killed two Austrian tourists. American intelligence officials came to believe that it was Bin Laden’s first attack.

On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in a truck driven into the underground garage at the World Trade Center, killing six people. Bin Laden later praised Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the bombing. In October of that year, in Somalia, 18 American service members were killed — some of their bodies dragged through the streets — while on a peacekeeping mission; Bin Laden was almost giddy about the deaths.

After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were “like the Russians,” he told an interviewer.

“The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat,” he said. “And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order, and after a few blows, they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”

By 1994, Bin Laden had established new training camps in Sudan, but he became a man without a country. The Saudi government froze his assets and revoked his citizenship. His family, which had become rich on its relations with the royal family, denounced him publicly after he was caught smuggling weapons from Yemen.

This seemed to make him only more zealous. He sent an open letter to King Fahd outlining the sins of the Saudi government and calling for a campaign of guerrilla attacks to drive Americans from Saudi Arabia. Three months later, in November 1995, a truck bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard training center operated by the United States in Riyadh, killing seven people. That year, Belgian investigators found a kind of how-to manual for terrorists on a CD. The preface dedicated it to Bin Laden, the hero of the holy war.

The next May, when the men accused of the Riyadh bombing were beheaded in Riyadh’s main square, they were forced to read a confession in which they acknowledged the connection to Bin Laden. The next month, June 1996, a truck bomb destroyed Khobar Towers, an American military residence in Dhahran. It killed 19 soldiers.

Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan that summer after Sudan expelled him under pressure from the Americans and Saudis, and he forged an alliance with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. In August 1996, from the Afghan mountain stronghold of Tora Bora, Bin Laden issued his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.”

“Muslims burn with anger at America,” it read. The presence of American forces in the Persian Gulf states “will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on their religion, feelings, and prides and pushes them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land.”

The imbalance of power between American forces and Muslim forces demanded a new kind of fighting, he wrote, “in other words, to initiate a guerrilla war, where sons of the nation, not the military forces, take part in it.”

That same month in New York City, a federal grand jury began meeting to consider charges against Bin Laden. Disputes arose among prosecutors and American law enforcement and intelligence officers about which attacks against American interests could truly be attributed to Bin Laden — whether in fact he had, as an indictment eventually charged, trained and paid the men who killed the Americans in Somalia.

His foot soldiers, in testimony, offered different pictures of Bin Laden’s actual involvement. In some cases he could be as aloof as any boss with thousands of employees. Yet one of the men convicted of the bombings of the embassies said that Bin Laden had been so involved that he was the one who had pointed at surveillance photographs to direct where the truck bomb should be driven.

Bin Laden was becoming more emboldened, summoning Western reporters to his hide-outs in Afghanistan to relay his message: He would wage war against the United States and its allies if Washington did not remove its troops from the gulf region.

“So we tell the Americans as a people,” he told ABC News, “and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring the fight to America, as Ramzi Yousef and others did. This is my message to the American people: to look for a serious government that looks out for their interests and does not attack others, their lands or their honor.”

In February 1998, he issued the edict calling for attacks on Americans anywhere in the world, declaring it an “individual duty” for all Muslims.

In June, the grand jury that had been convened two years earlier issued its indictment, charging Bin Laden with conspiracy to attack the United States abroad, for heading Al Qaeda and for financing terrorist activities around the world.

On Aug. 7, 1998, the eighth anniversary of the United States order sending troops into the gulf region, two bombs exploded simultaneously at the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Nairobi bomb killed 213 people and wounded 4,500; the bomb in Dar es Salaam killed 11 and wounded 85.

The United States retaliated two weeks later with strikes against what were thought to be terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which officials contended — erroneously, it turned out — was producing chemical weapons for Al Qaeda.

Bin Laden had trapped the United States in a spiral of tension, where any defensive or retaliatory actions would affirm the evils that he said had provoked the attacks in the first place. In an interview with Time magazine that December, he brushed aside President Clinton’s threats against him, and referred to himself in the third person, as if recognizing or encouraging the notion that he had become larger than life.

“To call us Enemy No. 1 or Enemy No. 2 does not hurt us,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty.”

In January 1999, the United States government issued a superseding indictment that affirmed the power Bin Laden had sought all along, declaring Al Qaeda an international terrorist organization in a conspiracy to kill American citizens.

The Aftermath

After the attacks of Sept. 11, Bin Laden did what had become routine: He took to Arab television. He appeared, in his statement to the world, to be at the top of his powers. President Bush had declared that the nations of the world were either with the Americans or against them on terrorism; Bin Laden held up a mirror image, declaring the world divided between infidels and believers.

Bin Laden had never before claimed or accepted responsibility for terrorist attacks. But in a videotape found in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar weeks after the attacks, he did precisely that, reveling in the horror of Sept. 11.

“We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he said. “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.”

In the videotape, showing him talking to followers nearly two months after the attacks, Bin Laden smiles, hungers to hear more approval and notes proudly that the attacks let loose a surge of interest in Islam around the world.

He explained that the hijackers on the planes — “the brothers who conducted the operation” — did not know what the mission would be until just before they boarded the planes. They knew only that they were going to the United States on a mission of martyrdom.

Bin Laden’s voice continued to be heard, off and on, for almost the next 10 years as he issued threats, warnings and pronouncements on video and audiotape from wherever he was hiding. As recently as October he appealed for aid for flood victims in Pakistan and blamed the West for causing climate change.

Bin Laden long eluded the allied forces in pursuit of him, moving, it was said, under cover of night with his wives and children, at first between mountain caves. Yet he was determined that if he had to die, he too would die a martyr’s death.

His greatest hope, he told supporters, was that if he died at the hands of the Americans, the Muslim world would rise up and defeat the nation that had killed him.

Michael T. Kaufman, a foreign correspondent, reporter and columnist for The Times, died in 2010; Tim Weiner contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 2, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of the restorations of the Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem and mosques at Medina and Mecca by Bin Laden's father.
Bin Laden Aides Bought Big Orders of Pepsi, Coke, Grocer Says
By Anwar Shakir - May 3, 2011
The two polite Pakistanis who helped Osama bin Laden hide in the shadow of their country’s army bought bulk food orders, chose major brands and equally favored Pepsi and Coke, neighbors and a local shopkeeper said.

Rashid and Akbar Khan owned the fortified residence where U.S. commandos killed bin Laden in an early morning raid yesterday, and did the daily shopping in the Pashtu-language accents of Waziristan, a region on the Afghan border, said grocer Anjum Qaisar, 27, who works 150 meters from the compound. Bin Laden’s men “never came by foot, they always drove a Pajero or a little Suzuki van, and they bought enough food for 10 people,” Qaisar said in an interview.

“I was curious about why they bought so much food, but I did not want to be rude by asking” such a personal question, Qaisar said. The Khans told neighbors they had fled a violent tribal feud in Waziristan to seek a calmer life in Abbottabad, an army headquarters town 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the capital, Islamabad.

A day after the gun battle that revealed bin Laden’s presence, his former neighbors expressed astonishment that the al-Qaeda leader had hidden among them, just a mile from the gate of the Pakistan Military Academy, the country’s equivalent of West Point in the U.S. Eight days before U.S. helicopters swooped in, Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani visited the academy, telling its cadets the “Pakistan army is fully aware of internal and external threats to the country,” an army statement said last week.

Support Network

The U.S. will investigate whether bin Laden’s support network included Pakistani officials, White House counter- terrorism adviser John Brennan said this morning on NBC’s Today show. Abbottabad’s district government chief, Zahir ul-Islam, said in an interview that local officials would not comment on that issue or on the fate of several women and children from the house that local residents said were taken to a hospital and then detained by authorities.

As Qaisar and other neighbors traded stories of bin Laden’s household and the U.S. raid, Pakistani troops controlled access into Bilal Town, their neighborhood of new, walled villas interspersed with farm plots where bin Laden’s 1.5-acre compound was the biggest. Qaisar was one of few merchants who braved the checkpoints to open for business today.

Bin Laden’s protectors “always bought the best brands -- Nestle milk, the good-quality soaps and shampoos,” Qaisar said. “They always paid cash, never asked for credit.” They purchased meat from a butcher nearby who stayed closed today, he said.

Global Rivalry

The twin purchases of American-developed soft drinks is an echo of the global rivalry between Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. and Purchase, New York-based PepsiCo Inc. Nestle SA, the Vevey, Switzerland- based enterprise that's the world's largest food company, has sought to boost its share of emerging-market sales.

Rashid and Akbar owned the compound, said Kamar Khan, a police official who sealed the house today. He declined to say whether the men had been killed in the battle with U.S. commandos.

Michael Scheuer, the CIA veteran who led the agency’s hunt for bin Laden in the 1990s, said it would be a surprise to find that the al-Qaeda leader, a Saudi, had relied on foreigners like the Khans for his innermost security.

“Historically, anyone that close to him almost always was an Arab rather than a Pakistani or an Afghan,” Scheuer said by phone from Washington yesterday.

Previous Escape

Bin Laden escaped U.S. surveillance about 90 days after the September 11 attacks in 2001, as troops closed in on him in the Tora Bora mountains on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. The CIA found evidence of him last August in Abbottabad, a military town in the Himalayan foothills that is favored by Pakistani army retirees and named for its founder, a 19th-century British major, James Abbott.

Neighbors in Bilal Town knew that Arabic-speaking women “lived inside that house because our children heard them through the gate one day and told us,” said Altaf Khan, 35, whose house is on the same street.

Still, at least some of bin Laden’s guards were ethnic Pashtuns, the group whom bin Laden befriended by joining their war against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said Amin Akbar, the nearest neighbor to the al-Qaeda house.

“They had very powerful security lights at night,” Akbar said. “When I saw them on one day last month, I knocked on the gate to tell them so they could turn them off, because our electricity is so expensive.”

A Pakistani opened the door “and became very angry with me,” he said. “He asked me ‘Who told you to come here?’”

Umar Nassir, a teenage student, said neighbors are concerned that bin Laden’s refuge in Abbottabad may bring more trouble. “The schools in the city have been closed for three days,” he said. “We worry that al-Qaeda will come back to attack in our town and take revenge for Osama’s death.”

Minggu, 08/05/2011 07:59 WIB
Obat Kuat Osama bin Laden
AN Uyung Pramudiarja - detikHealth





Obat-obat Osama (dok: Indiatvnews)Abbottabad, Pakistan, Gembong teroris internasional Osama bin Laden diberitakan menderita gagal ginjal. Namun dari berbagai jenis obat yang ditemukan di markasnya, ada kemungkinan ia justru menderita lemah syahwat karena salah satunya adalah obat kuat.

Obat kuat yang dimaksud adalah sirup Avena, sejenis ramuan herbal yang sebenarnya diindikasikan sebagai pemanis buatan dan obat sakit perut. Namun karena efek sampingnya bisa membangkitkan gairah seks, obat ini sering disalahgunakan sebagai 'Viagra alami'.

"Di Amerika, 40 persen sirup ini digunakan secara off label, artinya yang dipakai adalah efek sampingnya" ungkap Cynthia Reilly, ahli farmasi dari American Society of Health System Pharmacists mengomentari temuan obat kuat di markas Osama seperti dikutip dari MSNBC, Minggu (8/5/2011).

Sirup Avena dibuat dari ekstrak biji oat (Avena Sativa), sejenis sereal yang tumbuh liar di berbagai wilayah Eropa. Meski tak banyak bukti ilmiah bahwa sirup ini efektif membangkitkan gairah seks, popularitasnya sebagai suplemen khusus pria dewasa cukup mendunia.

Selain sirup Avena, jenis obat yang paling banyak ditemukan di markas Osama adalah obat sakit perut serta obat batuk untuk anak. Menariknya, tidak ada satupun obat yang mengindikasikan bahwa Osama menderita gagal ginjal seperti yang banyak diyakini selama ini.

Selengkapnya, berikut adalah isi lemari obat di markas Osama seperti diungkap oleh stasiun berita NBC News Pakistan baru-baru ini.

1. Tablet Grucid (omeprazole)
Obat ini diproduksi di India dan diindikasikan untuk mengatasi gangguan pencernaan, khususnya tukak lambung. Bisa juga digunakan untuk mengatasi refluks asam lambung, atau naiknya asam lambung menuju kerongkongan.

2. Tablet gabapentin
Indikasi utama obat ini adalah mengontrol kejang serta meringankan berbagai jenis gangguan saraf. Bisa juga digunakan untuk meringankan nyeri pada infeksi herpes zooster.

3. Natrilix
Jika benar obat ini dikonsumsi oleh Osama sendiri, maka bisa dipastikan bahwa ia tidak menderita gagal ginjal. Sebab obat yang diindikasikan untuk mengatasi tekanan darah tinggi ini tidak boleh diberikan pada penderita gangguan ginjal.

4. Penza drop
Obat tetes telinga ini berisi ampisilin yang digunakan untuk mengatasi infeksi telinga pada anak.

5. Sirup Tixylax (Tixylix)
Digunakan untuk mengatasi nyeri dada serta batuk di malam hari pada anak-anak.

6. Sirup Brufen
Diyakini sebagai sirup ibuprofen, yakni pereda nyeri dan demam pada anak.

7. Dettole
Cairan antiseptik semacam Dettol yang digunakan untuk membersihkan luka atau goresan di permukaan kulit.

8. Sirup Avena
Berisi ekstrak biji oat (Avena Sativa) yang khasiatnya meredakan sakit perut, namun banyak disalahgunakan sebagai pembangkit gairah seks.


(up/ir)

secara keilmuan, O mana yang paling dahsyat? Obama? Osama? Orgasme?