Bin Laden’s Secret Life in a shrunken World - Background info about life in the compound

May 7, 2011

Bin Laden’s Secret Life in a shrunken World


By ELISABETH BUMILLER, CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and Carlotta Gall and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt from Washington, David Rohde from New York, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

WASHINGTON — The world’s most wanted terrorist lived his last five years imprisoned behind the barbed wire and high walls of his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, his days consumed by dark arts and domesticity.

American officials believe that Osama bin Laden spent many hours on the computer, relying on couriers to bring him thumb drives packed with information from the outside world.

Videos seized from Bin Laden’s compound and released by the Obama administration on Saturday showed him wrapped in an old blanket watching himself on TV, like an aging actor imagining a comeback. A senior intelligence official said other videos showed him practicing and flubbing his lines in front of a camera. He was interested enough in his image, the official said, to dye his white beard black for the recordings.

His once-large entourage of Arab bodyguards was down to one trusted Pakistani courier and the courier’s brother, who also had the job of buying goats, sheep and Coca-Cola for the household. While his physical world had shrunk to two indoor rooms and daily pacing in his courtyard, Bin Laden was still revered at home — by his three wives, by his children and by the tight, interconnected circle of loyalists in the compound.

He did not do chores or tend to the cows and water buffalo on the south side of the compound like the other men. The household, American officials figure, knew how important it was for him to devote his time to Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he founded and was still actively running at the time of his death.

American officials say there is much they do not know about the last years of Bin Laden, who was shot dead by Navy Seal commandos last Monday in his third-floor bedroom, and the peculiar life of the compound. But what has emerged so far, in interviews with United States and Pakistani military and intelligence officials and Bin Laden’s neighbors in the middle-class hamlet where he had been hiding, is a portrait of an isolated man, perhaps a little bored, presiding over family life while plotting mayhem — still desperate to be heard, intent on outsize influence, musing in his handwritten notebooks about killing more Americans.

“My father would not look forward to staying indoors month after month, because he is a man who loves everything about nature,” Omar bin Laden, a son of Bin Laden, said in an e-mail message in 2009. “But if I were to say what he would need to survive, I would say food and water. He would go inward and occupy himself with his mind.”

Abbottabad, a scenic hill cantonment for the British Raj and later home to the elite military academy that is Pakistan’s West Point, became the Bin Laden family base in late 2005. Their large compound, in a new neighborhood on the outskirts of town, is now the most photographed house in the country, with stories spilling forth from astonished neighbors.
Bin Laden, who was the tall man C.I.A. officers watched pacing the courtyard from a surveillance post nearby, never went out.

The neighbors knew the family as Arshad Khan and Tariq Khan, the aliases of the trusted courier and his brother. The courier also went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
The Khans seemed pleasant enough, but they kept to themselves behind their 12-foot concrete walls and barbed wire, neighbors said. They never invited anyone in or went to others’ homes, although they did go to prayers in the mosque and funerals in the neighborhood.

The women left the compound only with their husbands in a car, and covered in black burqas. The children rarely played outside. When neighborhood boys playing in the fields let a ball fly into the compound by mistake, the Khans gave them 50 rupees, less than a dollar, to buy a new one rather than let them in to retrieve it.
“We thought maybe they had killed someone back in their village or something like that and were therefore very cautious,” said a neighbor, an engineer who identified himself as Zaheer.

for the rest go to:
http://www.statesman.com/news/world/bin-ladens-secret-life-in-a-shrunken-world-1461621.html

stating that bin Laden had been leading a "luxurious" life for the last
five years. I thought it wasn't possible. He couldn't risk going anywhere
because his face is so well known worldwide. "His home was his prison" is
an apt description.