Death of Bin Laden’s son seen as blow to al-Qaida
>>In the years before his death, Osama bin Laden spent his days behind the walls of his compound in Pakistan, fretting about his son living thousands of miles away.
He penned letter after letter, describing the curriculum that his son, Hamza bin Laden, then 23, should study, the qualities he should cultivate and the safety measures he should follow. In one, he advised his son, who was just 13 when he saw his father for the last time, not to leave his house.
In another, he discussed whether the young man could rejoin him in Pakistan, advising him to travel on a cloudy day when it would be harder for a drone to track him. He devised a complicated security protocol, calling for his son to switch cars inside a tunnel in order to fool overhead surveillance.
The care he showed was not just that of a father for a son. It appears to have also been an attempt by the world’s most hunted terrorist to secure his legacy.
Analysts believe that since at least 2010, al-Qaida was secretly grooming Hamza bin Laden to take over the organisation, a move that now appears to have been foiled. According to US officials, the younger bin Laden was killed during the first two years of the Trump administration.
If confirmed, his death represents another blow to al-Qaida, whose ranks were hollowed out by relentless US attacks and by the rise of the Islamic State group. The older terrorist network has struggled to appeal to a younger generation of recruits, who were lured to the Islamic State by slick videos shot on drones and GoPros when al-Qaida was still issuing hourlong lectures by aging leaders staring at camcorders.
“If it’s true that he is dead, then al-Qaida has lost its future because Hamza was the future of al-Qaida,” said former FBI agent and counterterrorism expert Ali Soufan, who sounded a note of caution because it is unusual for al-Qaida not to announce such a death.
“He was being prepared to lead the organisation, and it’s very obvious from his statements that his focus was to bring back his dad’s message,” said Soufan, who is the author of a profile of Hamza bin Laden calling him “al-Qaida’s leader in waiting”.
But the circumstances of his death, like much of his life, remain murky. The US government does not know precisely how he died.
A US airstrike in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, in May or June 2017, targeted Hamza bin Laden. It killed his son but not him, according to officials. The officials said bin Laden may have been wounded in the strike.
Another official said that bin Laden died in December 2017 after being wounded in an airstrike.
By February, when the State Department put a $1 million (30.8 million baht) reward for information on his whereabouts, intelligence officials believed he was dead. Officials now have the high confidence that he is dead even if the exact circumstances of his death remain unknown.
Bin Laden had been mistakenly pronounced dead before, when officials thought he had died in the raid to kill his father.
Al-Qaida, usually forthcoming in announcing the death of a leader as a martyr, has issued no confirmation or denial. One of the US officials said al-Qaida had kept the death secret out of concern that the news would hurt its fundraising.
Bin Laden was thought to have been living along the Afghan-Pakistani border, but there were only vague reports about possible sightings.
“Our intelligence reports showed there was a Hamza here, but we didn’t know for sure,” said Mohammad Ismail, governor of Want Waigal, a mountainous district in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. “Some would say he was a Pakistani, and some would say he was an Arab.”
Letters to and from his father — found by the Navy SEAL team that killed the elder bin Laden and later were declassified — indicate that he was living in Iran for several years, including in 2009 and 2010. Initially he lived in an al-Qaida safehouse before being imprisoned in a military camp, Soufan said.
Hamza bin Laden was only 13 when his father walked him and his brothers to the base of a mountain in Afghanistan and said goodbye for the last time. It was 2001 and planes piloted by operatives had just slammed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and another hijacked plane had been foiled on its way to Washington.
The terrorist leader knew that retaliation was not far behind and made arrangements to send his boys away. He handed each of them a set of Muslim prayer beads, reminding them to seek strength in their faith.
“You bid us farewell and we left, and it was as if we pulled out our livers and left them there,” Hamza bin Laden wrote in a letter addressed to “my beloved father” years later.
The identical gifts to his sons suggest that the senior bin Laden intended to be equal in his affection. But chroniclers of the family say that it was not long before it became clear that he had a special relationship with Hamza, the only son of Khairia Sabar, a highly educated Saudi woman who became Osama bin Laden’s favourite wife.
When Hamza was 2, his father moved from Afghanistan to Sudan. He was there until the age of 7, when the Sudanese government gave in to international pressure and expelled the family. Osama bin Laden and his followers returned to Afghanistan where they sought refuge with the Taliban and lived in a complex of concrete huts, lacking plumbing, electricity and even doors.
After the 2001 attacks, Hamza bin Laden was spirited over the mountains into Pakistan, before seeking refuge in Iran, where he initially lived in a safe house, according to Soufan. He and his mother were eventually arrested by the Iranian authorities and incarcerated in a military camp.
As Hamza bin Laden grew older, he sought no special treatment within the group as Osama bin Laden’s son. Hamza bin Laden married a daughter of a senior al-Qaida leader, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, a wedding that was recorded on video found in the Abbottabad compound.
Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defence of Democracies who has been studying al-Qaida for years, said that the younger bin Laden’s role in the organisation was opaque. “We don’t actually know what his real role was within al-Qaida,” he said. “We know al-Qaida was marketing him as a voice for a younger generation. You could see that when they would put out these audio messages from him.”
Mr Joscelyn cited evidence in the older bin Laden’s files that Hamza bin Laden had received elite training but that Osama bin Laden preferred that his son not take on a military role.
The younger bin Laden’s own ambitions, based on his audio recordings and letters to his father, indicated a desire to take an active role in al-Qaida.
“My beloved father, I was separated from you when I was a small child, not yet 13, but I am older now, and have attained manhood,” he wrote in the 2009 letter.
“But what truly makes me sad,” he added, “is the mujahedeen legions have marched and I have not joined them.”