Osama bin Laden’s violent death in his mystery home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, spurred me to think about the many other houses he had lived in, openly and not-so-openly, during his long terrorist career. In my article “Force and Futility,” in this week’s magazine, I write about the American war effort in Khost province, Afghanistan, along the Pakistani frontier. Khost was where bin Laden cut his teeth as a fighter in the eighties, during the anti-Soviet jihad; he returned there in 1996, after several years in self-imposed exile in Sudan, and initially chose it as his base as he built up his Al Qaeda network. After he openly declared his war against the West and became a target of U.S. missiles, bin Laden began to move around more. For a time, prior to September 11, 2001, he lived with his family in Naji Mujahid, a village outside the city of Jalalabad. During the messy, confusing aftermath of the attack, while reporting for The New Yorker, I was taken there.
By the second week of December, 2001, the initial phase of the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan was almost complete. In the east, not far from Jalalabad, near the lawless border with Pakistan, the last battle of the invasion was still underway. It featured a U.S. Special Forces-led onslaught to kill or capture bin Laden and the several hundred Arab and Afghan jihadis who were with him, in redoubts at Tora Bora, high in the mountains. After days of fruitless searching, however, it was becoming clear that bin Laden and his cohorts had escaped.
Below is an extract adapted from my book, “The Lion’s Grave,” which collects my Afghanistan reporting from that time, about my visit to Naji Mujahid and what was said to be bin Laden’s house there:
The house had high mud walls and metal gates. It and a gaggle of similar compounds formed a dusty, trash-strewn pit stop strategically located on the jeep track leading to the Tora Bora foothills. Bin Laden’s compound was nondescript, a haphazard welter of mud patios and small square houses with spartan rooms and alleyways leading to other cubicles. There were no flower beds, no decorations, and no furniture by the time I arrived; all that had been looted by the local mujahideen. Bin Laden evidently had plenty of time to gather up his more valuable possessions before he left, and also to burn things he didn’t want left lying around. In several places there were blackened swatches of ground and heaps of charred paper.
There were also some unburned papers, and I picked up a page from an English-language Turkish defense magazine with the specifications for an electronic siren and a public-address system sold by Military Electronics Industries, Inc., of Turkey; an advertisement from the Swedish arms company FFV Ordnance for a tank-busting rocket warhead; an operator’s manual for a portable radio transceiver made by Kachina Communications, Inc.; a tax-free shopping receipt for several digital multimeters that cost a hundred and seventy-three Deutsche marks, purchased from Conrad Electronic in Munich on May 6, 2000. I also found an article from the November 1989 edition of Modern Electronics, entitled: “More on How to Detect Ultraviolet, Visible Light and Infrared,” the second of two articles on the subject of radiation.
While I was poking about the compound, a sharp-faced young Afghan man and several children wandered in to watch. The man, whose name was Redwarullah, said that he was a neighbor, and he confirmed that until a few weeks earlier the village had been the home of a community of Arab families including that of Osama bin Laden. I asked Redwarullah if he thought bin Laden had masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. He said that he didn’t think so. “People here thought he was a very nice Muslim,” he said. My mujahideen escorts interrupted our chat and led me out of Osama bin Laden’s house. They explained that the inhabitants of Naji Mujahid were Al Qaeda supporters, and that it was best not to stay there too long.
The next day, we drove up the jeep track beyond the village into a dramatic panorama of ravines and steep, rocky hills covered with scrub oaks and fir trees. Trails led through the diminishing tree line toward the jagged, snow-covered peaks of Tora Bora. It was there that bin Laden’s trail went cold.
Read David Remnick, Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright, Jon Lee Anderson, Dexter Filkins, Hendrik Hertzberg, George Packer, and more of our coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death.
Recent photograph of the village of Naray, in Kunar province, Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. By Larry Towell/Magnum.
