Disappointment and regret marked bin Laden’s final years, documents show

WASHINGTON // Documents swept up in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound portray a leader cut off from his underlings, disappointed by their failures, beset by their complaints and regretting years of separation from much of his extensive family.

Focus your fighting on America, not each other, the sidelined Al Qaeda chief exhorts his followers.

In a videotaped will, he urges one of his wives, should she remarry after his death, to still choose to live beside him in paradise. He also directs her to send their son to the battlefield.

Despite some surprising quirks in the collection, the overall message of the 103 letters, videos and reports made public on Wednesday hews to the terror group’s familiar mission: In the name of God, find a way to kill Americans. Kill Europeans. Kill Jews.

“Uproot the obnoxious tree by concentrating on its American trunk,” bin Laden writes in a letter urging Al Qaeda affiliates in North Africa not to be distracted by fighting local security forces and to avoid Muslim infighting.

The US office of the director of National Intelligence said the documents – released as online images – were among a collection of books, US think tank reports and other materials recovered in the May 2011 raid that killed bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The information was declassified and made public after a review by government agencies, as required by a 2014 law. Hundreds more documents found at the compound will be reviewed for possible declassification and release, the office said on Wednesday, four years after bin Laden’s death.

Drone strikes against Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, the near-suffocation of the group’s affiliate in Iraq beginning in 2007, and other developments severely undercut bin Laden in the years before his death. The terrorist threat shifted to Al Qaida affiliates in other areas, including in Yemen and North Africa.

US officials have said that at the time of bin Laden’s death Al Qaeda no longer exercised the same level of control he once had.

A May 2007 letter to bin Laden from “the Jihad and Reform Front” implores him to disavow “the ongoing catastrophes and disasters” committed by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner of today’s ISIL group, which strayed from Al Qaeda’s orders with its brutal attacks on fellow Muslims.

“If you still can, then this is your last chance to remedy the Jihad breakdown that is about to take place in Iraq,” the letter warns bin Laden.

Al Qaeda did reject the splinter group, but the ISIL kept growing, and after bin Laden’s death it went on to seize large areas of Syria and Iraq, killing Muslims and Christians, beheading westerners and drawing warplanes from a US-led international coalition to the region.

* Associated Press

Bin Laden documents can be found online