The Battle for Tora Bora (1)

Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader’s movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city. That morning, while eating a meal of meat and olives, he gave an interview to Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who was writing his biography. He defended the attacks on New York and Washington, saying, “America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal.” Six months later, when I met Mir in Pakistan, he told me that the Al Qaeda leader had, on that day, appeared to be in remarkably good spirits.

Kabul fell on November 12, and bin Laden, along with other Al Qaeda leaders, fled to Jalalabad, a compact city in eastern Afghanistan surrounded by lush fruit groves. (He was quite familiar with the area, having maintained a compound in a Jalalabad suburb in the 1990s.) Tracking bin Laden closely was Gary Berntsen, a bear-sized CIA officer with a pronounced Long Island accent, who arrived in Kabul on the day it fell. Berntsen had been serving in Latin America on September 11 when he was yanked to run the CIA’s fast-moving ground operations in Afghanistan. It was a perfect job for an operative with a distinctly independent and aggressive style.

[...]

On December 9, a U.S. plane dropped an immense BLU-82 bomb on Al Qaeda’s positions. Known as a Daisy Cutter, the 15,000-pound bomb was used in the Gulf war to clear minefields. Berntsen remembers that the Daisy Cutter was followed by a wave of additional U.S. airstrikes. “We came right in behind it with B-52s,” he says. “Like three or four of them. … Each of them has twenty-five five-hundred-pounders, so everything goes in there. Killed a lot of people. A lot of bad guys.” That night, Al Qaeda member Abu Jaafar Al Kuwaiti and others “were awakened to the sound of massive and terrorizing explosions very near to us.” The following day, he later recounted on an Al Qaeda website, he “received the horrifying news” that the “trench of Sheik Osama had been destroyed.”

But bin Laden was not dead. A subsequent account on an Al Qaeda website offered an explanation of how he saved himself: Bin Laden had dreamed about a scorpion descending into one of the trenches that his men had dug, so he evacuated his trench. A day or so later, it was destroyed by a bomb.

[...]

That afternoon, American signals operators picked up bin Laden speaking to his followers. Fury kept a careful log of these communications in his notebook, which he would type up at the end of every day and pass up his chain of command. “The time is now,” bin Laden said. “Arm your women and children against the infidel!” Following several hours of high-intensity bombing, the Al Qaeda leader spoke again. Fury paraphrases: “Our prayers have not been answered. Times are dire. We didn’t receive support from the apostate nations who call themselves our Muslim brothers.” Bin Laden apologized to his men for having involved them in the fight and gave them permission to surrender.

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Notes:

An interesting read.  Is ‘Sammy Bin Elvis” dead?  I don’t know but I believe so.  My view — he was killed at Tora Bora when the US dropped the “bunker buster” on him and I’ve seen nothing since (including this story) that has changed my mind.