Osama the man and the myths..

[General Duke]

Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan during the war with Russia – though some say he never exposed himself to danger. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

 

1. Osama bin Laden was 'created' by the CIA

 

He did not receive any direct funding or training from the US during the 1980s. Nor did his followers. The Afghan mujahideen, via Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, received large amounts of both. Some bled to the Arabs fighting the Soviets but nothing significant.

 

 

2. He had a huge personal fortune

 

Bin Laden was forced to leave any cash he had when he in effect fled Saudi Arabia in 1991 for Pakistan and then Sudan. His family cut him off. Nor would the inheritance from his hugely wealthy father have been divided into equal parts anyway. What Bin Laden did have was contacts, which allowed him to raise money with ease.

 

 

3. He was responsible for 1993 bombing of World Trade Centre

 

Ramzi Yousef, who was the main perpetrator of the attack, was probably working for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed who was an independent operator at the time. Mohammed only started working with al-Qaida in 1996 and even then kept his distance from Bin Laden.

 

 

4. He got money from drug running

 

No evidence for this whatsoever despite repeated claims – such as in the post 9/11 British government dossier on al-Qaida.

 

 

5. He never exposed himself to any danger

 

He did not single-handedly seize a short-barrelled AK-47 from a dying Soviet general as he sometimes claimed but numerous witnesses report that he was in the thick of fighting in Jaji in 1987 and again at the battle of Jalalabad in 1989.

 

 

6. He spent a lot of time in caves

 

In the late 1990s, for propaganda purposes, Bin Laden invited select journalists to meet him in caves near Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. However he lived in a much more comfortable compound a short drive away, near the former Soviet collective farm of Hadda owned by a local warlord. By 1999 he had moved to a complex of houses near Kandahar. When he was killed, he was living in a relatively comfortable detached house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In between, there is no evidence that he spent any time living in caves. The rest of al-Qaida's senior militants appear to have lived in the semi-fortified houses that are common in the tribal zones.

 

 

7. He was a tearaway teenager who partied in Beirut before becoming religious.

 

There is no evidence for this either. Bin Laden appears to have been an intense, shy and pious youth who married young and spent an inordinate amount of time studying scripture.

 

 

8. He was near to dying of a kidney disease.

 

There are some reports – not least in the Guantánamo files – of renal problems but certainly not serious enough to kill him. It is more likely he had back problems caused by his height (around 6ft 5in) and relatively sedentary lifestyle.

 

 

9. He hid in Kashmir, was the leader of Chechen groups, was responsible for violence in the Philippines and in Indonesia, organised the Madrid 2004 attack and had an extensive network in Paraguay, sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa.

 

All these claims, made by various governments or intelligence services over the last decade have proved totally without foundation.

 

 

10. Bin Laden was an Arsenal fan

 

Despite fans reportedly chanting "Osama, woah-woah, Osama, woah-waoh, he's hiding in Kabul, he loves the Arsenal", Bin Laden was not a faithful of the north London club.

[General Duke]

Osama bin Laden regretted not spending more time with his children and doesn't want them to follow in his footsteps. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Osama Bin Laden's last wish, according to a document purported to be his will, was that his wives not remarry after his death and his children not join al-Qaida.

 

Al-Anbaa, a Kuwaiti newspaper, reported on Tuesday that the will, marked "private and confidential" was dated 14 December 2001, three months after the 9/11 attacks, when US forces were hunting him in Afghanistan.

 

The four-page document, written on a computer and signed by "your brother Abu Abdullah Osama Muhammad Bin Laden," predicts that he would die by the "treachery" of those around him. Al-Anbaa does not reveal how or when it obtained the will or whether it was able to authenticate it. Al-Majallah, a Saudi-owned Arabic magazine, published a similar document in 2002 but it was dismissed as a fraud by a pro-jihadi website.

 

In the document, Bin Laden lists the assault on New York's twin towers in a sequence beginning with the suicide bomb attack on US marines in Lebanon in 1983, the killing of 19 US marines serving as UN peacekeepers in Somalia in 1993 and the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998.

 

But its most striking feature is that he orders his wives not to remarry and urges his children not to join al-Qaida or go to "the front", citing the example of the seventh century Muslim Caliph Omar bin Khattab to his son Abdullah. Bin Laden also asked his children to forgive him for not having spent enough time with them.

 

"I have chosen a path fraught with dangers and endured hardships, disappointment and betrayal. If it wasn't for betrayal, things would be different today.

 

"As for you, my sons, forgive me if I failed to devote more of my time to you since I answered the call to Jihad."

 

He ends his will by advising "the mujahideen wherever they are" to suspend "the fight against the Jews and the Crusaders and start to purge your ranks of agents and defeatists."

[Somalina]