ON DECEMBER 14, 2001, Osama Bin Laden wrote and signed his last will and testament. At Tora Bora, around this time, he had endured heavy aerial bombardment by American-led forces, and now he prepared to die. He opened his will with religious invocations, and then wrote, “Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole…Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together.’ How many times did I wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!”
His tone, reflecting the military and political setbacks his organization had suffered throughout the autumn of 2001, was thoroughly down-hearted:
If every Muslim asks himself why has our nation reached this state of humiliation and defeat, then his obvious answer is because it rushed madly for the comforts of life and discarded the Book of Allah behind its back, though it is the only one that has its cure…The Jews and Christians have tempted us with the comforts of life and its cheap pleasures and invaded us with their materialistic values before invading us with their armies, while we stood like women doing nothing because the love of death in the cause of Allah has deserted the hearts…The principal cause of our nation’s ordeal is its fear from dying in the cause of Allah…Today, the nation has failed to support us.7
To his wives, Osama wrote, “You were, after Allah…the best support and the best help from the first day you knew that the road was full of thorns and mines…You renounced worldly pleasures with me—renounce them more after me. Do not think of remarrying and you need only to look after our children, make sacrifices, and pray for them.”
To his children, he wrote, “Forgive me because I have given you only a little of my time since I answered the jihad call. I have shouldered the Muslims’ concerns and the concerns of their hardships, embitterment, betrayal and treachery. If it was not for treachery, the situation would not be what it is now and the outcome would not be what it is now.”
He explicitly advised his children not to work with Al Qaeda. He cited the story of a Muslim leader, Omar Bin Al-Khattab, who forbid his son from becoming caliph, telling him, “If it is good, then we have had our share; if it is bad, then it is enough…”8
During his years in Sudan, as his family gradually disowned him, Osama’s writings sometimes rang with anger and frustration, but never before had a document attributed to him conveyed such despair and exhaustion. He had apparently assumed that the American military would quickly fall victim to a popular uprising by ordinary Afghans, as had occurred to the Soviet army after its invasion in 1979; instead, his allies in the Taliban had collapsed as the United States and its allies swept into every major Afghan city and town, and a number of his trusted compatriots in Al Qaeda had been killed or captured. If Osama imagined himself as the triumphant leader of a guerrilla vanguard, he now confronted the humiliating prospect of retreat, and the serious possibility that he would be killed or imprisoned.
The winter passed, however, and none of these fears materialized. By June 2002, Osama remained safe, and he had established a network of personal protection stable enough to allow him to return cautiously to jihad publishing and video production. His initial work that spring still expressed an unusual degree of self-pity; a jihadi Web site published a poetic exchange with his son Hamzah, evoking the conditions and causes of their shared exile:
“Oh father!” Hamzah wrote. “Where is the escape and when will we have a home? Oh father! I see spheres of danger everywhere I look. How come our home has vanished without a trace?…Why have they showered us with bombs like rain, having no mercy for a child?…Tell me, father, something useful about what I see.”
“Oh son!” Osama answered. “Suffice to say that I am full of grief and sighs. What can I say if we are living in a world of laziness and discontent…Pardon me, my son, but I can only see a very steep path ahead. A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy. Security has gone, but danger remains. It is a world of crimes in which children are slaughtered like cows. For how long will real men be in short supply?”9
NOT FOR LONG, as it happened. As the months passed, and still he remained free, Osama’s courage and confidence returned. The particular circumstances of his life as a fugitive are, as of this writing, unknown, but the open record of his published statements and recordings from exile during this period—more than a dozen altogether—makes plain the general trajectory of Osama’s experience: an initial period of giddy celebration immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington, followed by a rapid descent into desperation, and then a gradual recovery and a reawakened sense of purpose, producing a return to the ambition and boastfulness of his past. Osama’s statements make clear, too, that by 2003, at least, he enjoyed regular access to satellite television and the Internet.
Planning for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, more than any other event, seemed to draw Osama back to himself; judging by what he said and wrote, the war arrived as a kind of spiritual and political elixir, just when he required it most. The buildup to combat early in 2003 brought forth a burst of lengthy and ambitious writing, essays that harkened to his prolific period of pamphleteering from Sudan. After a period of quietude and anguish, suddenly Osama seemed to have much that he wished to say.
“I am rejoicing in the fact that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates,” he wrote in October 2003. “Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits, by the grace of God Almighty. Here is America today, screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the whole world.”10
Osama saw the Iraq war as “a rare and essentially valuable chance in every sense of the word to mobilize the ummah’s potential and unchain it.” He urged young volunteers to “take off to the battlefields in Iraq to cut off the head of world infidelity.”11 Many answered his call, particularly from Saudi Arabia.
Osama made no secret of his disdain for Saddam Hussein, but this, of course, could not justify the American occupation, he said: “It is true that Saddam is a thief and an apostate, but the solution is not to be found in moving the government of Iraq from a local thief to a foreign one.” When the United States announced increases in the reward money available for his capture or death, Osama retaliated by announcing his own reward schedule, in units of gold, for the murder of Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, as well as for the deaths of other Americans.12