US Special Forces recovered thousands of messages exchanged between members of al-Qaida during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011; many ended: ‘destroy after reading.’ There was also a 220-page handwritten document inaccurately described by the CIA as bin Laden’s ‘journal’: for the most part, it is a transcription of family discussions during the last...
Bin Laden’s wives and daughters were excluded from leadership on grounds of their gender, but their brothers were unsuitable for other reasons. Siham’s son, Khalid, doesn’t seem to have had his sisters’ intelligence. Khairiah’s letters say that he made ‘some contributions’ to his father’s work, and ‘in addition to his interest in raising chickens, he also has a cow that has a one-month-old calf.’ He was, she writes, waiting ‘for the security situation to improve so that he could leave to get married’.
