WASHINGTON: Six months before the US raid that killed him, Osama bin Laden contemplated leaving Abbottabad, reveals a letter he wrote.

In a letter to his wife, Khairiyah, bin Laden said that it would take him few months to find another hideout and then she could join him.

“I think that I have to leave them,” he wrote, referring to the two Kuwaiti brothers who sheltered him and served as his primary link to the outside world. “But it will take few months to arrange another place where you, Hamza, and his wife can join us.”

Also read: ‘Osama tried to end differences within jihadist movement’

In the same letter, he asks for her forgiveness for not living with her and the rest of the family.

“I hope you will understand the situation and pray that God makes it easy to reunite, God willing,” he wrote. But in less than six months, the United States confirmed his presence in Abbottabad and on May 2, 2011, US Navy SEALs raided his compound, and killed bin Laden and his caretakers.

His wife Khairiyah, who ultimately joined him in Abbottabad, was captured and turned over to Pakistani authorities.

The letter is included in 103 other documents the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released on Wednesday.

In another letter to Khairiyah, who was then hiding in Iran, bin Laden recounts his efforts to reunite his family. But he says his proposals for doing so were rejected by Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and his brother, who were responsible for protecting the al-Qaeda leader and whose families also lived in the compound.

“They are getting exhausted — security-wise — from me staying with them and what results from that. They have reached a level of exhaustion that they are shutting down, and they asked to leave us all,” bin Laden wrote.

The documents include two letters to Bin Laden from his son Hamza and one from Hamza’s mother imploring that he follow in his ‘father’s footsteps’.

Hamza had not seen his fugitive father in eight years, and described the ‘pain of separation’ he felt at age 13 and his hopes of a reunion as a young man of 22.

“My eyes still remember the last time they saw you, when you were under the olive tree and you gave every one of us a Muslim rosary, God remembers this, then you bid us farewell and we left, and it was as if we pulled out our livers and left them there,” Hamza wrote.

Hamza’s whereabouts are still not known and so far there is no evidence to suggest that he was with his father at the compound. He has not appeared publicly or released any public statement.

US intelligence officials have suggested that bin Laden was training him for the jihad and wanted him to lead the jihadist movement after his death.

The documents released on Wednesday portray bin Laden as a man who still had some power and maintained regular contacts with his family and his lieutenants, including with his second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri.

It contradicts a recent report by an American journalist Seymour Hersh, who claimed that the al-Qaeda chief was a prisoner of Pakistani security forces.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2015

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