This article titled “Al-Qaida offshoot hopes to turn Africa’s Sahel region into a ‘new Somalia’” was written by Simon Tisdall, for The Guardian on Thursday 8th December 2011 19.02 UTC

An offshoot of al-Qaida is working to turn the whole of Africa’s Sahel region into a “new Somalia” and terrorist bases there pose a growing threat to European and pan-African security, a panel of experts has warned.

Jerome Spinoza, head of the Africa bureau in the French ministry of defence, said the sub-Saharan Sahel area, up to 1,000km wide and stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea in the east, presented challenges that western policymakers ignored at their peril.

“Instability is on the rise,” Spinoza told the Chatham House thinktank in London on Thursday. “Without a meaningful policy, the area could constitute a lasting safe haven for jihadists.”

Robert Fowler, a former UN special envoy to Niger and Canadian diplomat who was kidnapped and held hostage for four months in 2008-9 by al-Qaida in the Maghreb (AQIM), said the 31-strong group of captors was well-disciplined and wholly concentrated on its aim of creating an Islamic caliphate embracing the Muslim lands of Africa and the Middle East.

“These men are highly motivated and totally ascetic,” Fowler said. “These guys have no needs. They are dressed in rags. They have a bag of rice and a belt of ammunition and that’s it. I was held in 23 different locations in about 70 days. They are organised. They can break camp in under four minutes.”

Fowler continued: “This was the most focused group of young men I have ever encountered in my life. They are totally committed to jihad. They said to me, ‘We fight to die, you fight to go home to your wife and kids. Guess who will win?’ Even if it takes 200 years … They want to turn the Sahel into a new Somalia.”

Fowler said the terrorist threat to Europe’s southern flank had risen after advanced weapons were plundered during the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya. “They (AQIM) are now equipped with enormous amounts of Libyan weapons and I mean sophisticated weapons such as 20,000 [shoulder-mounted] SA-24 missiles, heavy mortars, heavy artillery and thousands of anti-tank mines … The UN has demanded they be handed over. Well, good luck with that.”

The Sahel region embraces southern Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, southern Algeria, Niger, northern Nigeria, Chad, South Sudan and Darfur in western Sudan, northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Spinoza said a host of critical issues faced the region going beyond terrorism. They included recurring rebellions by nomadic Tuareg tribesmen, some of whom were armed by and fought as mercenaries for Gaddafi in this year’s Libya conflict, cocaine trafficking to Europe from the west African coast, and people and arms smuggling.

The region was also confronted by rapid population growth, weak and ineffective governance, inter-state tensions, poor access to education and employment, and increasingly acute food supply problems exacerbated by climate change and the southward advance of the Sahara desert, he said.

AQIM was exploiting the resulting instability, he suggested, spreading its influence south from Algeria and raising the prospect of transcontinental link-ups with Boko Haram militant Islamists in Nigeria and al-Shabaab in Somalia.

Spinoza called for a joined-up approach by the international community, suggesting interested countries including France, the Netherlands and the US needed to coordinate their policies with regional and local players. “The EU’s strategy for security involves development, rule of law and (non-military) security but the EU needs to be more concrete,” he said.

Speaking this week, Kristalina Georgieva, the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid crisis response, said the Sahel was likely to experience severe food shortages next year because of erratic rainfall and localised dry spells.

Seven million people were already facing shortages in Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, she said. Current trends pointed to a massive problem of food availability next year.

The European commission last month increased humanitarian funding to the Sahel by €10m (£8.5m) to a total of €55m this year. Niger and Mauritania have already declared a crisis, prepared national action plans, and appealed for international help.

At the eastern end of the Sahel arc, 13 million people remained in need of emergency help and the crisis there was expected to last until the spring and perhaps the summer of 2012, Georgieva said.

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This article titled “Pakistan to return Osama bin Laden helicopter wreckage to US” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Monday 16th May 2011 18.45 UTC

Pakistan will return the wreckage of the US special forces helicopter used in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden as a tentative first step towards hitting the reset button in their badly damaged relations.

Senator John Kerry announced the offer in Islamabad after 24 hours of meetings with Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership amid deep mutual mistrust and recriminations since Bin Laden’s killing on 2 May.

The US feared cutting-edge military technology in the tail of the helicopter, abandoned after US forces blew up the rest of the craft, could be reverse-engineered in China.

A joint statement following the talks reported “a constructive exchange of views” – diplomatic speak for tough-talking – but also an agreement to work together against “high value targets”. It was not clear if these targets included the Taliban leader Mullah Omar or al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of whom are believed to be in Pakistan.

Kerry, considered the “good cop” of US diplomacy with Islamabad, stressed the “extraordinary” nature of the mission that killed Bin Laden, saying it had been kept secret for operational reasons and not due to US mistrust of Pakistan. This claim contradicted earlier comments by the CIA chief, Leon Panetta, that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) had been excluded in case someone tipped off the al-Qaida leader.

“This had to be an American operation, and it had to be as secure as humanly possible,” he said. But he stopped short of alleging Pakistani complicity with Bin Laden, saying there was “no evidence at this point in time”.

The deal comes amid growing anti-American anger inside Pakistan, which on Friday passed a motion condemning the US raid and calling for a complete review of the relationship with the US, including potentially cutting Nato’s supply line to Afghanistan.

A senior Pakistani military official told the Guardian the raid had sparked vivid anti-American sentiment inside the armed forces, and that General Kayani had faced anger during a tour of military bases last week. There were also questions about the poor perfomance of the ISI, the official said, but rejected suggestions that agency personnel had helped Bin Laden.

Instead, he suggested, the US needed to make major concessions to rebuild the relationship including, he said, a nuclear cooperation deal similar to the one between Washington and India. But there are few signs that the US will make any concessions, with Kerry also under pressure from US senators who want to slash aid to Pakistan or cut relations entirely.

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This article titled “Osama bin Laden ‘vetoed’ killer tractor” was written by Jason Burke, for The Guardian on Thursday 12th May 2011 18.31 UTC

Osama bin Laden angrily vetoed a plot to fit rotating blades to a tractor and use it to “mow down the enemies of Allah”, on the grounds that it would cause “indiscriminate slaughter”, according to a US official familiar with material seized in the raid on the al-Qaida chief’s hideout.

The hoard of documents and computer discs taken by US special forces consisted more of “strategic musings” than concrete terror plots, the official told ProPublica, the US non-profitmaking investigative news organisation.

Though a fierce advocate of mass-casualty attacks in the west – elsewhere, Bin Laden attempts to calculate the number of Americans who would have to be killed to force the US to withdraw from the Arab world – he appeared angry at a suggestion by the Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula that a tractor or farm vehicle could, suitably adapted, be used in an attack.

The official told ProPublica: “Bin Laden said this is something he did not endorse. He seems taken aback. He complains that this tactical proposal promotes indiscriminate slaughter. He says he rejects this and it is not something that reflects what al-Qaida does.”

The tractor plan was mooted in Inspire, an English-language jihadi magazine, by a young US convert and al-Qaida recruit.

Bin Laden and his associates repeatedly admonished leaders of affiliated groups such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or al-Qaida in Iraq for not paying sufficient attention to avoiding targets that could not be portrayed as “legitimate” to the leadership’s target audience in the Middle East.

A series of letters and emissaries were sent to warn Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, to stop attacks on local Shia Muslims and to avoid civilian casualties. One senior al-Qaida figure close to Bin Laden told Zarqawi that he should be careful to avoid the fate of militants in Algeria in the 1990s who lost public support through indiscriminate and random violence.

Bin Laden also discusses which senior American political figures should be prioritised as targets. He dismissed an attack on Vice-President Joe Biden, saying he was of insufficient significance.

Other material seized shows how Bin Laden communicated with a small number of lieutenants mainly based in Pakistan, who then either executed his orders or tried to make sure all those in al-Qaida’s disparate and scattered affiliates were aware of his directives. Missives were carried by couriers as Bin Laden had no internet or telephone access.

It was a courier who eventually led the Americans to the al-Qaida leader.

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This article titled “Osama bin Laden sought ‘new 9/11′ to force US out of Middle East” was written by Ed Pilkington in New York and Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Thursday 12th May 2011 00.31 UTC

Osama bin Laden went to the bizarre length of trying to calculate how many more American deaths it would take to force the US to retreat from the Middle East, his writings have revealed.

The al-Qaida leader was convinced that only a massive blood-letting on the scale of 9/11 would have the necessary shock factor to effect a change in US policy around the region. He told his followers that a sprinkling of smaller attacks would not have the desired effect.

The revelation of Bin Laden’s morbid emphasis on another mass atrocity comes from the large stash of his writings that was discovered in his hideout in Pakistan and brought by Navy Seals to the US after they killed him. The hoard, which has been compared in size to a small college library, included five computers and about 100 removable digital storage devices or flash drives. It also included a diary that Bin Laden wrote by hand.

US intelligence officers poring through the data told the Associated Press the information underlines how proactive Bin Laden continued to be even when al-Qaida as a movement was on the defensive. Though he didn’t appear to have the ability directly to co-ordinate specific attacks from his lair in Abbottabad, he did have input into every major al-Qaida plot, including those across Europe last year, the officials said.

He was also in touch with many of the most dangerous al-Qaida offshoots around the world that some had assumed were working independently, such as the branch in Yemen that has become a leading centre of al-Qaida activity.

He pointed the network in certain directions. One of his missives to his supporters was to stop focusing on the big cities, particularly New York, and spread their targets out to include Los Angeles and other smaller cities. That, he said, would make it easier to have the impact he sought– a high number of American deaths at the same time.

Similarly, he urged them not just to focus on planes but to target trains as well – an instruction that chimes with last week’s warning from US authorities alerting people to be especially vigilant on trains. And in a further indication of the al-Qaida leader’s thinking, AP says that he also plotted ways to encourage politicians in Washington to war with one another.

The insight into Bin Laden’s activities during the six years he is believed to have been hidden away in Abbottabad came as his adult sons called for the UN to launch an inquiry into the killing of their father. In a joint letter the family said it wanted to know “why an unarmed man was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world”. “Arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems,” they said.

The letter was sent to the New York Times under the name of Omar bin Laden, the 30-year-old fourth son of Bin Laden who lived with the al-Qaida leader in Sudan and Afghanistan but has publicly denounced his attacks on civilians.

Drawing comparisons with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the statement said “international law has been blatantly violated” and, referring to the shooting of others in the compound, said Barack Obama had ordered “the execution of unarmed men and women”.

Bin Laden said it was “unworthy” of US special forces to kill an unarmed female family member and one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, identified in news reports as 22-year-old Khalid. Bin Laden’s family said it was calling on Pakistan to repatriate his three wives and several children, who are in military custody.

In a eulogy to Osama bin Laden posted on the internet yesterday, the leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, said his group would fight on. “What is coming is greater and worse, and what you will be facing is more intense and harmful.”

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This article titled “Osama bin Laden death leads to war of words between Pakistan and west” was written by Declan Walsh in Abbottabad, for The Guardian on Wednesday 4th May 2011 22.00 UTC

Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, lashed out at western critics as the war of words over the death of Osama bin Laden intensified, further undermining trust between Pakistan and the US.

The fact that bin Laden could live so long in Pakistan was “an intelligence failure of the whole world, not just Pakistan alone”, Gilani said in Paris before meeting President Sarkozy. Washington was also to blame for the lapses, he added.

It was the latest of several toughly-worded statements from Pakistani officials seeking to fend off angry western criticism of its failure to apprehend Bin Laden before a team of US Navy Seals swooped on a house in Abbottabad, 35 miles north of Islamabad, on Sunday night.

In perhaps the most damaging allegation, CIA chief Leon Panetta said Pakistani officials were kept in the dark about the Bin Laden assault over fears he would be tipped off. “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission. They might alert the targets,” he told Time.

In recent days President Asif Ali Zardari, several ambassadors and the foreign ministry have staunchly defended their country’s reputation. American claims of complicity with Bin Laden were “baseless speculation”, Zardari said.

But Pakistani officials are still struggling to explain how the Saudi fugitive managed to live in Abbottabad, a garrison town with thousands of soldiers and a major military academy, for up to six years. President Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, said some Pakistani officials, “including within the official Pakistani establishment”, knew about his hideout.

France’s foreign minister Alain Juppé said it was “hard to believe that the presence of a person such as Bin Laden in a large compound in a relatively small town … could go completely unnoticed.”

Pakistan’s military has been largely quiet, although officials from the ISI spy agency have released some details about the raid based on interviews with Bin Laden relatives left behind by the US Navy Seal team.

Pakistan’s role is also coming under intense fire in the US congress. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee that apportions government spending, said on Monday: “The United States provides billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan. Before we send another dime, we need to know whether Pakistan truly stands with us in the fight against terrorism.”

But western officials also recognise that Pakistan will remain a crucial partner in the war against Islamist militancy due to the war in Afghanistan, and because many of the most potent jihadi outfits, including al-Qaida, are based on Pakistani soil.

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This article titled “Al-Qaida leadership battle: who can replace Osama bin Laden?” was written by Jason Burke, for The Guardian on Monday 2nd May 2011 20.06 UTC

With so many potential al-Qaida leaders killed or captured over the past 10 years, there is not one standing who has a credible chance of imposing himself as overall leader of the core organisation.

The most obvious candidate to succeed Osama bin Laden is his Egyptian associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

But he, like the other potential leadership candidates, has several flaws that only serve to demonstrate how unique “the sheikh” was.

Zawahiri, a 59-year-old former paediatrician, has none of Bin Laden’s charisma and little of his talent for propaganda. He is strong on ideology and strategy but his attempts to communicate are often painfully clumsy. Recent videos in which he has removed his thick-lensed spectacles, presumably to make himself look younger or less scholarly, merely reveal how out of touch he is. Even his Egyptian origins are likely to be divisive in an organisation increasingly dominated by Libyans and Saudis and rent by factional tensions.

The second contender might come from among the younger leadership figures, some heavily promoted in a series of propaganda videos as al-Qaida has tried to fight its creeping marginalisation in recent years.

But even the inexperienced Abu Yayha al-Libi, in his mid-40s and credited with a legendary escape from a high-security prison in Afghanistan, can never replace Bin Laden.

The dead leader had a rare combination of talents which held his group together. He may have made grotesque strategic errors – like thinking the US too morally decadent to fight before 9/11 – but he commanded huge loyalty. Without him, the al-Qaida hardcore is now likely to definitively fracture.

The hardcore leadership has always been defined as Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and a few score associates with them in Pakistan. According to recent intelligence reports, largely based on the interviews of detainees, these are less numerous than often thought. Degraded by recent drone strikes, there are maybe only 80 or 100 senior al-Qaida militants still operative in Pakistan.

Certainly, many potential leadership candidates have been killed over the last 10 years. One of the first to die was Mohammed Atef, the former military commander killed in November 2001. One of the latest, Abu Mustafa al-Yazidi, a polylingual veteran who played linkman between al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban, died in 2009. A whole bench of potential leaders has been wiped out.

Many others have been captured. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, was picked up in Rawalpindi in 2003. Never a formal member of al-Qaida, he was unlikely to make the top ranks. Both Abu Farraj al-Libi, picked up by the Pakistanis in 2005, and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, detained on the Iraqi border, were capable and committed operators but neither was charismatic enough to lead.

Alongside Yayha al-Libi and his peers there is an even younger generation, but they are unknown and untried.

Decentralisation was always an integral part of Bin Laden’s strategy, with al-Qaida conceived as an umbrella group, channelling and focusing the diverse energies of the various groups active across the Islamist world in the 1990s, but it is hard to see how one of the affiliate groups or the “network of networks” could provide a leader now.

Each group has remained largely independent of the main al-Qaida leadership, and there is the problem of the fundamental parochialism of al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsular (largely Yemen), in the Maghreb (largely Algeria), and in Iraq. Each is rooted in specific local factors and history. Faced with significant challenges in reconciling global agendas with local realities, they are more likely to go their own way than try to pursue the chimerical dream of a united international jihad that Bin Laden dedicated much of his life to.

One exception might be the freelance US-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, currently in Yemen where he grew up. Through internet sermons and his slick magazine Inspire, 40-year-old Awlaki has the reach and has shown the ambition to, if not lead al-Qaida, then to fill the space Bin Laden has left. He is young, eloquent, speaks English and Arabic and can reach out to many different audiences. Awlaki’s profile and success is a reminder of how al-Qaida was always only one of scores of radical groups that together constituted the dynamic, varied and evolving phenomenon of Sunni Muslim violent extremism.

An important question is what effect the leader’s death will have on the ideological impact of al-Qaida. “My life or death does not matter. The awakening has started,” Bin Laden boasted in late 2001. But it is not clear whether he will prove correct.

Bin Laden’s greatest success was to make his particular interpretation of radical Islamism globally known. There were other strands of militant thinking and strategy around in the late 1990s but 20 years of “propaganda by deed” made Bin Laden’s the dominant one. A thriving jihadi subculture has emerged. Al-Qaida has become, in many ways, a social movement. Bin Laden’s death means the removal of the iconic figure at the centre of this construct.

Also, many of the myriad factors that have fed radical militancy in recent decades – some of which stretch back decades or even centuries in the Islamic world or in the Islamic world’s relationship with the west – are still has potent as ever. We are living in a new era of polarisation, conspiracy theory and religious identity. The strategic impact of Bin Laden’s actions depended in part on the reaction of his enemies, particularly the United States. The consequences of his death do so, too.

That said, in recent years the increasing marginalisation of al-Qaida – culturally, socially and geographically – has been very clear. The Arab Spring demonstrated how Bin Laden’s message had been rejected by those hundreds of millions he once sought to radicalise and mobilise. Al-Qaida had orchestrated no major successful attack for more than five years. The recruits were coming to the makeshift Pakistani camps but only in enough numbers to assure the core group’s survival, not its success, at least not in the short-term.

One of the most important figures in Islamist militancy’s recent history was Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian as his nom de guerre or kunya suggests, who formulated a complex theory of “leaderless jihad”. This, he imagined, would see militants all over the Islamic world and beyond acting independently according to a blueprint uploaded to the internet (and written) by Suri himself . At one moment, in around 2004 or 2005, it looked like his vision was becoming a reality. Suri certainly thought so, boasting that the London 7/7 bombings showed the beginnings of a “global intifada”. He was wrong and was detained in Pakistan shortly after the London attacks and is now, almost certainly, in a Syrian jail.

The most probable scenario in the future is continuing, low-level violence and threat shifting around the periphery of the Islamist world, depending on local circumstances and the emergence of new leaders able to galvanise fresh networks. But there is unlikely to be a genuine successor to Bin Laden, either as head of al-Qaida, or as pre-eminent global icon of jihad.

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This article titled “40 minutes of fighting, and then two fatal shots” was written by Declan Walsh, Esther Addley, Ewen MacAskill, for The Guardian on Tuesday 3rd May 2011 00.44 UTC

The helicopters swooped in the dead of night, flying in formation across the lower ranges of the Himalayas, then dropping precipitously on their target, a three-storey house on an acre of land in a wealthy suburb of Abbottabad, the training ground of Pakistan’s powerful military officer corps.

In one of the houses nearby, Omar Nazeer, a 30-year-old official at Pakistan’s petroleum ministry, was up late, working on his laptop. As the MH-60 Black Hawks thundered overhead he gave a start, spilling coffee on to the keyboard. “Our windows were shivering because the helicopters were so close,” he said.

The aircraft – three or four, according to different reports – carried soldiers from the US navy’s elite Seal Team Six, a highly secretive counter-terrorism unit that works closely with the CIA. One hovered over the target house; al-Qaida militants fired on it with a rocket-propelled grenade. Then disaster struck: the chopper stalled and slumped towards the ground.

Thousands of miles away in the US, officials watching on live video feeds had a heart-stopping moment. Some thought of “Black Hawk Down” – the infamous 1993 debacle in Somalia that precipitated America’s withdrawal from that country. But the pilot put his craft down safely and the Seals tumbled out, pressing towards their target, the 54-year-old Saudi fugitive who had eluded them for over a decade, now closer than ever.

The Americans had been led there by one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted men: a courier, first identified by detainees at Guantánamo Bay through his nom de guerre. He was said to be protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged architect of the 9/11 attack. The Americans discovered his name four years ago, and discovered that he lived in the Abbottabad region with his brother two years ago.

Last August they narrowed his location to this compound in Abbottabad, an affluent military town about 35 miles north of Islamabad named after its first deputy commissioner, the British officer Major James Abbott. At first the Americans were puzzled: the compound, built in 2005 and valued at m (£600,000), was no ordinary home. Perimeter walls up to six metres (18ft) high were topped with barbed wire, there was no internet or telephone connection and there were few windows. Oddly, the inhabitants burned their rubbish inside the compound instead of leaving it outside.

The neighbours knew the owners of the house – the courier and his brother, described as ethnic Pashtuns – as secretive types. They dispatched children to buy food at local shops, and although they regularly prayed at a local mosque, they didn’t engage in small talk.

Salman Riaz, a film actor, said that five months ago he and a crew tried to do some filming next to the house but were told to stop by two men who came out. “They told me that this is haram [forbidden] in Islam,” he said. He did not know that he had stumbled across a bespoke terrorist hideaway “custom-built to hide someone of significance”, according to a US official.

Monitoring the house with satellite technology and other spy tools, the CIA determined that a family was living in the house with the two men. Last February the CIA determined “with high probability” that it was Bin Laden and his clan. Officials scrambled to formulate a plan to kill him.

The first idea was to bomb the house using B2 stealth bombers dropping 2,000-pound JDAMs (joint direct attack munitions), according to ABC News. But Barack Obama rejected it, saying he wanted definitive proof that the Saudi was inside. “The helicopter raid was riskier,” said one US official. “[But] he didn’t just want to leave a pile of rubble.”

An air assault plan was formulated. The Seal Team Six, officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group and based in Virginia, held rehearsals at a specially constructed compound in early April. Meanwhile Obama officials engaged in regular meetings, chaired by national security adviser, Tom Donilon, and counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, to determine when – and how – to strike.

On 28 April, shortly after he nominated CIA director, Leon Panetta, to replace Robert Gates as defence secretary, Obama held a final meeting. In the secrecy of the White House situation room, he listened to recommendations from all sides, but reserved the final decision. Finally last Friday morning, with the eyes of the world glued on the royal wedding in London, he signed off on the air assault.

Only a tiny handful of people within the administration were aware of the operation. US officials say that no other country, including Pakistan – as far as some were concerned, especially Pakistan – was informed, even though the US helicopters would be invading Pakistani airspace. Pakistani officials agreed on Monday that they knew nothing.

“Not a thing,” said an official with the ISI spy agency.

But there are signs that statement may be untrue: some reports on the strike, sourced in Washington, suggest the Seals took off from Ghazi airforce base at nearby Tarbela Dam. If true, that suggests a convenient contrivance so that Pakistan could avoid ownership of an operation certain to rankle with the notoriously anti-American public.

Obama handed control of the assault to Panetta – still CIA director until July – who transformed the conference room at its headquarters into a command centre from where he could be in constant contact with the Seal leaders – an unusual case of a civilian spy leading a military team.

Saturday came, the day of the planned assault, but bad weather conspired against the Americans. On Sunday, Obama spent part of his day on the golf course, but cut short his round to return to the White House for a meeting where he and top aides reviewed final preparations. Hours later the Seals took off – probably from Jalalabad or Bagram airbases in Afghanistan, the ISI official said – and entered Pakistani airspace.

What happened next is subject to the American account only. Local residents reported three large blasts shortly after the helicopters passed overhead. The al-Qaida fighters holed up inside fought back, trading gunfire for nearly 40 minutes, as the US troops cleared the compound floor by floor, Pentagon officials said.

The Pashtun courier – he has not been identified – and his brother were killed, as was one of Bin Laden’s adult sons, possibly Hamza, who was a senior al-Qaida member. One woman reportedly died and two others were injured.

The Americans then reached Bin Laden – the man with a m bounty, the embodiment of the national terrorist nightmare, the subject of greater American passions and frustrations than perhaps any other figure of the past decade.

According to the Pentagon he was identified by name by one of his own wives. As the raiding party closed in on the last unsecured room in the compound, Bin Laden, who according to the White House had no weapon, was shot dead.

US officials say – and there is no independent verification of this fact – he was shot twice, once in the chest and once in the head. “Done in by a double tap – boom boom – to the left side of his face,” wrote Marc Ambinder of the National Journal, a beltway insider’s journal. Word of the kill went up the chain of command. Thousands of miles away, at the CIA in Virginia and at the White House, cheers erupted.

The Americans scoured the house for intelligence, took photos of the body, using facial recognition technology to compare it with pictures. It was him. Before withdrawing, the Seals blew up the wreckage of the helicopter. An orange fireball lit up the night sky over Abbottabad.

Bin Laden’s body was taken to the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the Arabian Gulf. Back in Abbottabad, the wounded were taken to the Combined Military hospital in Abbottabad. Omar Nazeer, the government official cowering in his house, said six children and three women had been wounded. He knew, he said, because his brother, a military official, worked at the hospital.

Hours later, Bin Laden’s body was wrapped in white cloth, and – after, it is said, the administration of Islamic burial rites – it was weighted and dropped from a plank into the sea. The location was not revealed. “We don’t want a bunch of people going to the shrine for ever,” an official told the Washington Post.

Obama called former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to inform them of the news. Keith Urbahn, the former chief of staff to Bush’s defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted. “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn.”

Then Obama gave a press conference, and gave the news to the rest of the world. “No matter how long it takes,” he said. “Justice will be done.”

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This article titled “Pakistani Christians protest after assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Thursday 3rd March 2011 16.29 UTC

Hundreds of Christians have taken to the streets of Pakistan in protest at the assassination of the minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, who was gunned down outside his home on Wednesday.

As the government declared three days of mourning, demonstrations were held across Punjab, where the Christian community is concentrated, with protesters burning tyres and demanding justice.

Such a show of anger is rare among Pakistan’s Christian minority, who enjoy little political power and are more often in the news as victims of violence from Muslim extremists. One of the largest crowds gathered in Gojra, in Punjab, where nine Christians were killed – seven of them burned alive – in 2009.

“This is such a black situation. We request the whole of humanity to do something for us,” said Yousaf Nishan, brother-in-law of Bhatti, who was the only Christian in the cabinet.

Bhatti was shot as he travelled to a cabinet meeting by killers who claimed to be affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaida. It was the country’s second political assassination in two months: the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer was killed, also in Islamabad, on 4 January.

A dark tone pervaded reaction in the media. “Death of a state” was the editorial headline in the Express Tribune. “A graveyard for lunatics” read a despondent post on the Café Pyala blog.

“The killers may have escaped the scene of the crime but the real culprit is known to all: an extremist mindset that has, with the sponsorship of some institutions of the state, spread far and wide,” wrote Dawn newspaper.

References to “institutions” are usually a euphemism for the military’s powerful intelligence agencies that nurtured select jihadist groups in the 80s and 90s and, according to western officials, still do today.

The depth of the “extremist mindset” became evident after Taseer’s assassination, when lawyers showered his assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, with rose petals and 40,000 supporters filled a Karachi street.

Two weeks ago media reports said Qadri, who faces possible execution, was sent scores of Valentine’s Day cards.

The question is whether the reaction to Bhatti’s death will be any different. The early signs are not encouraging.

President Asif Ali Zardari vowed to combat the forces of obscurantism. “We will not be intimidated nor will we retreat,” he told the state news agency.

But many opposition leaders offered a muted response to Bhatti’s death, condemning the violence but offering little of the fiery rhetoric that normally characterises political discourse in Pakistan.

When the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, led a two-minute silence in parliament, three members of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party remained seated.

“I am afraid that this could be an American conspiracy to defame the government of Pakistan, Muslims and Islam,” Rafi Usmani, the grand mufti of Pakistan, told AP.

Mainstream leaders are afraid of speaking out on the blasphemy law, which is considered politically toxic and potentially life-threatening among politicians.

Bhatti had, at one point, championed reform of the draconian law, although the ruling Pakistan People’s party of which he was a member rejected any change.

Analyst Mosharraf Zaidi called for an “urgent rehabilitation” of Pakistani society. “Bhatti’s murder is an unmitigated outrage, and Pakistan must start by acknowledging this,” he wrote.

But appetite for self-reflection appears limited. In Islamabad, where Bhatti was killed, just 60 people gathered outside a shopping market in pouring rain for a candlelit vigil, chanting: “We want peace”.

Pakistani society is nominally caste-free, but anti-Christian prejudices run deep, with Christians largely confined to low-paying jobs. Some Muslims refuse to eat food cooked by Christians, considering it unclean.

Bhatti, 42, was an exception to the rule. His funeral is due to take place at his home village near Faisalabad, 160 miles south of Islamabad, on Friday.

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This article titled “Shahbaz Bhatti: another voice against Pakistan’s extremists dies” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Wednesday 2nd March 2011 21.55 UTC

Mariam Pervaiz held up a quavering hand, its palm stained with the blood of her uncle, Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s latest political martyr.

“I touched his face,” said the 22-year-old, who rushed to the scene after hearing the rattle of gunfire that killed Pakistan’s minorities minister. “I pulled the car door but he was covered in blood. I said ‘uncle, uncle’ and tried to take his pulse. But he was already dead.”

The sound of wailing women rose from the next room; a rainstorm poured from the skies over Islamabad, washing the streets of a capital city that has witnessed two political deaths in as many months.

Bhatti, an unassuming man with a gentle manner, was not the most powerful of Pakistan’s politicians, nor the most prominent. But he was unquestionably among the bravest.

As the only Christian minister in a country buffeted by extremism and violence, he fought for the rights of Pakistan’s beleaguered minorities. On Wednesday he paid the price of principle with a brutal act that he himself had predicted.

“These Taliban threaten me,” he said in a videotaped message recorded four months ago, and released after his death. “But I am a follower of the cross. I am living for the suffering of my people, and I am ready to die for them.”

And so it was. His killers met little resistance. Witnesses said Bhatti’s killers arrived in a small white car that blocked the road as Bhatti left the tidy suburban home he shared with his mother, whose husband died six weeks ago.

First they fired a burst of Kalashnikov that tore through the windscreen. Then they dragged the driver out. Then they continued firing through a side window. Bhatti was alone; his police guard was due to meet him at his office, officials said.

Bhatti had requested a bulletproof vehicle and a house in the heavily protected ministers’ enclave, a government official said in a TV interview . But other ministers also reported threats and Bhatti’s request was not met, he admitted.

The gunmen fired at least 25 bullets, eight of which struck Bhatti, according to medics at the hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. As they left they scattered pamphlets spelling out their motive. Bhatti was an “infidel Christian” who deserved death for challenging Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, it said.

Those following his example would meet a similar fate. “With the blessing of Allah, the mujahideen will send each of you to hell,” it read, signed: “Taliban al-Qaida Punjab”.

International condemnation followed. The UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said Pakistan was being “poisoned by extremism” and urged immediate reform of the blasphemy laws. “I hope the government of Pakistan will … reflect on how it can more effectively confront the extremism poisoning Pakistani society.”

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who recently met Bhatti, said she was “shocked and outraged”. Barack Obama said the Christian minister “courageously challenged the blasphemy laws of Pakistan”. “He was clear-eyed about the risks of speaking out, and, despite innumerable death threats, he insisted he had a duty to his fellow Pakistanis to defend equal rights and tolerance.”

Yet inside the country there was an odd sense that Pakistanis were adjusting to their politicians being picked off, or at least a certain type. TV stations that normally cleared the decks after such traumas, offering dirges and dramatic headlines, reported the news, but then turned to the cricket and the story of Raymond Davis, the CIA official charged with murder.

At the scene of the shooting there was little of the forensic rigour that follows attacks on more influential politicians. A policeman jingled a handful of bullet casings that he then put in his pocket; journalists roamed behind the yellow cordon. The rain washed everything else away.

Pakistan’s Christians, already poorly represented in power, worried about what Bhatti’s death meant for them. “We do not have the freedom of expressing our point of view,” said Bishop Samuel Azariah, presiding bishop of the Church of Pakistan. “Why is the majority in the sin of silence?” Bhatti’s brother-in-law, Yousaf Nishan, said he felt “very insecure”. He said: “In this society you can’t open your mouth, even if you want to say something good, because you’re afraid who you might offend.”

Bhatti’s death casts an ever longer pall over the case of Aasia Bibi, the Christian woman sentenced to death for alleged blasphemy last November. Bhatti was one of three politicians who agitated for the release of the mother-of-five; now all three have been silenced. Salmaan Taseer, the Punjab governor, was killed by his own guard outside an Islamabad cafe while Sherry Rehman lives in hiding, advised against public appearances for fear of assassination.

The prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, and the interior minister, Rehman Malik, rushed to the hospital where Bhatti was taken . His death was a major security failure for their government, which has some odd priorities.

Last week Malik caused outrage by announcing restrictions on artists, actors and journalists travelling abroad; analysts said he would be better served protecting his cabinet colleagues.

“These people have a long list of targets, and we are all on it,” said human rights campaigner Tahira Abdullah outside Bhatti’s house .

The government’s greatest failing, however, was the lack of political protection for liberals like Bhatti. Politically embattled, the Zardari administration has ruled out any changes to the controversial law – isolating any reformists in its own party. Critics warn this appeasement policy could backfire disastrously. The government must “replace the political cowardice and institutional myopia that encourages such appeasement,” said Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. But the turmoil also has strong military roots – the extremist forces responsible for Bhatti’s death and Taseer’s were nurtured under the dictator General Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. According to the recent WikiLeaks cables, the army still supports some jihadist groups today.

That thinking still pervades Pakistani society. On TV Zaid Hamid, a rightwing commentator, said Bhatti’s killing was part of a CIA plot to divert attention from the Davis affair. On another channel Zia’s son, Ijaz ul-Haq, rejected the notion of Taliban involvement, calling the killing part of a “foreign plot”. Meanwhile Pakistan’s gunmen of hate retreated into the shadows, another day’s work done. Their message – that discussion of the blasphemy law is itself a death sentence – had been received loud and clear.

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This article titled “Al-Qaida supergrass: MPs seek answers as pressure on Hague increases” was written by Shiv Malik, for The Guardian on Monday 14th February 2011 20.53 UTC

British diplomats are pressing for an explanation for the early release of a US informant who helped train the terrorists behind London’s 7 July bombings.

Mohammed Junaid Babar, 35, was quietly released by a New York judge two months ago after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence, raising comparisons with the lenient treatment received by the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

The Foreign Office said: “Mohammed Junaid Babar’s release has caused pain and distress to those who lost family and friends on 7 July 2005.

“The prosecution and sentencing of Babar was a matter for the US authorities and their independent judicial system. The families have a right to an explanation of what lay behind this decision and we will be pressing the US authorities to give them one.”

The foreign secretary, William Hague, is expected to face pressure in the House of Commons over the affair after MPs from across the political spectrum came forward on Monday to question the decision. After a Guardian investigation into the case, it is understood that Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, will be putting a written parliamentary question to Hague to ask what discussions he had with US authorities about Babar’s release.

The issue was also raised in the continuing coroner’s inquiry into the bombings in 2005. Speaking on behalf of bereaved families, barrister Caoilfhionn Gallagher told the coroner, Lady Justice Hallett, that her clients wanted to ensure that UK security services “were not aware of any basis for the suggestion that Babar had been an informant for the authorities for any country prior to his detention” in 2004.

The inquest is this week expected to start addressing whether the 7 July attacks could have been prevented.

After the FBI arrested Babar, in April 2004, he confessed to US prosecutors that he had set up a training camp in north-west Pakistan in 2003 and had provided lodgings and transport for nearly a dozen radicals. Among these was Mohammad Sidique Khan, the Yorkshire suicide bomber who along with three fellow terrorists killed 52 people and injured more than 750 on London’s transport system in 2005. The camp taught how to fire machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, and taught bomb-making techniques.

Babar pleaded guilty and turned state witness for the US government, and was released early. He was praised by the sentencing judge and US prosecutors, who described his work as “exceptional” and “extraordinary”. However, politicians on this side of the Atlantic want questions asked about the release.

The Conservative former shadow home secretary David Davis MP said Babar was “no hero” and that the US authorities should offer the survivors and those bereaved by the London bombings a “proper explanation” for why Babar had served such a short sentence.

Davis said: “It seems to me that the US authorities have got some questions to answer. On the one hand, they understandably demand that we explain how al-Megrahi came to be released. But here they are, releasing after less than five years a man who knew the London bombers but failed to provide the information that could have prevented 7/7 happening.

“This man, Babar, is no hero. He is a terrorist, and the relatives of the dead and wounded from 7/7 should reasonably expect a proper explanation from the American authorities.”

Patrick Mercer, a fellow Tory and former chairman of the counter-terrorism subcommittee, described the release as a disgrace and called on Hague to intervene. “This is the only man to be brought to justice in connection with the 7/7 atrocities. For him to be treated so lightly by the US courts will cause enormous resentment in this country.

“I have no doubt that the foreign secretary will have some very serious questions to ask of his American counterparts,” Mercer said.

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