Who Was Hiding bin Laden in Abbottabad?

STRATFOR

Summary

The small Pakistani city where Osama bin Laden is thought to have lived since 2006 and where he died May 2 is sometimes compared to West Point, N.Y., since both cities have military academies. But Abbottabad is more like the less-accessible Colorado Springs, Colo., home of the U.S. Air Force Academy. While a secure and peaceful mountain town seems like an unlikely place to find bin Laden, Abbottabad has long served as a militant transit hub. But geography does not explain why al Qaeda chose it as such, or why bin Laden risked living in the same place for so long.Analysis

A daring raid by U.S. special operations forces May 2 focused world attention on a large though nondescript residence in a seemingly insignificant Pakistani city. The now-infamous compound housed Osama bin Laden, members of his family and several couriers. Media reports put the residence in Abbottabad city, but it is actually located in Bilal town in Abbottabad district, about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) northeast of the Abbottabad city center and 1.3 kilometers southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul.

Who Was Hiding bin Laden in Abbottabad?
(click here to enlarge image)

For this reason, the area is often compared to West Point, N.Y., where the sprawling campus of the United States Military Academy is located. While this area along the Hudson River is a major escape for New Yorkers, the same way Abbottabad is for residents of Islamabad, Colorado Springs, Colo., and the U.S. Air Force Academy may be a more fitting comparison. Both Abbottabad and Colorado Springs are pleasant, peaceful university towns at high altitudes where many people, particularly military officers, like to retire to enjoy the security, mountain air and scenery.

The differences of the two places outnumber the similarities. Unlike the United States, Pakistan has large areas of completely ungoverned territory where militants can maintain bases and more or less freely operate. And even while Pakistan has been actively fighting militants in the northern portion of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), there is still much freedom for militants to move outside of these areas. Overt militant activities, such as bombmaking and training, are much easier to detect in places like Abbottabad, where rule of law exists, than in more remote areas. But these areas are still relatively safe environments for covert activities like transportation, safe-havening, fundraising and planning.

Searching for bin Laden

STRATFOR wrote in 2007 that bin Laden would be extremely difficult to find, like the Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph. But Rudolph was eventually caught in an area where police and other security agencies could operate at will, as they can in Abbottabad. Rudolph, a loner, was captured when he came into town to rummage for food in a dumpster, while bin Laden had a much more robust support network. Bin Laden was not really “on the run,” and numerous media outlets and STRATFOR sources say he had been living in the Bilal town compound since 2005 or 2006. This would mean that he probably spent five to six years in the same place, where he could have made the same mistakes as Rudolph and been caught on a lucky break.

Indeed, a large amount of suspicious activity was reported about the compound over the years, though no local residents claimed to know bin Laden was there. To neighbors, the compound’s residents were a mystery, and according to AP interviews there were many rumors that the house was owned by drug dealers or smugglers. The compound had no Internet or phone lines and residents burned their own trash. Bin Laden was never seen coming or going. It also had walls between 3.7 and 5.5 meters (12 and 18 feet) high, which is not unusual for the area, but the presence of security cameras, barbed wire and privacy windows would have been notable. It was an exceptionally fortified compound for the area.

Other odd activity included prohibiting a Pakistani film crew that once stopped outside the house from filming. Security guards would also pay children who accidentally threw cricket balls into the compound rather than simply returning them. Its inhabitants avoided outside contact by not contributing to charity (thereby violating a Muslim custom) and by not allowing health care workers to administer polio vaccines to the children who lived in the compound, instead administering the vaccine themselves. Locals thought someone on the run from a tribal feud in Waziristan owned the compound, but they also noticed that its residents spoke Arabic.

These details may look suspicious only in hindsight, but many of these individual pieces would not have gone unnoticed by local police or intelligence officers, especially since this specific compound and the area around it was being monitored by Pakistani and American intelligence looking for other al Qaeda figures. While the U.S. public and media tended to imagine bin Laden hiding in a cave somewhere, STRATFOR has said since 2005 that he was probably in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where Abbottabad is located. Indeed, bin Laden was discovered in the southern part of the province, where he could have maintained communications while being away from the fighting. The choice of a city some 190 kilometers (120 miles) from the Afghanistan border as the crow flies may also have been an attempt to stay out of the reach of U.S. forces — though it was not too far for the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group.

Al Qaeda’s History in Abbottabad

A secure and peaceful mountain town seemed to many an unlikely place to find bin Laden, though al Qaeda operatives have been through Abbottabad before. In fact, the very same property was raided in 2003 by Pakistani intelligence with American cooperation. This was around the time Abu Farj al-Libi, a senior al Qaeda operations planner who allegedly was trying to assassinate then-President Pervez Musharraf, was hiding in Abbottabad, though it is unknown if he used the same property.

In the last year, another al Qaeda network was discovered in the town. A postal clerk in Abbottabad was found to be coordinating transport for foreign militants. Earlier this year, two French citizens of Pakistani ethnicity were caught travelling to North Waziristan, which is a long way from Abbottabad, using the postal clerk-cum-facilitator, Tahir Shehzad. This led to the Jan. 25 arrest in Abbottabad of Umar Patek (aka Umar Arab), one of the last remaining Indonesian militants from Jemaah Islamiyah. Patek actually has a long history in Pakistan, where he was sent to train in 1985 or 1986. At that time, Darul Islam, the Indonesian militant network that led to Jemaah Islamiyah, sent at least a dozen militants for operational and bombmaking training, and the skills they brought back with them led to a wave of terror in Indonesia from 2002 to 2009. It is highly likely that Patek would have met bin Laden during this period in the 1980s, so it is curious for him to once again pop up in the same place.

Abbottabad is certainly not the only location of al Qaeda safe-houses in Pakistan. Al-Libi was captured in Mardan in 2005, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in Gujrat in July 2004, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi in March 2003, Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Karachi in September 2002 and Abu Zubaydah Faisalabad in March 2002, all in operations coordinated between the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and the CIA. There is also a long list of al Qaeda operatives killed by missile strikes in North Waziristan.

Who Was Hiding bin Laden in Abbottabad?
(click here to enlarge image)

But the use of Abbottabad by al Qaeda’s central figure and as a militant transit hub seems odd when we examine the geography. One of the links to the historic Silk Road, Abbottabad sits on the Karakoram Highway that goes to Gilgit-Baltistan and on into China. It is separated from Islamabad, and really most of Pakistan, by branches of the eastern Himalayas and river valleys. And while offering access to some Taliban operating areas like Mansehra, it is far outside of the usual Pashtun-dominated areas of Islamist militants.

Abbottabad is located in the Hazara sub-region of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the home of a people who speak Hindko (a frontier variant of Punjabi). It is not the kind of safe-haven operated by Taliban camps in the FATA. Before the Pakistani military offensives that began in April 2009, Pakistani Taliban networks covered Dir, Swat, Malakand and Buner districts. Bin Laden probably traveled through Dir, Swat, Shangla and Mansehra districts to eventually reach Abbottabad. Such a route would have taken much longer and involves using smaller roads, but it also decreases the chances of detection given that these are less densely populated areas and most of them have had some Taliban presence. The alternative would be the route from Dir/Bajaur through the districts of Malakand, Mardan, Swabi and Haripur, which would involve taking major roads through more densely populated areas.

The Orash Valley, where Abbottabad is situated, is a beautiful and out-of-the-way place, and the Kashmir Earthquake of 2005 may have given more opportunities for al Qaeda to move in undetected. It is a mountainous and less accessible area, providing some safety but also fewer places for fugitives like bin Laden to escape to. Clearly, there is (or was) a significant al Qaeda transit and safe-house network in the city, something of which American and Pakistani intelligence were aware. But geography does not explain why al Qaeda chose Abbottabad, and why bin Laden was willing to risk living in the same place for so long.

U.S.-Pakistani Relations

While the Americans were largely hunting from the skies (or space), we must wonder how well Pakistani intelligence and police were hunting on the ground. Indeed, the Americans were wondering, too, as they increased unilateral operations in the country, resulting in incidents like the one involving Raymond Davis, a contract security officer for the CIA who was exposed when he shot two people he believed were robbing him. The Pakistani state, and especially its ISI, is by no means monolithic. With a long history of supporting militants on its borders, including bin Laden until 1989 (with the cooperation of the United States and Saudi Arabia), there are still likely at least a few Pakistani intelligence officers who were happy to help him hide the past few years. Because al Qaeda directly threatened the Pakistani state, from plotting assassinations to supporting a large insurgency, Islamabad itself would not have endorsed such support.

The question now is which current or former intelligence officers created a fiefdom in Abbottabad where they could ensure the safety of al Qaeda operatives. The intelligence gathered from the compound may lead to these individuals and further strain the already rocky relationship between the United States and Pakistan.