Pakistan: A love letter between Osama Bin Laden’s son Saad and his wife has been discovered among hundreds of documents found inside the Pakistan compound after his father was shot dead.
Originally recorded as a video message in 2008, the letter was transcribed on to paper and also outlines the his final wishes in case he was killed.
Saad is believed to be the third son of Osama and was born to the terror leader’s first wife – his Syrian cousin – and later married a woman from Yemen who bore him three children.
He was being groomed to be his father’s potential successor, however was killed in a 2009 CIA drone strike in Pakistan.
Addressed ‘to my dear faithful wife’, Bin Laden’s heir describes her as ‘the apple of my eye’ and says she ‘fills my heart with love’, but does not call her by name.
In the note, he says: ‘Know that you do fill my heart with love, beautiful memories, and your long-suffering of tense situations in order to appease me and be kind to me, and every time I thought of you my eyes would tear for being away from you.’
‘I want you to know that I will not marry on you because I will not find a woman like you, and I will remain in the land of jihad until God will bring us together.’
He goes on to say that if he is killed, she has permission to return to her family, but adds ‘you have to raise my children properly’.
For his two daughters, this means keeping them out of trouble and away from ‘bad company’ until after puberty, when they must ‘marry them to mujahidin, then that is best, or else to good people’.
For his one son, he says that the boy must be sent to stay with his grandfather – presumably Osama – to carry on fighting jihad, ‘because jihad is an obligated duty for all adults.’
Addressing his wife, he adds: ‘As for you, you are the apple of my eye, and the most precious thing that I have in this world.
‘If you want to marry after me, I have no objection, but I really want for you to be my wife in paradise, and the woman, if she marries two men, is given a choice on Judgment Day to be with one of them.’
The letter is dated August 15, 2008, when Osama Bin Laden was thought to be in hiding in Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Saad would have gone to Pakistan around that time.
In January 2009 then- Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell confirmed Saad bin Laden had either escaped custody in Iran or was released by the Islamic government and returned to Pakistan accompanied by other Al Qaeda operatives sometime in the middle of 2008.
Saad was among as many as 30 senior Al Qaeda figures who were held in custody in Iran over the six years after fleeing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001.
‘He is the son closest and most involved in his father’s activities,’ professor Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown said at the time. ‘He is as extreme as [Osama] Bin Laden, and he is being groomed as a senior member.’
Four years after his father was killed in the American it is thought that all three of Bin Laden’s wives, Saad’s stepmothers, and the many surviving children, are now living in Yemen.
The Letter:
