(New details and corrections continue to emerge which I'll be incorporating into this post as they come in; a strikethrough will indicate previously reported but now inaccurate information)
The operation was authorized Friday morning and the objective was to kill -- not capture -- Osama bin Laden.
Because the target was bin Laden the raid required practice. Earlier this year a one-acre replica of
bin Laden's compound was created at Camp Alpha, which is a segregated section of Bagram Air Base, located in the Parwan province of Afghanistan. Dry-op runs were conducted in early April.
The president authorized this incredibly daring and difficult operation during a time of “low loom” – little moon luminosity – so that U.S. helicopters could travel to the target from Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan low to the ground and undetected.
It was originally planned for Saturday night but on Friday, for weather reasons, it was pushed to Sunday.
Two
U.S. MH-60 Seahawk specially modified Blackhawk helicopters swept into the compound at 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning. The ground team consisted of 25 U.S. Navy Seals
and one specially trained and outfitted war dog from the elite
Seal Team Six, based in Dam Neck in Virginia. The op was run under the command of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and in cooperation with CIA.
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| Real Time: Team Obama watches the op live |
After bursts of fire during a raid originally scheduled for under 30 minutes but lasting 38 minutes, 22 people were captured or killed by the 'DevGru' team.
The SEALs took fire on their way to the compound’s third floor, where bin Laden had been sleeping. The encounter with bin Laden lasted only seconds, and ended with a double tap -- boom, boom -- two shots, one to the chest and one to the left side of his face. Radioing a commander on Sunday, the team reported the capture with a pre-arranged signal: “Geronimo!”
Also among
the dead were:
- One of bin Laden's sons named
Khalid Hamza
- Two brothers (or possibly cousins),
Afghan Pakistani Pashtuns from Charsa, who served as bin Laden's couriers named Arshad Khan and Tareq Khan (although one police official said that Arshad was not the man’s real name and that he carried a fake identity card)
- A yet to be identified woman who is a) not bin Laden's wife, and b) was not used as a human shield.
At least one more women, purported to be
bin Laden's youngest wife, was wounded as she charged the Seals. Bin Laden's 12-year old daughter is purported to have been in the bedroom, along with other children, and to have witnessed his death.
Other women and children, likely the families of the couriers, were present in the compound but were not killed.
U.S. officials said that Bin Laden himself did fire a weapon during the fight.
One of the U.S. helicopters was damaged but not destroyed during the initial part of the operation, and U.S. forces elected to scuttle it with explosives. Video
footage of a raging fire outside the walls of bin Laden's compound is purported to be
the MH-60 Seahawk a classified, stealth outfitted Blackhawk helicopter that was scuttled.
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| The Raid: by the numbers |
After the firefight American forces hauled Mr. Bin Laden’s body and a "mother load" of intel to a U.S. military base near Kabul, Afghanistan. There body photographed, presumably autopsied, but not in fact not incinerated.
The by now well travled Bin Laden corpose was next flown to the USS Carl Vinson. After a proper Islam burial ceremony conducted by a muslim member of the U.S. military the body was placed in a a weighted bag and cast overboard from the deck into the North Arabian Sea. The speedy, controversial disposal of the body was conducted inline with Islam custom to bury the dead within 24 hours.
While a video of the burial is expected to be release, the Obama administration is still debating whether to release photos of a deceased bin Laden due to their graphic nature ("s
kull was blown apart").
More backstory on Special Forces, the JSOC, etc. can be found
here and in the below video on Seal Team Six.
