9 Unexpected Things Navy SEALs Discovered in Osama bin Ladens Compound – History

When Seal Team Six carried out a raid on Osama bin Ladens compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2, 2011, they not only killed the al Qaeda leader. While under immense time pressure to vacate the premises before Pakistani military arrived, they quickly swept up a treasure trove of his personal belongings. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has since made a large portion of these materials available to the public. Bin Ladens personal possessions paint a more complete picture of the psyche of the notoriousand notoriously secretiveleader behind the 9/11 attacks. Here are nine unexpected things discovered in Osama bin Ladens compound and what they reveal about the founder of the international terrorist network al Qaeda.

This 2005 satellite image shows theAbbottabad, Pakistancompound where Osama Bin Laden was hidingand later shot and killed by Navy SEALs in May 2011. The residence, about 40 miles from Pakistan's capital of Islamabad, was just up the road from a garrison that housed Pakistan's premier military academy.

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Despite having no Internet access or phone lines at the compound"those would be too great a risk to his personal safety, says Bill Roggio of Long War JournalOsama bin Laden was a prolific writer and communicator from his self-imposed isolation. Using couriers, hed save email correspondence to a flash drive, which the courier would then send from an Internet caf.

Navy SEALs retrieved about 100 of these drives, which reveal that bin Laden was involved in critical al Qaeda operations even after world leadership assumed his responsibilities had been handed off to Ayman al-Zawahri. The emails showed bin Laden did not surrender operational or strategic control, says Roggio, who was granted advance access to many of bin Ladens files before the CIA released them to the public. He was issuing orders and being briefed on reports, promotions, reassignments, strategy and ideological issues like fatwahs and religious rulings.

READ MORE: How SEAL Team Six Took Out Osama bin Laden

This picture shows the alleged signature of Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden, taken from a fax sent to Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite television channel, September 24, 2001, about two weeks after the 9/11 attacks. According to the statement, bin Laden was urging Pakistanis to fight any assault on Afghanistan by 'crusader Americans.'

AFP via Getty Images

The SEAL team also recovered his 228-page journal, which records thoughts he expressed to family members between February and April of 2011. (Its unclear exactly how many people were living at the compound at the time of the raid, but its known that the cadre included several of his wives, along with multiple children and grandchildren, along with his couriers and their families.) Believed to have been recorded for him by one of his daughters, the diary revealed his thoughts on the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings taking place in several majority-Muslim countries and his vision for Al Qaeda's place in world politics: This chaos and the absence of leadership in the revolutions is the best environment to spread al-Qaeda's thoughts and ideas, the journal says.

The raid also unearthed a family video from bin Ladens son Hamza bin Ladens wedding in Iran. The only picture we had of Hamza prior to the videos release was of him as a child. Hamza was being groomed for a leadership position, so seeing him as an adult was very valuable, says Roggio.

The wedding guest list also proved revealing, as it included multiple members of al Qaedas inner circle. Hamza married the daughter of Abu Muhammad Al-Masri, another al Qaeda leader, and guests included Mohammed Showqi al-Islambouli, whose brother Khalid assassinated former Egyptian President Anwar-el Sadat. Hamza bin Laden was killed in 2019.

READ MORE:The Storied History of SEAL Team Six, the Secret Unit That Killed Bin Laden

A series of video games downloaded and saved onto compound computers suggest Osama bin Laden or someone else who lived on the compound was an avid video game enthusiast. The CIA files released after the 2011 raid showed the al Qaeda leader had downloads of popular games like Half-Life, Super Mario Bros., Yoshis Island DS, Final Fantasy VII, Dragon Ball Z, and Counter-Strike, a game where multiple players team up to take hostages while fending off counterterrorism efforts.

WATCH: How Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda Planned 9/11

While evading authorities, the fugitive leader released a number of pre-recorded videos to followers. Practice reels were discovered in the compound. Streaming live is a traceable activity, so he would pre-record the messages and hand them to a courier to distribute, says Roggio. Recording these videos in advance enabled him to carefully control his public image.

READ MORE: The Making of a SEAL

Its strange to think that the mastermind behind the death of thousands of people would have Disney films in his hideout, but several were found at the Abbottabad compound, including Antz, Cars, Chicken Little and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. His four youngest children were under the age of 10 at the time of his death.

A few items from the hideout were never released to the public, including bin Ladens reportedly large pornography collection. According to Reuters, "the pornography recovered in the Abbottabad compound consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive. Multiple Freedom of Information requests for the release of the files have been denied, so their exact contents remain amystery.

WATCH: Revealed: The Hunt for Bin Laden, premiering Sunday, May 2 at 8/7c on The HISTORY Channel:

Osama bin Laden, the subject of thousands of news articles and multiple documentaries, apparently had an avid curiosity about his public image. After he was killed, authorities found on his computer several films about him, including BiographyOsama bin Laden and the 2008 comedy documentary Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?

Osama bin Ladens personal library was full of surprises. He owned several books on American military and diplomatic history like Bob Woodwards Obama's Wars, Noam Chomskys Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies and Robert Hopkins Millers The U.S. and Vietnam 1787-1941. It was important for him to understand his enemy and their way of thinking, Roggio says. The compound also housed books on popular conspiracy theories on 9/11, The Committee of 300, and the Illuminati.

WATCH: 9/11 Documentaries on HISTORY Vault

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9 Unexpected Things Navy SEALs Discovered in Osama bin Ladens Compound - History