Hrm - Weekend at Bin Laden's. Good point.
It'still unconfirmed.
Typhoid is a worse death than being shot or blown up. It means that he was probably living in really squalid conditions: no toilet paper, no washing of hands.
If he is really dead, his followers will try to make it seem heroic, but I can't think of a much worse, and less heroic way to go. He plotted, but he never actually faced armed Western infidels, and hid out like a rat. And then he got fed some food with fecal contamination. His intestines could have become perforated, so that he would die of peritonitis; or his spleen could have burst, so that he would die of internal bleeding. Or the simple fever may have taken him, after days of stupor alternating with delirium.
If we had captured him, we would have had to give him medical treatment, which would be a useless misallocation of scarce resources very much needed elsewhere in the Third World.
Maybe providence has been on our side in this case.
Will the French blame us for hounding this "cleric" to his death?