Internal rift led to Osama killing: Saudi paper

RIYADH: US troops were led to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by his own deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, because of a simmering internal power struggle, a Saudi newspaper reported on Thursday.

Al-Watan newspaper, quoting an unnamed "regional source," said the top two Al-Qaeda men had differences and that a courier who led US forces to bin Laden was working for Zawahiri.

The courier was a Pakistan national and not a Kuwaiti as the US suspected, Al-Watan said. The man knew he was being followed by the US military but disguised the fact.

"The Egyptian faction of Al-Qaeda is defacto running the organisation now and since he was taken ill in 2004 they have been trying to take full control," according to the paper.

It said Zawahiri's faction had persuaded bin Laden to leave tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border and take shelter instead in Abbottabad near Islamabad where he was finally killed by US commandos on Monday.

With the return of an Egyptian figure in Al-Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, last autumn from Iran, the Egyptian faction had hatched a plan to dispose

sounds like somebody is wanting to put a big target on the number 2 guy, which is good

Of course, the guy in the weeds might be worse but I say we should keep killing them and find out.

Anything is possible. I certainly think that Binny had become a tired, sick drag on AQ activities, and that Pakistan was involved with both his initial “safe haven” there and ultimately in handing him over to the US.

I suspect a condition of his residence there was that he was not allowed to be armed and was told he could rely on Pakistani forces to protect him. But Pakistan, probably to get in better with the US (and with China, which wants to get closer to Pakistan but didn’t want to encourage Muslim terrorism in its own borders), together with Zawahiri, who had come to regard OBL as a liability, agreed to let the US come in and solve their problem for them.

IMHO, there’s no other way that our folks could have been there 40 minutes in a town which is virtually nothing but a military post and not have had any Pakistan military or ISI people show up. They had to fight his body guards, since Binny was obviously not in on the plan, but they didn’t have to take on the Pakistani army, even though they were technically “invading” Pakistan.

This does not detract from the actual work that the SEALS did, since it was a dangerous operation and there was certainly much that could go wrong.

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