A Brief History
On May 2, 2011, American military Special Forces carried out a surprise raid on the Abbottabad, Pakistan compound where Al Qaeda leader and mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States, Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden, had been hiding.
Digging Deeper
At the time of the terrible crimes committed on September 11, 2001, the President George Bush vowed that Osama bin Laden and others responsible for the attacks would be found, “Dead or Alive” and brought to justice. President Bush never did “get his man,” but President Barack Obama authorized the raid into the third-party country of Pakistan without Pakistan’s permission and without any notification to the Pakistani government.
Operation Neptune Spear was launched by Blackhawk helicopters from Afghanistan taking two dozen Navy Seals to the compound, where not only was bin Laden killed, but his body and a trove of intelligence information was also removed by the US forces.
Only three other Saudi men including one of bin Laden’s sons, and a woman were killed in the raid. Bin Laden’s body was later buried at sea. No Americans died.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Bundy, Cana. The Neptune Sequel: Aftermath of Neptune Spear. Kindle, 2017.
O’Neill, Robert. The Operator: Firing the Shots That Killed Osama Bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior. Simon and Schuster, 2017.
The featured image in this article, a map by Weaveravel of the United States’s Operation Neptune Spear (killing of Osama bin Laden), is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
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