Bin Laden as Patriarch

By SCOTT SHANE

NYT

WASHINGTON — When a man stalks the world as a mass killer, it distracts from the ordinary interest we might otherwise take in the mundane details of his life. And so it was with Osama bin Laden.

But after he was cornered and killed on May 2 in an upstairs bedroom of his house in Pakistan, Bin Laden the terrorist and Bin Laden the family man came together. At home with him were three of his wives, the youngest of whom was shot in the leg; a son, who was killed; a daughter, who witnessed her father’s death; and other children, some of whom may be Bin Laden’s.

Now there is official interest in the wives as intelligence sources. They were questioned at length by the Pakistanis and subsequently by the Americans, though Bin Laden is not believed to have shared much of his business with the women in his life.

But apart from anything Bin Laden’s wives may have to say that might be useful to intelligence officers about his associates and their whereabouts, there is also a powerful natural curiosity about the women and their children: What was it like to live with the founder of Al Qaeda, to call him husband or father? As with Hitler or Pol Pot, you want to understand whether his bizarre combination of grandiosity and viciousness carried over to domestic life — in Bin Laden’s case, whether he perhaps was an eerily ordinary parent, complaining about what was for dinner, nagging the kids about their homework.

(More here.)