May 2 marks the 10th anniversary of the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was described as the "world's most wanted terrorist", by US Navy SEALs in an attack on his headquarters In Pakistan.
For the United States, this top secret operation, which was carried out by American forces without informing the Pakistani government, was tantamount to retaliation for the September 11, 2001 attacks and closing its file.
As for Pakistan, this process was considered a great insult and embarrassment to it.
Who is Osama bin Laden?
Osama bin Laden was born on March 10, 1957, and his father is the Saudi businessman, billionaire Mohammed bin Laden, and his Syrian mother was divorced after his birth, and he has more than 50 years. brother and sister. He lost his father in a plane crash when he was a child.
When he was young, he practiced football and horseback riding, and had a passion for Bruce Lee's films. He also used to travel every summer to Syria, his mother's hometown, where he climbed the mountains. He fell in love with the daughter of one of his uncles.
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In his youth, he was fond of fast cars, and he would drive his cars very fast and break at least one of them. He also liked to go to the desert to relax with his friends and his horses. He married his Syrian cousin for the first time when he was 17 years old. He is said to have at least 23 children from at least five marriages.
Bin Laden was a shy, average student with a degree in civil engineering. He traveled to Pakistan after the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
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Some accounts say that he helped establish al-Qaeda when the Russian forces in Afghanistan were suffering successive military defeats at the hands of Afghan militants.
An American author says that the death of bin Laden's half-brother, Salem, in 1988 in a plane crash was a decisive factor in his conversion to extremism and extremism.
Bin Laden condemned the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia that were sent to the Gulf in 1990 with the aim of helping expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait after they invaded in the same year.
Bin Laden remained convinced that the Islamic world was "a victim of international terrorism led by the United States."
And then he called for jihad against the United States, which spent billions of dollars on the Afghan resistance, on whose side bin Laden fought.
On May 2, 2011, US special forces raided a residential compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, killing bin Laden.
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Bin Laden lived freely only 50 kilometers from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and almost under the nose of the Pakistan Military Academy in Abbottabad.
But 10 years after the raid was turned into a Hollywood drama, the bloody jihadis are still very much a global phenomenon.
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The past years have witnessed extremist attacks on almost all continents, in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa.
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So, to what extent will bin Laden's legacy, if any, affect the world? A question asked by Frank Gardner, the BBC's security correspondent, several years ago.
Sajjan Gohil, of the Asia Pacific Foundation think tank, said: “Bin Laden's death left a legacy... To some extent, this legacy has been appropriated by the Islamic State, who have taken over and built on their objectives to launch a new transnational terrorist enterprise.”
For many, the 22-year reign of bin Laden's organization, from 1989 to 2011, may not seem so different from the violent ideology of today's Islamic State.
The two groups adhered to a strict and intolerant approach to Islam, and considered any other Sunni person or group an apostate if he did not agree with them.
The two groups used suicide bombings and the mass killing of civilians as a tactic, and rejected the concept of democracy as inconsistent with Islamic law.
Long-term strategy
However, the two groups are different, and if Bin Lane, or Abu Abdullah as his followers used to call him, were still alive, I would certainly disagree with the movements and tactics of the Islamic State.
Bin Laden was relying on a deliberate, long-term, generational strategy. He hoped that the 9/11 attacks would weaken the United States and the West and thus abandon their support for the secular Arab regimes in the Middle East, ultimately paving the way for Jihadist control and the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.
Bin Lan felt that this might take decades and might not happen in his lifetime.
Even before his death, there were indications that Osama bin Laden and the leadership of al-Qaeda in Pakistan opposed the extreme violence of the al-Qaeda branch in Iraq that then morphed into the current Islamic State.
Gohel said: "The Islamic State organization took a different path from the al-Qaeda organization led by bin Laden."
He added, "The state organization deliberately killed Sunni Muslims, including women and children, as it carried out bombings in several mosques in Saudi Arabia, to kill Sunnis and Shiites alike."
And he continued: "ISIS also engaged in criminal activities, such as human and child trafficking, and its doors were open to recruiting women, all of which Al-Qaeda was opposed to."
The Final Blow
Historians consider bin Laden's death in that American raid, which was carried out at dawn on May 2, 2011, a near-fatal blow to Al Qaeda.
His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a dull, unattractive figure who lacks presence and makes no impression on others.
The CIA's controversial program of drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas has driven what remained of bin Laden's supporters into hiding and weakened the group's ability to plan attacks such as the London bombings again.
Al-Qaeda's regional affiliates, such as Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, have resorted to operating and developing independently.
There is a division over the ideological legacy left by bin Laden, as some jihadists believe that attacking the United States on its soil gave the opposite result, as the jihadist theoretician Abu Musab al-Suri wrote in an article published on jihadist accounts on the Internet, "It is strategic folly," according to the news agency. French.
Today, some branches of al-Qaeda are fighting in the Sahel region, Somalia and some countries in the Middle East, but they are not carrying out strikes in the West.
A Watershed Moment
Richard Clarke, who was responsible for counterterrorism affairs in the administration of former US President George W. Bush until 2003, expressed his belief that bin Laden's death marked a watershed moment. "I think there was a direct effect of the propaganda," he said.
He added, "As long as bin Laden was alive, the Americans seemed helpless, but the effect of bin Laden's death in the long run is that the leadership of al-Qaeda has never recovered. As a multinational organization, al-Qaeda has no real existence."
But bin Laden remains the founder of the global jihad and succeeded in recruiting a large number of elements in his organization because he realized the importance of propaganda policy, according to the French News Agency.
Bin Laden shrewdly understood the importance of propaganda that helped project his charismatic image long after his death. Videos showed him with a submachine gun at his side, though he rarely took part in the fighting himself.
The French news agency quoted Colin Clark, director of the "Soufan" Research Center, as saying that the image that was promoted of him succeeded in recruiting fighters.
The West has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to eradicate terrorism since the emergence of bin Laden and his organization, without succeeding in that, and the number of jihadists today in the world exceeds the number they were 20 years ago.
Twenty years after the attacks of September 11, which bore his signature, the United States is preparing to leave Afghanistan, and Clark says that bin Laden struck the first world power "and dragged it into a war of attrition in Afghanistan that it could not win."
Last will
Bin Laden's letters and other documents revealed his plans to divide his money and assets after his death and that he requested that most of these funds be used to continue the global jihad.
These letters are part of 113 documents found during the raid by US Special Forces on bin Laden's hideout.
US intelligence officials have described one such letter as possibly his last will.
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This was reported by Reuters news agency and ABC TV. Exclusively on these documents, which were translated into English from Arabic and removed from the status of confidentiality by the American intelligence services.
These documents were part of a second batch of documents found during the operation and declassified since May 2015.