Osama bin Laden seen as isolated, frustrated in documents

Al Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden spent his final years pleading with followers to stay focused on the goal of large-scale attacks against Americans, and avoid getting sucked into the regional wars and Muslim-on-Muslim violence that have come to define so much of the global jihadi narrative since his death.

While U.S. intelligence officials say the trove of bin Laden files declassified Wednesday represent only a fraction of what Navy SEALs retrieved from the terror leader’s Pakistan lair in 2011, the documents appear to show a terrorist leader so isolated in hiding that he was losing control of his flock.

Letters and memos show bin Laden pushing back against jihadi offshoots impatient to form an Islamic state and warning that small wars to topple governments in the Middle East would distract from the big-picture goal — striking the United States.

“The focus,” he wrote in one letter, “should be on fighting the American people and their representatives.”

But terrorism analysts are divided over the extent to which bin Laden’s influence was waning during the years leading up to his death. And debate is heated over the extent to which his directives either failed to reach his followers — or were simply ignored by a new breed of extremists that have since come to dominate the global jihadi movement.

At the time bin Laden was making his pleas, the Islamic State — also known as ISIS and ISIL — had yet to form in Syria and Iraq. The Arab Spring revolutions in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia were just taking hold. And social media had not yet evolved into the lively outlet that it now is for Islamic State propaganda and recruiting.

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The Islamic State’s rise over the past year has drawn thousands of young recruits to Syria and Iraq — between 16,000 and 17,000 from some 90 countries, according a report Wednesday by The Associated Press.

The group’s focus on establishing an extremist Islamic caliphate — and its appeal to Muslims throughout the world to not only fight but to serve as administrators, doctors, judges, engineers and scholars for it — may have won out over bin Laden’s call for attacks on the West.

Longtime terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, writing for CNN, argued Wednesday that much of bin Laden’s advice either didn’t make it to emerging jihadi groups or was “simply ignored because al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and North Africa continued to attack local targets.”

But other analysts cautioned against reading to deeply into Wednesday’s documents, a small sampling of the overall document trove captured by U.S. forces.

“The idea that bin Laden was myopically obsessed with attacking the U.S. is wrong,” said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). “The truth of the matter is that the documents show that al Qaeda is embedded deeply in various insurgencies in the Middle East.”

Despite the rise of the Islamic State, al Qaeda remains “a major threat,” he said, noting the strength of al Qaeda affiliates from Syria to Yemen. “The Islamic State has definitely grown fast and had a big bump since last year, but the idea that they’ve eclipsed al Qaeda internationally is just false.”

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The documents released Wednesday suggest bin Laden was warned as far back as 2007 about the dangers of spiraling Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Iraq. “If you still can, then this is your last chance to remedy the jihad breakdown that is about to take place in Iraq, that is mostly caused by your followers,” according to a letter to bin Laden dated May 22 of that year.

They also show bin Laden’s frustration with pressure that he and other al Qaeda leaders had come under in the face of U.S. drone strikes and surveillance during the years leading up to his death. One undated memo refers to a drone strike that killed “many jihadi cadres, leaders and others,” and complained that such strikes were”exhausting us.”

Another bin Laden letter mocks President George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” saying it had not achieved stability in Iraq or Afghanistan and questioning why U.S. troops were “searching for the lost phantom” — weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No date is included on the U.S. translation.

In a video letter to one of his wives, also described as bin Laden’s “last will,” the terror leader says, “Know that you do fill my heart with love, beautiful memories, and your long suffering of tense situations in order to appease me and be kind to me.”