Navy SEAL Mark Owen describes how he hunted and killed Osama bin Laden in his book 'No Easy Day'
- Sunday Herald Sun
- September 09, 2012
AS one of his team headed towards the stairs that led to the roof of the guesthouse, AK-47 rounds from inside shattered the glass above the door, narrowly missing him and showering him with glass.
"The first rounds always surprise the s--- out of you," he writes.
Will, another member of Owen's team, yelled in Arabic for al-Kuwaiti to come out, while Owen returned fire. The door started to open and a woman called out.
Owen says that in the green glow of their night vision goggles, the Seals could make out the figure of a woman clutching something in her arms. The first suspicion was that it was a bomb.
Owen recalls in his account how he started applying pressure to his trigger. Lasers on the Seals' guns targeted the woman's head - she could be dead in a second.
But the bundle was a baby. Al-Kuwaiti's wife, Mariam, emerged with the infant and three more children behind her. Owen kept his weapon trained on her as she told them that Al-Kuwaiti was dead.
Owen says he spotted a pair of feet lying in the doorway of a bedroom and that he shot the body of al-Kuwaiti several times to make sure.
With the guesthouse secured, the Seals sprinted to the main compound. Bin Laden's house was split into a duplex and his family lived on the second and third levels and had their own private entrance.
A team led by a Seal referred to in the book as Tom was to clear the first level, according to Owen. Again, the building was dark but the soldiers' night-vision goggles revealed a long hallway with two doors opening off on each side.
The point man - the leading Seal - spotted a man's head sticking out of the first room on the left. The point man shot him and he disappeared back into the room.
When the team reached the doorway the man, later identified as Abrar al-Kuwaiti, was writhing on the floor. The Seals opened fire on him. Al-Kuwaiti's wife Bushra, who jumped in the way to shield him, was also killed.
Owen says a woman and several children were huddled in the corner crying. An AK-47 was found in the room and Tom unloaded it while the rest of the team searched the remaining rooms.
After one of the US troops blew up an iron gate blocking access to the second level, the Seals started filtering up a spiral staircase punctuated by small landings.
Pakistani media personnel and local residents gather outside the hideout of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden following his death by US Special Forces in a ground operation in Abbottabad. Picture: AFP Source: AFP
When Owen reached the second level, he could see a body splayed out on its back on the landing above, between the second and third levels.
One of the Seals had shot Khalid, one of bin Laden's sons, who had probably been living on the second floor.
By then, Owen writes, Seals were queuing up behind Owen on the staircase and the second-level hallway already had sufficient troops to search and clear it, so he continued to the third level, up steps slick with blood and passing Khalid's unused AK-47 propped up on a step.
"We had planned for more of a fight," he writes. "For all the talk about suicide vests and being willing to shed blood for Allah, only one of the al-Kuwaiti brothers got off a barrage."
He describes how, as he and his team slowly ascended the narrow stairwell, his ears strained to hear footsteps or the sound of a round being put into a chamber. He was less than five steps from the top of the staircase when he heard shots.
Osama bin Laden was assassinated by a team of US Navy SEALS. Picture: AP Source: HWT Image Library
He writes: "BOP. BOP. The point man had seen a man peeking out of the door on the right side of the hallway about ten feet in front of him. I couldn't tell from my position if the rounds hit the target or not."
The man disappeared into the dark room. They cautiously approached the room where they found two women, weeping and standing over a man lying at the foot of a bed. The younger of the two women rushed at the point man who grabbed her and herded both women into a corner.
Owen writes that had the women been wearing suicide vests, the action would have cost the soldier his life but saved those of his colleagues.
The fallen man, wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt, tan trousers and a tan tunic, had been shot in the right side of his head and was convulsing, Owen writes.
Owen and another SEAL fired more rounds into his chest until he was motionless. At least three children sat stunned in the corner of the room as the commandos cleared two small rooms just off the bedrooms.
Mark Owen's book "No Easy Day" - an account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011 by the Navy SEALs who executed the mission. Source: Getty Images
Other Seal teams cleared the rest of the third level until it was declared secure. Then Owen and his comrades examined the body.
He says: "The man's face was mangled from at least one bullet wound and covered in blood. A hole in his forehead collapsed the right side of his skull. As I crouched down to take a closer look, Tom joined me. 'I think this is our boy', Tom said."
Owen writes that Tom did not want to report over the radio that it was bin Laden because he knew that a call would be quickly relayed to Washington where President Obama was listening.
The Seals wanted to be sure first.
The dead man was the correct height and looked like the composite photos the Seals had been given.
They wiped the blood from his face using a blanket from the bed and he looked more familiar but younger than expected. It transpired his beard had been dyed.
Owen says he took photos of bin Laden's full body and then his head: "Pulling his beard to the right and then the left, I shot several profile pictures."
He asked his colleague to hold bin Laden's good eye open. He reached down and peeled back the eyelid, exposing his now lifeless brown eye. I zoomed in and shot a tight photo of it.
Meanwhile other Seals were collecting computers, videos and notebooks and a team was preparing to blow up the crashed Black Hawk.
The remaining Black Hawk and a CH-47 helicopter, that had set up a forward refuelling point 15 minutes from the compound, and was carrying a quick reaction force of additional troops, were circling the compound. Time was pressing.
Owen says a comrade, Walt, took DNA samples by dipping a swab in bin Laden's blood and used another to swab his mouth.
He tried jabbing a spring-loaded syringe provided by the CIA to get a blood-marrow sample from bin Laden's thigh but the needle didn't work.
Owen says two sets of DNA samples and two sets of photographs were needed so that if one of the helicopters was shot down on its way back to Jalala-bad, one set of evidence would survive.
Meanwhile, Seals were trying to get confirmation from bin Laden's wife, who had been wounded in the ankle, that the dead man was the al-Qaida leader. She gave a series of aliases for him such as the sheik.
Owen recalls how one Seal then approached the children outside on the balcony. They were all sitting silently against the wall. Will knelt down and asked one of the girls: "Who is the man?"
The girl didn't know to lie.
"Osama bin Laden."
Will smiled. "Are you sure that is Osama bin Laden?"
"Yes," the girl said.
Back in the hallway, he grabbed one of the wives and shook her.
"Stop f------ with me now," Will said, more sternly than before. "Who is that in the bedroom?"
Owen continues: "She started to cry. More scared than anything else, she didn't have any fight left.
"Osama," she said.
"Osama what?" Will said, still holding her arm. "Osama bin Laden," she said.
With dual confirmation, the Seals called it in to Admiral McRaven in Jalalabad, who was keeping President Obama updated.
While the soldiers cleared the building of material that would provide useful intelligence, Owen watched two Seals drag bin Laden's body by his legs down the stairs.
Searching the tiny bathroom, Owen found a box of Just For Men hair dye, which he assumed was what bin Laden used on his beard.
He discovered a rifle and a pistol, neither of them loaded. Owen writes about his surprise that bin Laden hadn't prepared a defence.
He says the terror leader had no intention of fighting, though he asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes into buildings.
He says: "In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon. The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a pussy he was.
"Did he (bin Laden) believe his own message? Was he willing to fight the war he asked for? I don't think so. Otherwise, he would have at least gotten his gun and stood up for what he believed.
"There is no honour in sending people to die for something you won't even fight for yourself."
Owen's group of Seals, which had bin Laden's body, travelled on the remaining Black Hawk which, as a smaller, more manoeuvrable aircraft, had less chance of being shot down than the CH-47.
In the Black Hawk, one of the Seals had to sit on bin Laden's body which lay at Owen's feet in the centre of the cabin.
Despite having the body at his feet, Owen writes that he felt a sense of failure that the teams had left intelligence behind because they had run out of time.
Back at base in Jalalabad, the Seals loaded the body on to the back of a truck. It was to be transported to Bagram. Admiral McRaven asked to see it. Owen says he pulled the body bag from the truck.
"It flopped on the cement floor like a dead fish. Kneeling down, I unzipped the bag. Almost all of the colour had faded from his face and his skin looked ashy and gray. 'There's your boy', I said."
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