U.S. Still Waits for Access to Bin Laden Widows
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The dispute over access for American officials to
Osama bin Laden's three widows, who were taken into Pakistani custody after the raid that killed the leader of Al Qaeda, has become the latest test in the adversarial relationship between the C.I.A. and its Pakistani counterpart, Inter-Services Intelligence.
Pakistan has not yet allowed American investigators access to the widows, nor shared their own
interrogation report, a Pakistani security official said Tuesday. The official was speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with the rules of his organization.
The Obama administration demanded access to the women, who appear to have been in hiding with Bin Laden for years, and an American official said that Pakistan had promised to comply.
Yet the women may not prove to be the mine of information that some suppose because they led such cloistered lives, officials and analysts say. In line with the strict code of Islam followed by Bin Laden, they never met men outside their immediate family and were not informed by Bin Laden of any of his business or operational dealings.
The widows, along with the Pakistani wife of Bin Laden's trusted courier, and a number of children detained at the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad remain in the hands of the Pakistani security forces, who have controlled the flow of information about them.
There are conflicting reports as to how many there are and who they are. Initial reports indicated that 12 women and children were in the compound; it now appears that there were as many as 17.
Some information given by intelligence officials appears intended to cast doubt on the account of the raid as presented by American officials; none has been independently verified.
Pakistani security officials, asking to remain anonymous, say that along with the widows — two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen — there were 13 children, 8 of them related to Bin Laden.
The fourth woman, a Pakistani who was wounded in the raid, indicated to officials who first arrived at the compound that her husband had been killed, said Asad Munir, a retired brigadier and former intelligence service official. Her husband appears to have been Arshad Khan, Bin Laden's trusted courier, who owned the compound and protected him for more than five years.
Bin Laden's widows have been identified as Um Hamza, or Mother of Hamza, whose real name is Khairiah Sabar, and is from Jidda in Saudi Arabia; Um Khalid, or Mother of Khalid, whose name is Siham, and is from Medina in Saudi Arabia; and the youngest, a Yemeni, Amal al-Saddah, 29. Her passport names her as Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah.
Bin Laden's daughter with Ms. Saddah, Safia, who is 12 or 13 years old, is also reported to have been present and even to have witnessed the shooting of her father. Officials have also said that there is a 5-year-old son of Bin Laden and that four of the children are his grandchildren by a daughter killed in an airstrike in Pakistan's tribal areas.
One of his sons was killed in the raid, but reports have named him variously as Hamza or Khalid, both of whom were born in the same year from different wives and would be 22 years old.
Bin Laden has been married five times, according to a book, "Growing Up bin Laden," written by his fourth son, Omar bin Laden, in collaboration with the American author Jean Sasson and his mother, Najwa bin Laden, Bin Laden's first wife and cousin.
In answers to e-mailed questions forwarded by Ms. Sasson, Omar bin Laden said his father kept his wives, and often his children, sequestered in the house.
His mother, Najwa, would sneak into the garden when Osama bin Laden was away, warning the children not to tell their father she had dared step outside the house. The children, too, rarely were permitted to go outside. Omar bin Laden said his saddest memories were of being locked in their home in Jidda and staring out at all the other kids who were allowed to play.
Najwa and Omar had long wondered whether Osama's two Saudi wives were with him in hiding, and only from reports of the American assault undertaken by a Navy Seals team did they learn that they were. Omar said he was sad that his half-brother Khalid was killed in the raid, though he said he had little in common with Khalid and had seen him rarely.
The book Omar and his mother wrote details the Bin Laden family's life in Sudan and Afghanistan until 2001. It describes how Bin Laden's first wife left him shortly before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and how she now lives in her native Syria, and how his second wife, a well-educated Saudi woman, divorced him in the 1990s when he was living in Sudan.
The book describes the women living in very strict purdah, or separation from men, never leaving their homes except fully veiled and accompanied by their husband or close male relatives, and kept out of his business affairs. Bin Laden also made all the decisions in the household including how apartments were decorated, and anything to do with the education, travel and betrothal of the children.
When the family moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, none of the wives, or their grown-up sons, were told where they were going until their chartered plane landed. "From what we women were told, not even the men knew if we were returning to Saudi Arabia, or perhaps moving to Yemen or Pakistan," Najwa bin Laden wrote.
Yet Bin Laden's widows could at least fill in the gaps for investigators as to where they have been living since 2001 and how they evaded detection. His youngest wife, al-Saddah reportedly returned to Yemen, where she gave an interview to a Saudi woman's magazine, al-Majalla in 2002, and somehow rejoined Bin Laden in Pakistan.
If true, it raises questions about how she re-entered Pakistan and rejoined her husband undetected.
She has told Pakistani officials that before moving to the compound in Abbottabad toward the end of 2005, they lived in a village near the town of Haripur, some 40 miles to the south, for two and a half years.
American officials have emphasized that Pakistani cooperation on access to the women would help ease the tense relations between the C.I.A. and the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. Pakistani journalists who received a briefing from the director general of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha , this week said he expressed anger at being kept out of the loop with the operation.
The anger and hurt within the Pakistani military and intelligence service over America's action against Bin Laden will leave cooperation bumpy for some time, foreign diplomats and analysts predicted.
The American ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, was placatory in comments he made at a dinner in the business city of Karachi on Monday. Mr. Munter called on the Pakistani government to engage in a conversation about the way forward. "We have common goals, and we need to work closely to articulate these common goals clearly," he said in comments reported by the government news agency, The Associated Press of Pakistan.
"The road ahead will be based on the choices made by Pakistan," he added. "Those choices involved the answers to questions that are raised by Pakistanis and Americans alike."
