Washington, April 26: Al-Qaida supremo Osama bin Laden and his deputy spent a frantic three months traveling non-stop across Afghanistan after 9/11, according to secret US military files released by WikiLeaks. The documents, part of intelligence assessments of Guantanamo detainees, showed that bin Laden told fighters just four days after the September 11, 2001 attacks to take up arms in Afghanistan against the “infidel invaders,” according to the Washington Post.
The Post was among a group of US and European news outlets provided early access to the classified military files obtained by whistleblower website WikiLeaks. In one sign of how desperate bin Laden had grown after narrowly escaping from the Tora Bora cave complex of eastern Afghanistan in mid-December 2001, the al-Qaida leader was so strapped for cash that he borrowed $7,000 from a protector, reimbursing him within a year, the documents showed.
At some point before their escape from Tora Bora, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri were said to have hosted a steady stream of visitors and ordered their followers to continue attacking Western targets from a makeshift headquarters at a guesthouse in or around Kabul. Bin Laden had his fighters leave training camps and told some of his wives and children to flee to Pakistan.
-Agencies