
I Knew Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden spent the last decade of his life as a fugitive, glimpsed only in occasional video and audio messages after he vanished from Afghanistan in late 2001. Al Jazeera's Islamabad correspondent Ahmad Zaidan spent years building sources inside that world, and this film puts those contacts on camera: former Taliban commanders, Mujahideen leaders, Pakistani officials, and fellow journalists who dealt with bin Laden directly. Former ABC News reporter John Miller recalls interviewing him and describes a man who, looking him in the eye, sounded like an old uncle telling a story. Others trace the arc from Saudi construction heir to Afghan jihad fighter against the Soviets to the founder of al-Qaeda, and push back on both the caricature of pure fanatic and the myth of the untouchable holy warrior. The film closes where the manhunt did, with the May 2011 raid on a compound roughly sixty kilometers from Islamabad. What it adds is not the ending but the texture: how the people closest to bin Laden actually remember him.