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Al-Qaida leader spent final weeks trying to strengthen links with Afghan and Pakistani insurgent groups in bid to ‘stay relevant’ Osama bin Laden spent much of his last weeks alive planning a new attempt to bring the disparate factions among insurgents and militants fighting in Pakistan and Afghanistan together under the umbrella of al-Qaida. The terrorist leader, who had made repeated efforts to unify militant groups, was even considering risking leaving his safe house in Abbottabad, the northern Pakistani garrison town, to try to build a fresh alliance through face-to-face meetings, sources in Pakistan, Afghanistan and America have told the Guardian. Western intelligence services and Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations al-Qaida and Taliban sanctions committee, told the Guardian the reports that Bin Laden was planning a “grand coalition” were credible. “Bin Laden found it pretty difficult to be marginalised and was making a huge effort to stay relevant. There was some indication that he was looking at re-energising links with [other local militant groups] to give himself a central role,” Barrett said. Mediating alliances and focusing the efforts of disparate groups has been a favoured strategy of Bin Laden since the late 1980s. Many experts say that, with the growing sophistication of local groups such as the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, the role of international militants in the region has diminished. “In recent years, al-Qaida has become increasingly marginal in the region, particularly in Afghanistan,” said Thomas Ruttig, a Kabul-based analyst. “The Taliban have people who have been fighting for 30 years and who have little to learn from outsiders.” Western intelligence officials in Kabul told the Guardian they believe there are probably no more than 100 extremists affiliated with al-Qaida fighting in Afghanistan and that relations with the other insurgent groups there and in Pakistan are “variable and dynamic”. “Most of the guys fighting in this region have a very local focus. That leads to friction with the internationals,” one said last week. Bin Laden had known key insurgent figures such as the cleric Jalaluddin Haqqani or the Islamist former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, for decades. American investigators hope the trove of data seized in the raid on the Abbottabad compound this month, in which Bin Laden and his 22-year-old son, Khaled, were killed, will cast light on the relations of al-Qaida and other militant groups in the region and beyond. Special forces seized dozens of computers, 10 hard drives and more than 100 storage devices, such as disks, DVDs and flash drives, from the safe house. The data includes emails sent as recently as last month by a courier on behalf of the al-Qaida leader. The sheer size of the haul – described by one official recently as a mother lode of intelligence – has slowed the flow of information, however. “My understanding is that we are talking about something the size of a small college arts faculty library,” said Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA analyst and expert in south Asian Islamist militancy. “There is a huge amount that needs processing.” Almost all the data is in Arabic, and needs to be translated into English. A further problem, US officials have said, is that it is unclear whether many of the messages, instructions and notes written by Bin Laden were ever sent or ever reached their intended destination. “They could have been just jottings. He probably got bored, like anyone else,” Riedel said. Intelligence gathering American former intelligence officials told the Guardian the immediate priority of the dedicated teams set up to work through the data would be to search for any operational information that could avert terrorist plots, rather than to focus on more strategic issues. So far, the investigators have found evidence confirming only that certain broad types of target – such as trains and planes – were still of interest to Bin Laden. According to officials and an American law enforcement bulletin two weeks ago, Bin Laden was also interested in hijacking and blowing up oil and gas tankers. Among the material seized in the compound, where Bin Laden may have been based for at least five years, are his notes on how many Americans he believed an attack needed to kill to force a change in Washington’s Middle East policies and on who were the best senior political officials to target in the US. There are also indications that Bin Laden was contemplating trying to negotiate some kind of pact with the Pakistani government. Investigators are also looking for details of the financing of al-Qaida. Much of the money for the terror group came from personal contacts of Bin Laden’s and what is believed to be a relatively small number of donors in the Middle East. One official with knowledge of the operation said last week it was hoped that the cache would identify these. Of particular interest would be any communications with al-Qaida’s Sheikh Sa’id al-Masri, believed to be the group’s chief financial officer until he was killed last year, the official said. The key thing the investigators will be seeking to assess is the nature of Bin Laden’s role in recent years within the al-Qaida organisation. Since his death, US officials have described the 54-year-old Saudi-born militant leader as “central” to the group and “a micro-manager” linked to “every plot” in America and Europe. However, some doubt Bin Laden could have been closely involved in day-to-day management, given that the compound where he lived was without internet access or telephones. Communicating may have involved a laborious process of writing messages offline, saving them to a USB key and then having a courier take them to a distant internet cafe or other terminal to be sent. The two men who lived with Bin Laden, his three wives and up to 15 children and grandchildren put batteries in their mobile phones only when they were at least 60 miles from Abbottabad, for security reasons, according to one report. This will have limited Bin Laden’s ability to run the group, officials told the Guardian. The data retrieved has already shown that Bin Laden was in touch with a small number of senior al-Qaida figures, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian veteran militant who is now expected to succeed as the head of the group. In a statement released in February this year, Zawahiri told followers to avoid “civilian casualties” in their attacks, saying he had been asked to issue the directive by Bin Laden himself. According to news reports, Bin Laden’s notebooks show his displeasure at a suggestion in the Islamist extremist internet magazine Inspire, published from the Yemen by an al-Qaida affiliate, that a farm tractor be converted into a “killing machine” by attaching blades to its wheels. This was not “representative of al-Qaida”, he complained. There is also evidence that Bin Laden had the final say in leadership appointments, pointing out the defects of potential candidates to close senior associates such as Zawahiri. But some officials seeking to divine the future direction of Islamist militancy point to the conclusions of Moroccan investigations into the bombing of a Marrakech cafe days before the al-Qaida leader died. A government statement said: “The individuals were absorbed by jihadist ideology, and had allegiance to al-Qaida and had already made several attempts to join some of the hotbeds of tension, especially Chechnya and Iraq, before deciding to carry out terror in the homeland.” There was no evidence of a direct connection with the al-Qaida leadership, the investigators said. “The suspects learned on the internet how to make the two remote-detonated explosive devices,” the statement said. Shortly after the death of Bin Laden, al-Qaida’s online al-Fajr Media Centre issued a statement telling every “mujahid Muslim, if there is an opportunity, do not waste it”. “Do not consult anyone about killing Americans or destroying their economy,” the statement continued. “We also incite you to carry out acts of individual terrorism with significant results, which only require basic preparation.” Osama bin Laden al-Qaida Afghanistan Pakistan Global terrorism Jason Burke guardian.co.uk