Latest word on OBL fall-out is that Bin Laden's secret pad in Pakistan is to be demolished to stop it becoming a shrine to the al-Qaeda leader. The local officials are pretty convinced that it will indeed draw in the crowds, although I can't really see it myself. It might get the odd rubbernecking foreign reporter like me, but tourists to Pakistan aren't exactly thick on the ground at the moment, and the average Al Qaeda sympathiser in Pakistan is unlikely to want to draw himself to the attention of the ISI by turning up and laying a wreath. I'm sure the ISI will be watching too, if my own experience of working in Pakistan is anything to go by. I was apprehended by one of their agents on a trip to Pakistan in 2008 - not during an exclusive interview with Mullah Omar, I regret to say, but during the rather more innocent business of shadowing some British embassy officials who were trying to rescue a woman from a forced marriage . As I recall, at the time all we'd done was pull over in a village to make a few phone calls en route to where we were going; the mere sight of a few passing strangers, though, was enough to make the local ISI man materialise and ask the diplomats what they were up to. All seeing, indeed...
Besides which, the track record of recent bogeymen in the "War on Terror" for becoming bigger in death than they were in life isn't that impressive. Saddam Hussein, for example, has an elegantly turned-out mausoleum near his home town of Tikrit, where he is buried alongside a fairly full hand of the old "Deck of 55" most wanted, including his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti, who was the Five of Clubs, Taha Yasi Ramadan, the Iraqi vice-president who was the Ten of Diamonds, and Saddam's psychotic sons Uday and Qusay. Yet visitor numbers are seldom more than a trickle, as the Telegraph discovered when we sent our old Iraqi stringer, Akeel, to pay a visit on the anniversary of Saddam's death. Rather touchingly, though, some folks round there did still call him "The President", and apparently claimed that his face now appeared as that of the Old Man in the Moon. No such affection for Abu Musab al Zarqawi, however, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose body was apparently buried at a secret location in the Iraqi desert after the US killed him with a rocket strike. I am unaware of any kind of shrine to him anywhere, including in his home town of Zarqa in Jordan, nor has his name particularly lived on in death. Bin Laden, I guess, will be different, although it just how much continues to inspire from beyond the grave, only time will tell...
Besides which, the track record of recent bogeymen in the "War on Terror" for becoming bigger in death than they were in life isn't that impressive. Saddam Hussein, for example, has an elegantly turned-out mausoleum near his home town of Tikrit, where he is buried alongside a fairly full hand of the old "Deck of 55" most wanted, including his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti, who was the Five of Clubs, Taha Yasi Ramadan, the Iraqi vice-president who was the Ten of Diamonds, and Saddam's psychotic sons Uday and Qusay. Yet visitor numbers are seldom more than a trickle, as the Telegraph discovered when we sent our old Iraqi stringer, Akeel, to pay a visit on the anniversary of Saddam's death. Rather touchingly, though, some folks round there did still call him "The President", and apparently claimed that his face now appeared as that of the Old Man in the Moon. No such affection for Abu Musab al Zarqawi, however, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose body was apparently buried at a secret location in the Iraqi desert after the US killed him with a rocket strike. I am unaware of any kind of shrine to him anywhere, including in his home town of Zarqa in Jordan, nor has his name particularly lived on in death. Bin Laden, I guess, will be different, although it just how much continues to inspire from beyond the grave, only time will tell...
