Thursday 29 April 2021
Paris - It was THE phone call with THE news I d been waiting for for years. It was May 2, 2011 in Islamabad, and very early in the morning. I was in bed and half asleep. On the end of the line was Jennie Matthew, news editor in the bureau, as terse as usual: Washington is about to announce they ve killed bin Laden in Pakistan.
This was it. I d been waiting for this day for six years, since reporting from Afghanistan in 2005. The question of what happened to Osama bin Laden, following his 2001 escape under US bombardment, coloured every NATO briefing. Many believed he was hiding across the border, in Pakistan s mountainous and semi-autonomous tribal belt, where the Americans didn t send ground troops, but instead waged their war from the sky, by drones.