Osama bin Laden wanted much of his fortune used ‘on jihad’

The letter was among materials that were seized in the May 2, 2011, USA raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan that killed the al Qaeda chief and which were released on Tuesday by the Obama administration.

The trove of letters and manuscripts were taken from bin Laden’s compound in Abottabad, Pakistan during the operation that killed him.

Osama bin Laden is shown in this file video frame grab released by the U.S. Pentagon May 7, 2011.

A senior intelligence official said the Central Intelligence Agency did not know what became of the money, or if any of it remained at the time of bin Laden’s death.

“I hope for my brothers, sisters and maternal aunts to obey my will and to spend all the money that I have left in Sudan on jihad, for the sake of Allah”, he wrote.

Another letter, apparently not written by Bin Laden, described a Qatari diplomat visiting al Qaeda members in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and bringing gifts including a “huge” watch.

And in a separate letter, from 2008, he wrote, “If I am to be killed, pray for me a lot and give continuous charities in my name”.

In an apparent reference to armed US drones patrolling the skies, bin Laden says his negotiators should not leave their rented house in the Pakistani city of Peshawar “except on a cloudy overcast day”.

One document, a hand-written note that United States intelligence officials believe the Saudi militant composed in the late 1990s, laid out how he wanted to distribute about $29 million he had in Sudan.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the newly declassified documents Tuesday (March 1).

Bin Laden disagreed with the level of brutality, such as beheadings, that the affiliate was using and was opposed IS leaders’ bent on declaring an Islamic State — something bin Laden argued would fail because it did not have enough popular support and could not shoulder the burdens of governance.

In his call for a youth-led “great revolution of freedom”, bin Laden advises young Americans to read Thomas Paine and to follow the example of the Founding Fathers, whom he calls “men with courage and initiative”.

US intelligence officials were not immediately available to comment on whether he may have been referring to his step-father, Mohammad al-Attas. “I was told that you went to a dentist in Iran, and you were concerned about a filling she put in for you”.

Bin Laden agreed the American economy faces some “significant and risky challenges”, but was not convinced the prospect of a weakening dollar was a sign of economic collapse in the U.S.

But even in the period shortly before his death, bin Laden placed the utmost importance on portraying his fraying organization as a united enterprise-while his lieutenants privately wrestled with their growing schism from al- Qa’ida in Iraq.

Bin Laden ends his letter by demanding a full return of Israel and the Palestinian territories to Muslims, completely rejecting the two-state solution promoted by presidents Bush and Obama.