Former Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden left a personal fortune of around $29 million “for jihad”, his will shows.
The will is among a trove of documents released to the media on Tuesday and quoted by the BBC. The will was seized in the 2011 American assault on Bin Laden’s hideout in Abbotabad, Pakistan.
Bin Laden urged his family to “obey my will” and to spend his inheritance on “jihad, for the sake of Allah”, according to the BBC.
He referred to the money as being in Sudan, but it is not clear whether it was cash or assets. Bin Laden lived in Sudan for five years in the 1990s as a guest of the Sudanese government.
It is not known whether any of the money made its way to his heirs.
According to the British network, other letters attributed to Bin Laden and released on Tuesday show that he:
- Urged Americans to fight “catastrophic” climate change to “save humanity”
- Feared that a dentist had planted a tracking device in his wife’s tooth
- Planned a major media campaign to mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks
He also gave his assessment of the progress of the West’s “war on terror” and the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan.
“They thought that the war would be easy and that they would accomplish their objectives in a few days or a few weeks,” he wrote.
“We need to be patient a bit longer. With patience, there is victory!”
Since Bin Laden’s death, the group has since been led by his former second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Zawahiri occasionally makes his presence known in the form of audio recordings in which he encourages jihadist attacks against the West.
In his most recent recording, released last November, Zawahiri welcomed the terrorist attacks in Israel as “a new epic of jihad,” in which people “defend Palestine and Al-Aqsa with knives, cars, stones, and everything they own.”