Ground Report

The man is called Sohaib Athar. The city is Abbottabad, about 50 kilometres from Islamabad, Pakistan. The helicopter belongs to the US Army. The heavy fighting lasted about five minutes. And what happened, the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Sohaib^¹ is a 33 year-old IT Consultant with a Master in Computer Science and a MBA in Marketing. He was born in Lahore and currently lives in Abbottabad. He is the man who tweeted the minutes that preceded Osama Bin Laden’s death to the world.

It was about one o’clock in the morning (local time), when Sohaib wrote on his Twitter account that a helicopter was hovering above Abbottabad.

Two hours later, and after exchanging a lot of tweets with some of his “followers” about rumours that a military attack was taking place in the neighbourhood, that there were not one but two helicopters, that maybe two helicopters had crashed, Sohaib was the first to, actually, acknowledge that the reason for the military presence was that Osama Bin Laden had been found in a compound near a Pakistanis army barrack (Google Maps) and that he had been killed.

A few minutes later, Barack Obama was appearing on TV, announcing the news that the world already knew!

This is yet another example of the practical use of social networks and their remarkable power to relay information faster than official media or authorities do. (Obama was a bit late to react on this one!) The Arab Revolutions, which have been taking place since the beginning of the year, had already showed the power of Facebook. Now, Twitter.

On his Twitter account, Sohaib said “I apologize for reporting the operation ‘unwittingly/unknowingly’ – had I known about it, I would have tweeted about it ‘wittingly’ I swear.”

Today, two questions remain, however, unanswered. Could Sohaib’s tweets have derailed the military operation, thus preventing the arrest, or the killing, of the most wanted man on earth? Quite intriguing is the fact that neither Osama Bin Laden nor his extremist followers were actually aware of Sohaib’s tweets which could have saved his life! How was that made possible when we know how technology aware Al Qaeda and the Talibans are?

We may never know. However, in the future, tyrants, dictators and other villains will certainly not make the same mistake and will be monitoring the social networks to know whether locals are telling the world something that THEY should know about!

The following video was posted by Sohaib on YouTube today, it shows from a distance the compound where Osama Bin Laden was hiding and was finally killed yesterday this morning.