The night-walkers of Uganda

Dead or alive, Bin Laden haunts US
Level 1
Elementary
Key words
1
Find the information
2
Look in the text and find this information as quickly as possible.
1. How old is Osama bin Laden?
2. Where is the Hindu Kush?
3. How much is the reward for finding bin Laden?
4. When did NATO attack Afghanistan?
5. How many Afghans say they have a negative opinion of bin Laden?
6. How many audio and videotapes did bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri make in 2006?
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Dead or alive, on his 50th birthday 
ghost of the Hindu Kush haunts US
CIA think they know where Osama bin Laden 
is. So do local tribesmen - hiding in the White 
House.
Declan Walsh in Islamabad
March 10, 2007
It is Osama bin Laden’s 50th birthday today. 
He is probably somewhere in the mountains 
between Pakistan and Afghanistan. You can 
almost imagine the scene: a birthday cake with 
50 candles and bin Laden sitting in his cave with 
his smiling comrades around him. The truth is 
that it probably won’t be much of a party. Bin 
Laden is from the Wahhabi branch of Islam which 
believes that birthday parties are an unwelcome 
western import. But bin Laden is probably 
enjoying a quiet smile on his birthday. 
Six years after 9/11, bin Laden is still free. The 
world’s largest manhunt and a possible reward 
of $25 million have not managed to find him. He 
is like the ghost of the Hindu Kush, the remote 
mountain range in the north of Afghanistan. 
Some reports say he is dead; others say he is 
alive. The Pakistani army thought it had found 
him in a village in North Waziristan in 2003. A 
year later, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo said 
he was in a Muslim area of western China. One 
US senator said that bin Laden had died in the 
huge earthquake in Pakistan last year. 
At about the same time a team of American 
agents arrived in Chitral, a quiet mountain area 
in the north of Pakistan, where they believed bin 
Laden was hiding. Soon afterwards, angry clerics 
told local people who they were and they had to 
leave. Some reports also say bin Laden is ill and 
has kidney problems. Last September, a French 
newspaper reported he had died of typhoid. 
America’s spies believe OBL, as they call him, 
is hiding in Pakistan’s tribal region. “As far as 
we know the senior leadership of al-Qaida, 
number one and two, are there,” the Director of 
National Intelligence said last week. ABC News 
reported last Tuesday that the CIA is sending 
new teams to catch him. But if the Americans 
think he is in the border areas, the tribesmen 
who live there think the opposite. Over the 
border in Afghanistan, many people believe 
that the Americans have already caught Bin 
Laden. Some people even think he is in the 
White House. “Many, many people believe such 
stories,” said Sarah Chayes, a writer who lives 
in Afghanistan. If America really has such strong 
soldiers and powerful satellites, people believe 
they must have captured bin Laden. 
Most Afghans do not support bin Laden. They 
believe it was because of him that NATO 
attacked their country in 2001. In a recent 
opinion poll, nine out of 10 people said they had 
a negative opinion of bin Laden. But in other 
Muslim countries in the world, many people 
respect him. “Osama is a hero,” said Kamran Ali, 
a 23-year-old from Islamabad. “Americans have 
done many bad things against Muslims. Osama 
fights back.” Like many other Pakistanis, Ali 
does not believe that bin Laden was responsible 
for the World Trade Centre attacks. “There’s no 
proof of that,” he said. 
“All over the Muslim world people feel the same 
way,” said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the al-
Quds al-Arabi newspaper. But, he said, if people 
support bin Laden it does not mean that they 
vote for terrorism. “When people in Palestine 
voted for Hamas it was a vote against corruption. 
This is the same. People hate American foreign 
policy and corrupt Arab dictatorships so they 
sympathize with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. 
It doesn’t mean they support al-Qaida’s actions 
or September 11,” he said. 
Is bin Laden dead? Mullah Dadullah, a Taliban 
commander, says he has contacted him. “We 
exchange messages to share plans,” he said in 
one of two recent interviews. “It’s very hard for 
anyone to see Bin Laden now but we know he’s 
still alive.” Bin Laden is becoming bolder. With his 
deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri he made more than 20 
audio and videotapes in 2006.