In the early hours of May 2 local time, members of SEAL Team Six flew into Abbottabad, Pakistan, aboard stealth helicopters and stormed a walled compound where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been hiding for years. The 40-minute raid killed bin Laden and several others; President Barack Obama announced the operation to the world that night, closing a chapter that began with the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
For almost a decade, bin Laden had eluded American intelligence, believed by many to be hiding in the mountainous tribal regions along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Instead, he had been living in a large, walled compound in Abbottabad, a garrison town just a couple of miles from Pakistan's premier military academy, hidden in plain sight behind twelve-foot walls topped with barbed wire.
CIA analysts tracked him there by following a trusted courier over years of painstaking work, finally identifying the compound in 2010. President Obama authorized a helicopter raid rather than an airstrike, wanting proof of death. Two modified Black Hawk helicopters carrying roughly two dozen SEALs flew in low from Afghanistan; one crashed on landing but the team pressed on, breaching walls and reaching bin Laden on the compound's third floor, where they shot him in the chest and head.
The SEALs recovered his body, along with a trove of computers and documents, and were back in the air within forty minutes. Obama's late-night television address, delivered as crowds spontaneously gathered outside the White House chanting 'U.S.A.,' brought a strange, cathartic close to a decade defined by the September 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan, and the long, patient hunt for the man behind them.
Key people: Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama