“He is well-known for living austerely but he spent all his money for jihad,” al-Zawahri said “If you enter his house you would find simple furniture .. and if we were invited to eat, he offered us what was available in his house, bread and vegetables.”
But the terror leader was “generous to his guests by slaughtering sheep for them and because of continuous visitors, he once bought a herd of sheep so that he would be always ready for them.”
Al-Zawahri said Bin Laden used to encourage the mujahideen – “holy warriors” – to live without electricity which he considered as luxury.
“Luxury is the enemy of jihad and if the mujahideen were brought up to live in asceticism, they would tolerate the burden of jihad,” al-Zawahri quoted bin Laden as saying.
Al-Zawahri said Bin Laden was also generous to his bodyguards, who were devoted to him. Once in Afghanistan, he came under shelling, but the bodyguards took Bin Laden to a wall and formed a human shield around him.
In the first video in the series, posted on jihadist Web sites in November, al-Zawahri said he wanted to show Bin Laden’s “human side.” He described a sensitive man who cried when his friends lost family members, remained close to his children despite the hard life of an international jihadist, and fondly remembered – by name – the 19 men who carried out the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.