In the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan on the night of December 9, 2001, “al-Qaeda member Abu Jaafar al-Kuwaiti and others ‘were awakened to the sound of massive and terrorizing explosions very near to us.’ The following day, Abu Jaafar ‘received the horrifying news’ that the ‘trench of Sheikh Osama [bin Laden] had been destroyed.’ But bin Laden was not dead. An al-Qaeda website offered the following description of what had happened: bin Laden had dreamed about a scorpion descending into one of the trenches that his men had dug, so he evacuated his trench, moving two hundred meters away.”
– Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 76