It was launched by the United States and its allies with the objective to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of the militant organization al-Qaeda.

Several cave areas were used in much earlier periods, as the difficult terrain formed a natural defensive position and had been used by tribal warriors fighting foreign invaders.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom to dismantle the Taliban regime that had sheltered Osama bin Laden.

Through a combination of air strikes and ground operations, the U.S. and its allies quickly gained the upper hand, seizing control of key Taliban strongholds and toppling the regime's grip on power.

Vice President Dick Cheney revealed in a November 29, 2001 television interview that bin Laden was believed to be in the general area of Tora Bora, surrounded by a sizable force of loyal fighters.

To them, Al-Qaeda was a group of fellow Muslims, and with the battle taking place during Ramadan, the fighters would retire every evening to break their fast and spend time with their families off the mountain.

However, Delta Force couldn't act on this opportunity due to being engaged in a fierce firefight with other Al-Qaeda fighters and their Afghan allies leaving to break their fast and observe Ramadan.

[24] On December 12, Al-Qaeda forces, facing defeat, negotiated a truce with a local Afghan militia commander to give them time to surrender their weapons.

[25] ...a severe and fierce bombardment began...not one second passed without warplanes hovering over our heads...[America] exhausted all efforts to blow up and annihilate this tiny spot – wiping it out altogether...Despite all this, we blocked their daily attacks, sending them back defeated, bearing their dead and wounded.

[28] On December 13, the fighting flared again, possibly initiated by a rear guard buying time for the main force's escape through the White Mountains into the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Tribal forces backed by U.S. special operations troops and air support pressed ahead against fortified al-Qaeda positions in caves and bunkers scattered throughout the mountainous region.

[29] However, progress was painfully slow due to the Afghans retreating every night to break their fast, leaving only a small number of U.S. special forces to fend for themselves and allowing Al-Qaeda to regain control of all the terrain that had been gained during the day.

[34] Some of the most brutal fighting of the battle took place during these last couple of days as the most dedicated Al-Qaeda fighters remained in the caves to cover the retreat of their leadership.

[38] CIA intelligence had indicated that bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership were trapped in the caves early in the battle, and Berntsen had wanted to send less than 1,000 American Army Rangers to eliminate them, which he believed would have ended the War on Terror very quickly.

[39] Former CIA agent Gary Schroen has agreed with Berntsen's opinion in a 2005 interview, in which he cited the opportunity to take out bin Laden and the senior Al-Qaeda leadership early on in the conflict by deploying the Rangers.

[40] Historian Carter Malkasian, a former adviser to American military commanders in Afghanistan, has argued that bin Laden always had a good chance of escaping the caves and that the Rangers would not have been able to completely seal off the mountain range.

[42] However, he later backpedaled on this comment, writing in an October 2004 opinion article in The New York Times: We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001.

[4] According to Lieutenant General Michael Delong, Franks's deputy at CENTCOM at the time, officials in Washington were well aware of bin Laden's presence at Tora Bora during the battle.

John Kerry, the Democratic contender, criticized the Bush administration, accusing them of failing to capture bin Laden despite having him cornered in the caves and with the world's most powerful military at their disposal.

They concluded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks had not committed enough troops during the battle to secure the area around Tora Bora.

Fury theorized that, because the battle took place over the holy religious month of Ramadan, the Afghan forces would leave the battlefield in the evenings to break fast, giving al-Qaeda a chance to regroup, reposition, or escape.

Fury's team proposed an operation to attack bin Laden's suspected position from the rear, over the 14,000 foot-high mountain separating Tora Bora from Pakistan.

Fury and his team approached the suspected position from the front and were within 2,000 meters, but withdrew because of uncertainty over the number of al-Qaeda fighters and a lack of support from allied Afghan troops.

Fury thought that bin Laden was injured during the bombing of the cave, but was hidden, given medical care, and assisted out of the area into Pakistan by allied local Afghans.

[48] In September 2007, Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, a Yemeni medical doctor held as an enemy combatant by the United States, was reported to have described the conditions during the battle:[49] "Most of all the total guns in the Tora Bora area was 16 Kalashnikovs and there are 200 people.

In 2009, a U.S. Senate report concluded that the failure to capture bin Laden "[laid] the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.

On May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, who was living in a compound in the city of Abbottabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan.

During an interview with the New York Times, Masood Farivar, a former Mujahideen fighter who had fought in Tora Bora during the war with the Soviets, explained the significance of the caves: "They're rugged, formidable and isolated, If you know them, you can come and go with ease.

[4] Tora Bora has been variously described by the Western media as an impregnable cave fortress housing 2000 men complete with a hospital, a hydroelectric power plant, offices, a hotel, arms and ammunition stores, roads large enough to drive a tank into, and elaborate tunnel and ventilation systems.

Scattered on the floor were a few green metal boxes of ammunition with Russian writing on them, and a canister about the size of an unexploded cluster bomb but the wrong color — red instead of yellow.