The Documentary Podcast: Archive 2015

In early 2002, following the fall of the Talban, Osama Bin Laden's abandoned compound in the Afghan city of Kandahar was ransacked. Among the finds was a collection of more than 1500 audio cassettes featuring sermons, speeches, songs and candid recordings of Arab-Afghan fighters, recorded between the 1960s up until the 9/11 attacks.The collection served as an audio library for those who gathered under Bin Laden's roof between 1997 and 2001 – a key era in Al Qaeda's development and growth. BBC Security correspondent Gordon Corera speaks to Prof Flagg Miller from the University of California-Davis, who has spent more than a decade translating and analysing the tapes.Through pain-staking detective work Prof Miller has sought to understand what the tapes say about the evolution of Bin Laden, presenting his findings in the book 'The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal about Al-Qaeda'. The collection features over 200 speakers, with around 20 tapes featuring Bin Laden himself – among them some rarely