When Osama bin Laden moved to his hidden-away compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2005, “he wore a cowboy hat to avoid detection from above,” according to a newly disclosed report by an independent Pakistani commission. The report continues:

He was concerned about the poplar trees on the perimeter of the Compound as they might provide cover for observers. He had thought of buying them to cut them down. Whenever OBL felt unwell … he treated himself with traditional Arab medicine (Tibb-i-Nabawi) and whenever he felt sluggish he would take some chocolate with an apple…. Khalid, OBL’s son, looked after the furnishings inside the house and the internal plumbing…. They lived extremely frugally. The family of OBL did not mix with the families of Abrar and Ibrahim [the Pathan brothers, who were bin Laden’s couriers and protectors]. The children did not play together. There was in fact a wall separating them. The children of the OBL family led extremely regimented and secluded lives. OBL personally saw to the religious education of his grandchildren and supervised their play time, which included cultivating vegetable plots with simple prizes for best performances.

This account of the banality of the world’s once most-wanted man comes from the testimony of two former teen-age brides, who lived in the Abbottabad compound throughout the half-dozen years of bin Laden’s stay. One of them, Maryam, had married Ibrahim al-Saeed in 2001, when she was fourteen. The other, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, was also a teen-ager when she travelled from Yemen to Afghanistan to marry Osama bin Laden, in 2000.

Maryam and Amal became friends after they met in Karachi, early in 2002. Maryam was fifteen and fresh from her wedding; Amal had found her way out of Afghanistan just before the September 11th attacks, and some of her husband’s friends were protecting her in Karachi, she explained, while she sorted out a passport problem. While various groups of robed men came and went and met without their wives present, Amal taught Maryam, a Pashto and Urdu speaker, some Arabic. Eventually, Amal’s husband appeared. He was a tall, clean-shaven Arab. At first, that was all Maryam knew about him.

Later in 2002, the two women moved, together with their families, to Swat, a former resort in the mountains west of Islamabad. There they lived in a “beautiful house with a river flowing behind it.” It took Maryam some time to realize that her husband, Ibrahim, who could be a little secretive, was in fact an Al Qaeda operative, and that the clean-shaven Arab married to Amal was bin Laden. The clues Maryam had about whether the men in her life were outlaws or had ins with the Pakistani authorities were ambiguous. According to her, when the families moved to Swat, a man in a police uniform drove with them from Peshawar. Another time, driving to the local market with bin Laden in the car, they were pulled over by a cop for speeding. Ibrahim quickly extracted them from any difficulty.

Their only visitors in Swat were a man and his large family. Maryam later identified this man as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, who is now imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. When K.S.M. was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March of 2003, the young wives hurriedly left Swat with their husbands and families—no doubt because the men feared that K.S.M. would rat them out.

They moved to a two-story house in the city of Haripur, where they stayed for two years, and then to Abbottabad, to the compound built especially for them by Ibrahim and his brother, Abrar. Once, Maryam asked her husband, even though he didn’t like to talk about the subject, why he was taking the risk of protecting bin Laden. Ibrahim said that he would soon hand off the job to a successor and that he would receive money and land, maybe in Saudi Arabia, as his reward. He was dead before he could collect.

The wives’ narrative is a highlight of the three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-page report of the Abbottabad Commission, impanelled by Pakistan’s parliament in 2011, after the May 1st Navy SEAL raid that killed bin Laden—though much else in it is fascinating. The report was published this week by Al Jazeera. By recording transparent, careful accounts of the four wives who survived—Maryam, Amal, and two older Saudi wives of bin Laden who lived more briefly in Abbottabad—the commission has delivered to the historical record illuminating testimony that had previously leaked out only through anonymous intelligence briefings, some of them plainly designed to spin the facts.

Bin Laden’s killing, understandably, galvanized Americans, but the raid’s meanings in Pakistan have been remarked upon less often. The attack was a sensation there, too, but hardly in the spirit of hubristic triumph and relief that characterized American responses. For Pakistanis, the raid was a humiliation, a broadcast-round-the-world exposure of the country’s military weakness, the corrosive distrust between Washington and Islamabad, and the amateurism or malfeasance—or both—of Pakistan’s powerful Army and intelligence forces.

The Abbottabad Commission is a landmark of the country’s troubled proto-democracy. Its report had been suppressed, presumably at the insistence of Pakistan’s military. The newly elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may seek to benefit from its publication, as the report criticizes both the Army and, at least by implication, the civilian government led by the Pakistan People’s Party, which Sharif opposed.