ABBOTTABAD, PAKISTAN—It took less than an hour for the U.S. Special Forces to complete their mission and kill Osama bin Laden.

It will take far longer to determine the fate of his children.

The children — American soldiers left them at the compound with their hands bound behind their backs after taking away bin Laden’s body and dozens of computers and hard drives — are aged 4 to 12 and are being kept in a safe house near Islamabad in the military city Rawalpindi, a source told the Star.

Details on their specific ages and gender have not been released, although reports indicate bin Laden’s 12-year-old daughter Safia witnessed her father’s death.

It’s possible some of the children are bin Laden’s nephews and nieces.

While Pakistan’s foreign ministry has said it wants to repatriate the children to their country of origin, that may prove difficult. Long before his death, Saudi Arabia revoked the citizenship of the 54-year-old bin Laden in 1994.

It’s unclear where his children were born but a person familiar with the matter told the Star that Pakistan’s foreign ministry on Tuesday asked Saudi officials to take custody of the bin Laden children. The request was refused, the source said.

Because of bin Laden’s revoked citizenship status, his children may now be stateless, said a United Nations official based in Pakistan.

At least one of bin Laden’s wives may be a citizen of Yemen. An Urdu language paper published Wednesday a grainy photo of a Yemeni passport that it reported belonged to one of his widows.

Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, who was shot in the leg during the raid, is being treated at the military hospital in Rawalpindi, according to reports on the Arabic news network Al-Arabiya.

It’s thought to be the same hospital that bin Laden was treated on Sept. 10, 2001 — hours before the attack on the World Trade Center.

The 27-year-old, who was bin Laden’s fifth wife, is at the centre of a diplomatic custody battle after U.S. attempts to interrogate her appeared to be rejected by Pakistan.

A Yemeni diplomat in Pakistan declined to comment when reached by the Star. It’s unclear whether Yemen would agree to take the bin Laden children.

It’s similarly uncertain how many of the children, if any, were born in Pakistan. U.S. officials say they believe bin Laden has been living in Abbottabad since at least last August.

Several diplomats said they are worried how the government will deal with the children.

With a flagging economy and the desire to keep pace with India’s military spending, Pakistan has not made its education and child protection systems a priority.

Filling the void of social services has been a series of madrassas, or religious schools, that pepper Pakistan’s landscape. Some of the madrassas are run by extremists, government officials concede.

Maulana Abdul Aziz, head of the controversial Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad, is offering to adopt bin Laden’s children.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“We accept that bin Laden is dead and consider him a martyr,” Aziz told the Star. “We know many people who would want to care for his children, and we would be willing to look after them, too.”

Lal Masjid is one of Pakistan’s most radical mosques, a staging ground four years ago for a showdown between government forces and arch-conservative extremists.

In July 2007, soldiers raided the mosque after a series of provocations by its members. Officially, 76 militants and 11 soldiers were killed. Aziz was captured when he tried to escape. He fled the mosque wearing a burqa, the head-to-toe veil worn by female students at his conservative seminary.

Walking into Lal Masjid, 22-year-old Fahim Khan said that while he doesn’t believe bin Laden is dead, he hopes the children are assimilated in madrassas like Jamia Afridi, a school funded by the mosque.

“We’d be proud to have them, the children, too, are heroes,” Khan said.

Several retired Pakistan diplomats said they doubted the government would allow bin Laden’s children to be handed over to a madrassa.

“It’d be a huge mistake. The children would have a cult following and almost certainly become jihadis,” said Zafar Hilaly, a former Pakistan diplomat and aide to former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. “Wouldn’t it be great if the U.S. said, ‘they can come here.’ ”

Hilaly said it’s unreasonable, however, to expect the U.S. government to make that offering.

It’s also possible that the children might be turned over to public or privately run orphanages, although that, too, is a less than ideal option.

“The government-run orphanages are basically like prison cells,” said Mohammad Tahseen, founder of the South Asia Partnership, a consortium of Canadian and international aid agencies.

“There’s a lot of exploitation there. Over the past years there’s been a bit of improvement, but it’s still a very bleak picture.”

Read more about: