Osama Bin Laden
Saudi Arabian Militant and Founder of al-Qaeda
| Date of Birth | : | 10 Mar, 1957 |
| Date of Death | : | 02 May, 2011 |
| Place of Birth | : | Riyadh, Saudi Arabia |
| Profession | : | Engineer, Businessperson |
| Nationality | : | Saudi |
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was a Saudi-born Islamic militant who was the founder and first emir general of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death in 2011. Ideologically pan-Islamist, his organization is designated a terrorist group by the Council of Security of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union and several other countries. He is best known as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Osama was born in Riyadh to the aristocratic bin Laden family. He studied at local universities until 1979, when he joined the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the wake of the Soviet-Afghan War. In 1984, he co-founded Maktab al-Khidamat, which recruited foreign mujahideen for war. He founded Al Qaeda in 1988 for global jihad. In the Gulf War (1990-1991), Bin Laden's offer of support against Iraq was rebuked by the Saudi royal family, who instead sought American help. Bin Laden's views on pan-Islamism and anti-Americanism resulted in his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1991. He subsequently moved his headquarters to Sudan until 1996, when he left the country to establish a new base in Afghanistan, where he had the support of the Taliban. . Bin Laden declared two fatawa, the first in August 1996 and the second in February 1998, declaring holy war on the United States. He orchestrated the bombings of the U.S. embassy in East Africa in 1998. He was later placed on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists and Most Wanted Fugitives lists.
Name
Osama bin Laden's name is most frequently rendered as "Osama bin Laden". The FBI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as other US governmental agencies, have used either "Usama bin Laden" or the accepted transliteration "Usama bin Ladin".
Osama bin Laden's full name, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of Awad, son of Laden". "Mohammed" refers to Bin Laden's father Mohammed bin Laden; "Awad" refers to his grandfather, Awad bin Aboud bin Laden, a Kindite Hadhrami tribesman; "Laden" therefore refers to Bin Laden's great-great-grandfather, Laden Ali al-Qahtani.
He was named Usama, meaning "lion", after Usama ibn Zayd, one of the companions of Muhammad. Osama bin Laden had assumed the kunya (teknonym) Abū ʿAbdallāh, meaning "father of Abdallah" The Arabic linguistic convention would be to refer to him as "Osama" or "Osama bin Laden", not "Bin Laden" alone, as "Bin Laden" is a patronymic, not a surname in the Western manner. According to one of his sons Omar, the family's hereditary surname is āl-Qaḥṭānī, but Bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, never officially registered the name.
Early life and education
Osama bin Laden was born on 10 March 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, was a billionaire construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family, and Mohammed bin Laden's tenth wife, Syrian Hamida al-Attas (then called Alia Ghanem). In a 1998 interview, Bin Laden gave his birth date as 10 March 1957. Despite it being generally accepted that Bin Laden was born in Riyadh, his birthplace was listed as Jeddah in the initial FBI and Interpol documents.
Mohammed bin Laden divorced Hamida soon after Osama bin Laden was born. Mohammed recommended Hamida to Mohammed al-Attas, an associate. Al-Attas married Hamida in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The couple had four children, and Bin Laden lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister. The Bin Laden family made $5 billion in the construction industry, of which Osama later inherited around $25–30 million.
Bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim. From 1968 to 1976, he attended the elite Al-Thager Model School. He studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981. Bin Laden attended an English-language course in Oxford, England, during 1971. One source described him as "hard working"; another said he left university during his third year without completing a college degree. At university, Bin Laden's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the Quran and jihad" and charitable work. Other interests included writing poetry; reading, with the works of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Charles de Gaulle said to be among his favorites; black stallions; and association football, in which he enjoyed playing at centre forward and followed the English club Arsenal.
Personal life
At age 17 in 1974, Bin Laden married Najwa Ghanem at Latakia, Syria; but they were later separated and she left Afghanistan on 9 September 2001, 2 days before the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden's other known wives were Khadijah Sharif (married 1983, divorced 1990s); Khairiah Sabar (married 1985); Siham Sabar (married 1987); and Amal al-Sadah (married 2000). Some sources also list a sixth wife, name unknown, whose marriage to Bin Laden was annulled soon after the ceremony. Bin Laden fathered between 20 and 26 children with his wives. Many of Bin Laden's children fled to Iran following the September 11 attacks and as of 2010, Iranian authorities reportedly continue to control their movements.
Nasser al-Bahri, who was Bin Laden's personal bodyguard from 1997 to 2001, details Bin Laden's personal life in his memoir. He describes him as a frugal man and strict father, who enjoyed taking his large family on shooting trips and picnics in the desert. Bin Laden's father Mohammed died in 1967 in an airplane crash in Saudi Arabia when his American pilot Jim Harrington misjudged a landing. Bin Laden's eldest half-brother, Salem bin Laden, the subsequent head of the Bin Laden family, was killed in 1988 near San Antonio, Texas, in the United States, when he accidentally flew a plane into power lines.
The FBI described Bin Laden as an adult as tall and thin, between 1.93 m (6 ft 4 in) and 1.98 m (6 ft 6 in) in height and weighing about 73 kilograms (160 lb), although the author Lawrence Wright, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, writes that a number of Bin Laden's close friends confirmed that reports of his height were greatly exaggerated, and that Bin Laden was actually "just over 6 feet (1.8 m) tall". Eventually, after his death, he was measured to be roughly 1.93 m (6 ft 4 in). Bin Laden had an olive complexion and was left-handed, usually walking with a cane. He wore a plain white keffiyeh. Bin Laden had stopped wearing the traditional Saudi male keffiyeh and instead wore the traditional Yemeni male keffiyeh. Bin Laden was described as soft-spoken and mild-mannered in demeanor.
Political views
According to former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who led the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader was motivated by a belief that US foreign policy has oppressed, killed, or otherwise harmed Muslims in the Middle East. As such, the threat to US national security arises not from al-Qaeda being offended by what the US is but rather by what the US does, or in the words of Scheuer, "They (al-Qaeda) hate us (Americans) for what we do, not who we are." Nonetheless, Bin Laden criticized the US for its secular form of governance, calling upon Americans to convert to Islam and reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury, in a letter published in late 2002.
Bin Laden believed that the Islamic world was in crisis and that the complete restoration of Sharia law would be the only way to set things right in the Muslim world. He opposed such alternatives as secular government, as well as pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, and democracy. He subscribed to the Athari (literalist) school of Islamic theology.
Death and aftermath
Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on 2 May 2011, shortly after 1:00 AM local time (4:00 PM Eastern Time) by a United States military special operations unit.
The operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was ordered by United States President Barack Obama and carried out in a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation by a team of United States Navy SEALs from the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (also known as DEVGRU or informally by its former name, SEAL Team Six) of the Joint Special Operations Command, with support from CIA operatives on the ground. The raid on Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad was launched from Afghanistan. After the raid, reports at the time stated that US forces had taken Bin Laden's body to Afghanistan for positive identification, then buried it at sea, in accordance with Islamic law, within 24 hours of his death. Subsequent reporting has called this account into question—citing, for example, the absence of evidence that there was an imam on board the USS Carl Vinson, where the burial was said to have taken place.
Pakistani authorities later demolished the compound in February 2012 to prevent it from becoming a neo-Islamist shrine. In February 2013, Pakistan announced plans to build a PKR 265 million (US$30 million) amusement park in the area, including the property of the former hideout. In an interview in 2019, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan claimed that Pakistani intelligence led the CIA to Osama bin Laden.
It was widely reported by the press that Bin Laden was fatally wounded by Robert J. O'Neill; however, it has also been widely discredited by witnesses, who claim that Bin Laden was possibly already dead by the time O'Neill arrived, having been injured by an anonymous SEAL Team Six member referred to under the pseudonym "Red". According to Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, Bin Laden was struck by two suppressed shots to the side of the head from around ten feet away after leaning out of his bedroom doorway to survey Bissonnette and a point man, once the Navy SEALs entered the bedroom, his body began convulsing before Bissonnette and another SEAL responded by firing multiple shots into his chest
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