Osama bin Muhammad bin 'Awad bin Laden (Arabic:
أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن;
born
March 10,
1957
[1]), most commonly known
as Osama bin Laden is a
militant Islamist and one of the founders of
al-Qaeda. Bin Laden is a member of the prestigious and
wealthy
bin Laden family and issued a 1998
edict that
Muslims should kill civilians and military personnel
from the
United States and allied countries until they withdraw
their forces from Muslim countries and from
Israel[2].
He has been
indicted in
United States federal court for his alleged involvement
in the
1998 U.S. embassy bombings in
Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania and
Nairobi,
Kenya, and is on the U.S.
Federal Bureau of Investigation's
Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. He has also been linked
to the 2000
USS Cole bombing, the
Bali nightclub bombings, the
Madrid bombings, as well as
bombings in the
Jordanian capital of
Amman and in
Egypt's
Sinai peninsula.
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were connected with the
September 11, 2001 attacks which involved the
World Trade Center in
New York City as well as
The Pentagon in
Arlington, Virginia, and the hijacking of
United Airlines Flight 93, which together killed at
least 2,986 people.
Bin Laden, while under indictment in the U.S. for many
charges, has not been indicted for his alleged role in the
attacks of 9/11.
Family and childhood
Osama bin Laden was born in
Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia
[3]. In a 1998 interview,
later televised on
Al Jazeera, he gave his birth date as
March 10,
1957. His father was the late
Muhammed Awad bin Laden, a wealthy businessman involved
in construction and with close ties to the
Saudi royal family
[4]. Before
World War I, Muhammed, poor and uneducated, emigrated
from
Hadhramaut, on the south coast of
Yemen, to the
Red Sea port of
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he began to work as a
porter. Starting his own business in 1930, Muhammed built
his fortune as a building contractor for the
Saudi royal family during the
1950s.
In
1994
bin Laden's family publicly disowned him, shortly before
the
Saudi Arabian
government revoked his
citizenship for anti-government activity. He attended
his son's wedding in January 2001, but since September 11,
he is believed only to have had contact with his mother on
one occasion.
[5].
There is no definitive account of the number of children
born to Muhammed bin Laden, but the number is generally put
at 55. In addition, various accounts place Osama as his
seventeenth son. Muhammed bin Laden was married 22 times,
although to no more than four women at a time per
Sharia law. Osama was born the only son of Muhammed bin
Laden's tenth wife,
Hamida al-Attas, nee
Alia Ghanem[6],
who was born in
Syria
[7].
al-Attas step family in Jeddah
Osama's parents divorced soon after he was born,
according to
Khaled M. Batarfi, a senior editor at the
Al Madina newspaper in Jeddah who knew Osama during the
1970s. Osama's mother then married a man named
Muhammad al-Attas, who worked at the bin Laden company.
The couple had four children, and Osama lived in the new
household with three stepbrothers and one stepsister.
[8]
Bin laden was raised as a devout
Sunni
Muslim. But from
1968 to
1976, he attended the relatively secular
Al-Thager Model School, the most prestigious high school
in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, called "the school of the
élite."
[9] However, during the
1960s,
King Faisal had welcomed exiled teachers from
Syria,
Egypt, and
Jordan, so that around 1971 or 1972, at Saudi high
schools and universities, it was common to find many of whom
had become involved with dissident members of the
Muslim Brotherhood. During that time, bin Laden was
exposed to those educators' banned political teachings
during after-school Islamic study groups.
As a college student at
King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, bin Laden studied
civil engineering and
business administration. He earned a
degree in civil engineering in
1979 and also one in
economics and
public administration, in
1981.
At the university, bin Laden was influenced by several
professors with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Among
them was
Muhammad Qutb, an Egyptian, whose brother, the late
Sayyid Qutb, had written one of the Brotherhood’s most
important tracts about anti-Western jihad, Signposts on
the Road. The university at Jeddah is also where bin
Laden met Dr.
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. Azzam was a teacher there while
bin Laden was in attendance, and he would later play a
crucial role working with bin Laden in the Afghanistan
resistance against the Soviets.
Married life in Jeddah
In 1974, at the age of 17, bin Laden married his first
wife,
Najwa Ghanem, his mother's niece, and a first cousin,
who was from Syria. The marriage ceremony took place in
Najwa's native land, at
Latakia, in northwestern Syria.
[10] After the
birth of his first son, Abdallah, they moved from his
mother's house to a building in the Al-Aziziyah district of
Jeddah.
Although bin Laden reportedly married four other women,
he
divorced one,
Umm Ali bin Laden (i.e., the mother of Ali), a
University lecturer who studied in Saudi Arabia, and spent
holidays in Khartoum, Sudan, where Osama later settled
during his exile in the years 1991 to 1996. According to
Wisal al Turabi, the wife of Sudan's ruler Hassan Turabi,
Umm Ali taught Islam to some families in Riyadh, an upscale
neighborhood in Khartoum. The three latter wives of Osama
bin Laden were all university lecturers, highly educated,
and from distinguished families. According to Wisal al
Turabi, he married the other three because they were
"spinsters," who "were going to go without marrying in this
world. So he married them for the Word of God." According to
Abu Jandal, bin Laden's former chief bodyguard, Osama's
wife Umm Ali asked Osama for a divorce when they still lived
in Sudan, because she said that she "could not continue to
live in an austere way and in hardship."
[10]
Children
Bin Laden has fathered at least 24 children. His wife,
Najwa, reportedly had 11 children by bin Laden, including
Abdallah (born c. 1976), Omar,
Saad and Muhammad. Muhammad bin Laden (born c. 1983)
married the daughter of the late alleged al-Qaeda military
chief
Mohammed Atef in January 2001, at
Kandahar, Afghanistan. Omar and Abdallah reportedly
organized the U.S. branch of the World Congress of Muslim
Youth in
Falls Church, Virginia during the
1990s. Abdallah runs his own firm, called Fame
Advertising, which has offices on Palestine Street, in
Jeddah.
Appearance and manner
Bin Laden is often described as lanky; the
FBI
describes him as tall and thin, being 6' 4" (193 cm) to 6'
5" (195 cm) tall and weighing about 160 pounds (75 kg). He
has an olive complexion, is left-handed, and usually walks
with a
cane. He wears a plain white
turban and no longer dons the traditional Saudi male
headdress, generally white.
[11]
In terms of personality, bin Laden is described as a
soft-spoken, mild mannered man,
[12]; and despite his
rhetoric, he is said to be charming, polite, and respectful.
According to CNN's In The Footsteps of bin Laden
television program, he is near-fluent in the
English language.
Usage variations of Osama's name
Osama's name is
transliterated in many ways. Osama bin Laden is
used by most
English-language
mass media. The US Government, including the
FBI and
CIA,
uses Usama bin Laden, which is often abbreviated to
UBL. Less common renderings include Ussamah Bin
Ladin and Oussama Ben Laden (French-language
mass media). The latter part of the name can also be found
as Binladen or Binladin.
Strictly speaking, under
Arabic linguistic conventions, it is incorrect to use
"bin Laden" in a similar manner as a Western surname. His
full name means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of 'Awad, son
of Laden". However, the bin Laden family (or "Binladin," as
they prefer to be known) generally use the name as a surname
in the Western style. Although Arabic conventions dictate
that he be referred to as "Osama" or "Osama bin Laden",
using "bin Laden" is in accordance with the family's own
usage of the name and is the near-universal convention in
Western references to him.
Bin Laden also has several commonly used
aliases and
nicknames, including the Prince, the
Sheikh, Al-Amir, Abu Abdallah,
Sheikh Al-Mujahid, the Director, and Samaritan.[13].
Military and militant activity
Afghan Jihad resisting the Soviet invasion
Bin Laden's wealth and connections assisted his interest
in supporting the
mujahideen, Muslim
guerrillas fighting the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan following the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. By 1980, his old
teacher from the university in Jeddah, Abdullah Azzam, had
relocated to
Peshawar, a major border city of a million people in the
North-West Frontier Province of
Pakistan. From there, Azzam was able to organize
resistance directly on the Afghan frontier. Peshawar is only
15 km east of the historic
Khyber Pass, through the
Safed Koh mountains, connected to the southeastern edge
of the
Hindu Kush range. This route became the major avenue of
inserting foreign fighters and material support into eastern
Afghanistan for the resistance against the Soviets, and
also in later years.
After bin Laden graduated from the university in Jeddah
in 1981, he also came to live for a time in Peshawar,
according to Rahimullah Yusufzai, executive editor of the
English-language daily
The News International in 2001. "Azam prevailed on him
to come and use his money" for training recruits, reported
Yusufzai.
[14] In the early 1980s,
bin Laden lived at several addresses in and around Arbab
Road, a narrow street in the
University Town neighborhood in western Peshawar,
Yusufzai said. Nearby in Gulshan Iqbal Road is the Arab
mosque that Abdullah Azzam used as the jihad center,
according to a
Reuters inquiry in the neighborhood. Years later, in
1989, Azzam was blown up in a massive car bombing outside
the mosque. Bin Laden is thought to be a suspect in that
assassination, because of a rift in the direction of the
jihad at that time.
By 1984, with Azzam, bin Laden had established an
organization named
Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK, Office of Order in
English), which funneled money, arms and
Muslim fighters from around the world into the Afghan
war. Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's inherited family
fortune paid for air tickets and accommodation, dealt with
paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such
services for the jihad fighters. In running al-Khadamat, bin
Laden set up a network of couriers traveling between
Afghanistan and Peshawar, which continued to remain active
after 2001, according to Yusufzai.
(See: the
History of Afghanistan).
Robin Cook, former leader of the
British House of Commons and Foreign Secretary from
1997-2001, wrote in
The Guardian on Friday, July 8, 2005,
