Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, bin Laden participated in the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War of the 1980s, and supported the Bosnian mujahideen during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. Opposed to American foreign policy in the Middle East, bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 and supervised numerous terrorist attacks in various countries, including the September 11 attacks in 2001 in the U.S.
Born in Riyadh to the aristocratic bin Laden family, he studied at Saudi and foreign universities until 1979, when he joined the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1984, he co-founded Maktab al-Khidamat, which recruited foreign mujahideen into the war. As the Soviet war in Afghanistan came to an end, bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 to carry out worldwide jihad. In the Gulf War, bin Laden's offer of support to Saudi Arabia against Iraq was rejected by the Saudi royal family, which instead sought American aid.
Bin Laden's views on pan-Islamism and anti-Americanism resulted in his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1991. He shifted his headquarters to Sudan until 1996, when he established a new base in Afghanistan, where he was supported by the Taliban. Bin Laden declared two fatāwā in August 1996 and February 1998, declaring holy war against the U.S. After al-Qaeda's bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, which killed hundreds of civilians, he was indicted by a U.S. district court and listed on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists and Most Wanted Fugitives lists. In October 1999, the United Nations designated al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization.
Bin Laden organized the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. This resulted in the U.S. invading Afghanistan and launching the war on terror. Bin Laden became the subject of a nearly decade-long international manhunt led by the U.S. During this period, he hid in the mountains of Afghanistan and later escaped to neighboring Pakistan. On 2 May 2011, bin Laden was killed by U.S. special operations forces at his compound in Abbottabad. His corpse was buried in the Arabian Sea and he was succeeded by his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri on 16 June 2011. During his lifetime, bin Laden was considered a war hero by many within the Islamist movement due to his role in opposing the Soviet and American interventions in Afghanistan. In the West and elsewhere, he is widely seen as a global symbol of terrorism and reviled as a mass murderer due to his orchestration of numerous terrorist attacks.
Name
Bin Laden's name is most frequently rendered as "Osama bin Laden". The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency, as well as other U.S. governmental agencies, have used either "Usama bin Laden" or the accepted transliteration "Usama bin Ladin".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 his father Muhammad bin Ladin, and "Awad" refers to his grandfather, Awad bin Aboud bin Laden, a Kindite Hadhrami tribesman. Aboud's father was Ali, whose father was Omar. The family includes many individuals over a number of generations.
He was named, meaning "lion", after Usama ibn Zayd, one of the companions of Muhammad. Osama bin Laden had assumed the , 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 patronym, not a surname in the Western manner. According to one of his sons Omar, the family's hereditary surname is, but bin Laden's father never officially registered the name.
Early life
Osama bin Laden was born on 10 March 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His father Muhammad was a Yemeni-born billionaire construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family, and his mother was Mohammed bin Laden's tenth wife, Syrian Hamida al-Attas. 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 divorced Hamida soon after Osama 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 prestigious Al-Thager Model School in Jeddah. Bin Laden attended an English-language course in Oxford, England, in 1971. He studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. Some reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979, or a degree in public administration in 1981. One source described him as "hard working"; another said he left university during his third year, without attaining 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. During his studies in Jeddah, bin Laden became a pupil of the influential Islamist scholar Abdullah Yusuf Azzam and avidly read his treatises. He also read the writings of several Muslim Brotherhood leaders and was highly influenced by the Islamic revolutionary ideas advocated by Sayyid Qutb.
Personal life
At age 17 in 1974, bin Laden married Najwa Ghanem at Latakia, Syria. However, they later separated, and she left Afghanistan on 9 September 2001. His other known wives were Khadijah Sharif ; Khairiah Sabir ; Siham Sabir ; and Amal al-Sadah. Some sources also list a sixth wife, name unknown, whose marriage to bin Laden was annulled soon after the ceremony. Bin Laden fathered 24 children with his wives. Many of bin Laden's children fled to Iran following the September 11 attacks, and as of 2010 Iranian authorities closely controlled them there.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 U.S., when he accidentally flew a plane into power lines.
The FBI described bin Laden as an adult as tall and thin, between and in height and weighing about, although author Lawrence Wright, in his 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 he was actually "just over tall". After his death, he was measured to be roughly. Bin Laden had an olive complexion and was left-handed, usually walking with a cane. He wore a plain white keffiyeh. At one point, he stopped wearing the traditional Saudi male keffiyeh and instead wore the traditional Yemeni male keffiyeh. He 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 bin Laden, bin Laden was motivated by a belief that U.S. foreign policy has oppressed, killed, or otherwise harmed Muslims in the Middle East. As such, the threat to U.S. national security arises not from al-Qaeda being offended by what the U.S. is but rather by what the U.S. does, or in the words of Scheuer, "They hate us for what we do, not who we are." Nonetheless, bin Laden criticized the U.S. 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 school of Islamic theology.
These beliefs, in conjunction with violent jihad, have sometimes been called Qutbism after being promoted by Sayyid Qutb. Bin Laden believed that Afghanistan, under the rule of Mullah Omar's Taliban, was "the only Islamic country" in the Muslim world. Bin Laden consistently dwelt on the need for violent jihad to right what he believed were injustices against Muslims perpetrated by the U.S. and sometimes by other non-Muslim states. In his Letter to the American People published in 2002, bin Laden described the formation of the Israeli state as "a crime which must be erased" and demanded that the United States withdraw all of its civilians and military personnel from the Arabian Peninsula, as well as from all Muslim lands.
His viewpoints and methods of achieving them had led to him being designated as a terrorist by scholars; journalists from The New York Times, the BBC, and Qatari news station Al Jazeera; and analysts such as Peter Bergen, Michael Scheuer, Marc Sageman, and Bruce Hoffman. He was indicted on terrorism charges by law enforcement agencies in Madrid, New York City, and Tripoli.
Bin Laden supported the targeting of American civilians, in retaliation against U.S. troops indiscriminately attacking Muslims. He asserted that this policy could deter U.S. troops from targeting Muslim women and children. Furthermore, he argued that all Americans were complicit in the crimes of their government due to majority of them electing it to power and paying taxes that fund the U.S. military. According to Noah Feldman, bin Laden's assertion was that "since the United States is a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government's actions, and civilians are therefore fair targets."
Two months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, bin Laden stated during an interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir:
"According to my information, if the enemy occupies an Islamic land and uses its people as human shields, a person has the right to attack the enemy.... The targets of September 11 were not women and children. The main targets were the symbol of the United States: their economic and military power. Our Prophet Muhammad was against the killing of women and children. When he saw the body of a non-Muslim woman during a war, he asked what the reason for killing her was. If a child is older than thirteen and bears arms against Muslims, killing him is permissible."Bin Laden's overall strategy for achieving his goals against much larger enemies such as the Soviet Union and U.S. was to lure them into a long war of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender. He believed this would lead to economic collapse of the enemy countries, by "bleeding" them dry. Al-Qaeda manuals express this strategy. In a 2004 tape broadcast by Al Jazeera, bin Laden spoke of "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy".
A number of errors and inconsistencies in bin Laden's arguments have been alleged by authors such as Max Rodenbeck and Noah Feldman. He invoked democracy both as an example of the deceit and fraudulence of Western political system—American law being "the law of the rich and wealthy"—and as the reason civilians are responsible for their government's actions and so can be lawfully punished by death. He denounced democracy as a "religion of ignorance" that violates Islam by issuing man-made laws, but in a later statement compares the Western democracy of Spain favorably to the Muslim world in which the ruler is accountable. Rodenbeck states, "Evidently, has never heard theological justifications for democracy, based on the notion that the will of the people must necessarily reflect the will of an all-knowing God."
Bin Laden was heavily anti-Semitic, stating that most of the negative events that occurred in the world were the direct result of Jewish actions. In a December 1998 interview with Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, bin Laden stated that Operation Desert Fox was proof that Israeli Jews controlled the governments of the U.S. and the United Kingdom, directing them to kill as many Muslims as they could. In a letter released in late 2002, he stated that Jews controlled the civilian media outlets, politics, and economic institutions of the U.S. In a May 1998 interview with ABC News, bin Laden claimed that the Israeli state's ultimate goal was to annex the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East into its territory and enslave its peoples, as part of what he called a "Greater Israel". He stated that Jews and Muslims could never get along, that war was "inevitable" between them, and accusing the U.S. of stirring up anti-Islamic sentiment. He claimed that the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Defense were controlled by Jews, for the sole purpose of serving the Israeli state's goals. He often delivered warnings against alleged Jewish conspiracies: "These Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery. They will leave you nothing, either in this world or the next." Shia Muslims have been listed along with heretics, the U.S., and Israel as the four principal enemies of Islam at ideology classes of bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.
Bin Laden was opposed to music on religious grounds, and his attitude towards technology was mixed. He was interested in earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants, while rejecting the use of chilled water. He also believed climate change to be a serious threat and penned a letter urging Americans to work with U.S. president Barack Obama to make a rational decision to "save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny".