Osama bin Laden

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Osama bin Laden
أسامة بن لادن
Bin Laden in 1998
1st General Emir of al-Qaeda
In office
11 August 1988 – 2 May 2011
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byAyman al-Zawahiri
Personal details
Born
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden[1]

(1957-03-10)10 March 1957
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Died2 May 2011(2011-05-02) (aged 54)
Abbottabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan
Cause of deathGunshot wound
CitizenshipStateless (1994–2011)
Saudi Arabia (until 1994)
Spouses
(m. 1974; sep. 2001)
Khadijah Sharif
(m. 1983; div. 1990)
Khairiah Sabar
(m. 1985)
Siham Sabar
(m. 1987)
Amal Ahmed al-Sadah
(m. 2000)
Children20–26, including
Religion
Islam (Sunni Islam)[2][3][4][5]
Military service
Allegiance
Years of service1984–2011
RankGeneral Emir of al-Qaeda
Battles/wars

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (

pan-Islamist, he participated in the Afghan Jihad against the Soviet Union and supported the activities of the Bosnian mujahideen during the Yugoslav Wars. Bin Laden is most widely known as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks in the United States
.

Osama was born in

Sudan until 1996 when he left the country to establish a new base in Afghanistan, where he was supported by the Taliban. Bin Laden declared two fatawa, the first in August 1996, and the second in February 1998, declaring holy war against the United States. He orchestrated the 1998 United States embassy bombings in East Africa. He was then 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 was the organizer of the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. This resulted in the United States invading Afghanistan, which launched the war on terror. Bin Laden became the subject of nearly a decade-long multi-national manhunt led by the United States. During this period, he hid in several mountainous regions 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 at the Arabian Sea and he was officially succeeded by his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri on 16 June 2011.

Bin Laden grew to become a highly influential ideologue in the

Western imperialism, often having approval ratings in some countries higher than those of national leaders. Nonetheless, his justification and orchestration of attacks against civilian targets in the United States
, including the September 11 attacks, have made him a hated figure in the West, where public opinion holds bin Laden to be a reviled figurehead of mass murder.

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".

Hadhrami tribesman; "Laden" therefore refers to Bin Laden's great-great-grandfather, Laden Ali al-Qahtani.[6]

He was named Usama, meaning "lion", after

Mohammed bin Laden, never officially registered the name.[8]

Early life and education

Osama bin Laden was born on 10 March 1957 in

FBI and Interpol documents.[16]

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.[17] The couple had four children, and Bin Laden lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister.[14] The Bin Laden family made $5 billion in the construction industry, of which Osama later inherited around $25–30 million.[18]

Bin Laden was raised as a devout

Sunni Muslim.[19] From 1968 to 1976, he attended the elite Al-Thager Model School.[14][20] He studied economics and business administration[21] at King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest he earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979,[22] or a degree in public administration in 1981.[23] Bin Laden attended an English-language course in Oxford, England, during 1971.[24] One source described him as "hard working";[25] another said he left university during his third year without completing a college degree.[26]

At university, Bin Laden's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the

centre forward and followed the English club Arsenal.[29] 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.[30]

Personal life

At age 17 in 1974, Bin Laden married Najwa Ghanem at Latakia, Syria;[31] but they were later separated and she left Afghanistan on 9 September 2001, 2 days before the 9/11 attacks.[32] 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.[33] Bin Laden fathered between 20 and 26 children with his wives.[34][35] 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.[36]

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.[37]

Bin Laden's father Mohammed died in 1967 in an airplane crash in Saudi Arabia when his American pilot Jim Harrington[38] misjudged a landing.[39] 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.[40]

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".[41] Eventually, after his death, he was measured to be roughly 1.93 m (6 ft 4 in).[42] 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.[43] Bin Laden was described as soft-spoken and mild-mannered in demeanor.[44]

Political views

According to former

US foreign policy has oppressed, killed, or otherwise harmed Muslims in the Middle East.[45] 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.[46]

Bin Laden believed that the Islamic world was in crisis and that the complete restoration of

Athari (literalist) school of Islamic theology.[48]

These beliefs, in conjunction with violent

His viewpoints and methods of achieving them had led to him being designated as a terrorist by scholars,[54][55] journalists from The New York Times,[56][57] the BBC,[58] and Qatari news station Al Jazeera,[59] analysts such as Peter Bergen,[60] Michael Scheuer,[61] Marc Sageman,[62] and Bruce Hoffman.[63][64] He was indicted on terrorism charges by law enforcement agencies in Madrid, New York City, and Tripoli.[65]

Bin Laden supported the targeting of American civilians, in retaliation against US troops indiscriminately attacking Muslims. He asserted that this policy could deter

US military 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 US military.[66] 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."[67]

Two months after the

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."[68]

Bin Laden's overall strategy for achieving his goals against much larger enemies such as the Soviet Union and United States 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.[69] 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".[70]

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"[71]—and as the reason civilians are responsible for their government's actions and so can be lawfully punished by death.[72] 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, [Bin Laden] 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."[73]

Bin Laden was heavily

heretics, the United States, and Israel as the four principal enemies of Islam at ideology classes of Bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.[77]

Bin Laden was opposed to music on religious grounds,[78] and his attitude towards technology was mixed. He was interested in earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants on the one hand, but rejected chilled water on the other.[79]

Bin Laden also believed

climate change to be a serious threat and penned a letter urging Americans to work with President Barack Obama to make a rational decision to "save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny".[80][81]

Militant and political career

Afghan–Soviet War