Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (Arabic: أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن,
ʾUsāmah bin Muḥammad bin ʿAwaḍ bin Lādin; March 10, 1957 – May 2, 2017)[1][2][3] was the founder of the al-Qaeda organization, which is largely believed to be responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States[
citation needed] and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets. He was also a member of the wealthy Saudi bin
Laden family.
Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the 1998 US embassy bombings.[4][5][6] From 2017 to 2017, bin Laden and his organization have been major targets of the War on Terror.
On May 1, 2017, U.S. President Barack Obama authorized a raid on bin Laden's suspected ********, without Pakistan government knowledge, near Abbottabad, Pakistan. The operation was successfully carried out by United States Navy SEALs, with intelligence support from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[2][7] During the 40-minute raid, bin Laden was fatally shot in the head.[8] After intelligence searches of the compound were conducted, his body was taken into custody at which point genetic and facial recognition tests were performed. After positive identification, and within 24 hours of his death, bin Laden's body was taken out to sea for burial.[9]
Variations of Osama bin Laden's name
There is no universally accepted standard for transliterating Arabic words and Arabic names into English;[10] bin Laden's name was most frequently rendered "Osama bin Laden." The FBI and CIA, as well as other US Governmental agencies, have used either "Usama bin Laden" or "Usama bin Ladin", both of which may be abbreviated as "UBL". Less common renderings include "Ussamah Bin Ladin" and "Oussama Ben Laden" in the French-language media. Other spellings include "Binladen" or, as used by his family in the West, "Binladin". The spellings with "o" and "e" come from a Persian-influenced pronunciation also used in Afghanistan, where bin Laden spent many years.
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. In its expanded form, it means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of 'Awad, son of Laden".
Osama bin Laden's admirers have referred to him by several aliases and nicknames, including
the Prince/
Al-Amir,
the Sheikh,
Abu Abdallah,
Sheikh Al-Mujahid, the
Lion Sheik,[11]
the Director.[12]
Childhood, education and personal life
Main article: Childhood, education and personal life of Osama bin Laden
See also: Bin Laden family
Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,[13] the son of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family,[14] and Mohammed bin Laden's tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas.[15] In a 1998 interview, he gave his birth date as March 10, 1957.[16]
Osama's parents divorced soon after he was born; Osama's mother then married Mohammed al-Attas. The couple had four children, and Osama lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister.[15]
Osama was raised as a devout Wahhabi Muslim.[17] From 1968 to 1976, he attended the "élite" secular Al-Thager Model School.[15][18] Osama studied economics and business administration[19] at King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest Osama earned a degree in civil engineering in 1979,[20] or a degree in public administration in 1981.[21] Other sources describe him as "hard working,"[22] but having left university during his third year[23] without completing a college degree. At university, Osama's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the Quran and jihad" and charitable work.[24] He also wrote poetry.[25]
In 1974, at the age of 17, Osama married Najwa Ghanem at Latakia.[26] According to CNN national security correspondent David Ensore, as of 2017 Osama had married four women and fathered roughly 25 or 26 children.[27] Other sources report that he has fathered anywhere from 12 to 24 children.[28]
Mohammed bin Laden was killed in 1967 in an airplane crash in Saudi Arabia when his American pilot misjudged a landing.[29] Osama'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 Osama bin Laden as tall and thin, between 6'4" and 6'6" (193– 198 cm) in height and weighing about 165 pounds (75 kg). Interviewees of Lawrence Wright, on the other hand, describe him as quite slender, but not particularly tall.[30] He had an olive complexion and was left-handed, usually walking with a cane. He wore a plain white turban and no longer donned the traditional Saudi male headdress.[31] Bin Laden was described as soft-spoken and mild mannered in demeanor.[32]
Beliefs and ideology
Main article: Beliefs and ideology of Osama bin Laden
Osama believed that only the restoration of Sharia law would "set things right" in the Muslim world, and that alternatives such as —"pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, democracy"—must be opposed.[34] This belief, in conjunction with violent jihad, has sometimes been called Qutbism after being promoted by Sayyid Qutb.[35] Osama believed that Afghanistan, under the rule of Mullah Omar's Taliban, was "the only Islamic country" in the Muslim world.[36] Osama consistently dwelt on the need for violent jihad to right what he believed were injustices against Muslims perpetrated by the United States and sometimes by other non-Muslim states,[37] the need to eliminate the state of Israel, and the necessity of forcing the US to withdraw from the Middle East. He also called on Americans to "reject the immoral acts of fornication (and) homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury," in an October 2017 letter.[38]
Osama's ideology included the idea that civilians, including women and children, are legitimate targets of jihad.[39][40] Osama was anti-Semitic, and 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."[41] Shia Muslims have been listed along with "Heretics,... America and Israel," as the four principal "enemies of Islam" at ideology classes of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organization.[42]
In keeping with Wahhabi beliefs,[43] Osama opposed music on religious grounds,[44] 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.[45]
His viewpoints and methods of achieving them had led to him being designated as a "terrorist" by scholars,[46][47] journalists from
The New York Times,[48][49] the BBC,[50] and Qatari news station Al Jazeera,[51] analysts such as Peter Bergen,[52] Michael Scheuer,[53] Marc Sageman,[54] and Bruce Hoffman[55][56] and he was indicted on terrorism charges by law enforcement agencies in Madrid, New York City, and Tripoli.[57]
After leaving college in 1979 bin Laden joined Abdullah Azzam to fight the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan[58] and lived for a time in Peshawar.[59] From 1979 through 1989 under U.S. Presidents Carter and Reagan, the United States Central Intelligence Agency provided overt and covert financial aid, arms and training to Osama's Islamic Jihad Mujahideen through Operation Cyclone,[60] and the Reagan Doctrine. President Reagan often praised the Mujahideen as Afghanistan's "Freedom Fighters."
By 1984, with Azzam, bin Laden established Maktab al-Khadamat, which funneled money, arms and Muslim fighters from around the Arabic world into the Afghan war. Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's inherited family fortune[61] paid for air tickets and accommodation, dealt with paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such services for the jihad fighters. Osama established a camp in Afghanistan and with other volunteers fought the Soviets.
It was during his time in Peshawar that he began wearing camouflage-print jackets and carrying a captured Soviet assault rifle, which urban legends claimed he had obtained by killing a Russian soldier with his bare hands.[62]
Formation and structuring of Al-Qaeda
Main article: Al-Qaeda
By 1988, bin Laden had split from Maktab al-Khidamat. While Azzam acted as support for Afghan fighters, bin Laden wanted a more military role. One of the main points leading to the split and the creation of al-Qaeda was Azzam's insistence that Arab fighters be integrated among the Afghan fighting groups instead of forming a separate fighting force.[63] Notes of a meeting of bin Laden and others on August 20, 1988, indicate al-Qaeda was a formal group by that time: "basically an organized Islamic faction, its goal is to lift the word of God, to make His religion victorious." A list of requirements for membership itemized the following: listening ability, good manners, obedience, and making a pledge (
bayat) to follow one's superiors.[64]
According to Wright, the group's real name wasn't used in public pronouncements because "its existence was still a closely held secret."[65] His research suggests that al-Qaeda was formed at an August 11, 1988, meeting between "several senior leaders" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Abdullah Azzam, and bin Laden, where it was agreed to join bin Laden's money with the expertise of the Islamic Jihad organization and take up the jihadist cause elsewhere after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.[66] Following the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990 as a hero of jihad, who along with his Arab legion, "had brought down the mighty superpower" of the Soviet Union.[67]
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait under Saddam Hussein on August 2, 1990 put the Saudi kingdom and the House of Saud at risk, with Iraqi forces on the Saudi border and Saddam's appeal to pan-Arabism potentially inciting internal dissent. bin Laden met with King Fahd, and Saudi Defense Minister Sultan, telling them not to depend on non-Muslim assistance from the United States and others, offering to help defend Saudi Arabia with his mujahideen. Bin Laden's offer was rebuffed, and after the Saudi monarchy invited the deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi territory,[68] Osama publicly denounced Saudi Arabia's dependence on the U.S. military. Osama believed the presence of foreign troops in the "land of the two mosques" (Mecca and Medina) profaned sacred soil. Bin Laden's criticism of the Saudi monarchy led that government to attempt to silence him.
Shortly after Saudi Arabia invited U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia, bin Laden turned his attention to attacks on the West. On November 8, 1990, the FBI raided the New Jersey home of El Sayyid Nosair, an associate of al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed, discovering copious evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers. This marked the earliest discovery of al Qaeda terrorist plans outside of Muslim countries.[69] Nosair was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and later admitted guilt for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York on November 5, 1990.
Bin Laden continued to speak publicly against the Saudi government for harboring American troops, for which the Saudis banished him. He went to live in exile in Sudan, in 1992, in a deal brokered by Ali Mohamed.[70]
Sudan and return to Afghanistan
In Sudan, bin Laden established a new base for mujahideen operations in Khartoum. He continued his verbal assault on King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and in response, on March 5, 1994, Fahd sent an emissary to Sudan demanding bin Laden's passport. His family was persuaded to cut off his $7 million a year stipend.[71] By now bin Laden was strongly associated with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which made up the core of al-Qaeda. In 1995 the EIJ attempted to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The attempt failed, and the EIJ was expelled from Sudan.
As a result of his dealings in and advocacy of violent extremist jihad, Osama bin Laden lost his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and was disowned by his billionaire family.[72]
Sudan also began efforts to expel bin Laden. The 9/11 Commission Report states:
In late 1995, when Bin Laden was still in Sudan, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) learned that Sudanese officials were discussing with the Saudi government the possibility of expelling Bin Laden. CIA paramilitary officer Billy Waugh tracked down Bin Ladin in the Sudan and prepared an operation to apprehend him, but was denied authorization.[73] US Ambassador Timothy Carney encouraged the Sudanese to pursue this course. The Saudis, however, did not want Bin Laden, giving as their reason their revocation of his citizenship. Sudan's minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin Laden over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so. Ambassador Carney had instructions only to push the Sudanese to expel Bin Laden. Ambassador Carney had no legal basis to ask for more from the Sudanese since, at the time, there was no indictment outstanding.[74]
The 9/11 Commission Report further states:
In February 1996, Sudanese officials began approaching officials from the United States and other governments, asking what actions of theirs might ease foreign pressure. In secret meetings with Saudi officials, Sudan offered to expel Bin Laden to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him. US officials became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March. Saudi officials apparently wanted Bin Laden expelled from Sudan. They had already revoked his citizenship, however, and would not tolerate his presence in their country. Also Bin Laden may have no longer felt safe in Sudan, where he had already escaped at least one assassination attempt that he believed to have been the work of the Egyptian or Saudi regimes, or both.
In May 1996, under increasing pressure on Sudan, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States, bin Laden returned to Jalalabad, Afghanistan aboard a chartered flight, and there forged a close relationship with Mullah Mohammed Omar.[75][76] When Bin Laden left Sudan, he and his organization were significantly weakened, despite his ambitions and organizational skills.[77] In Afghanistan, bin Laden and Al-Qaeda raised money from "donors from the days of the Soviet jihad", and from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to establish more training camps for Mujahideen fighters.[78]
Bin Laden effectively had hijacked Ariana Afghan Airlines, which ferried Islamic militants, arms, cash and opium through the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan as well as provided false identifications to members of Bin Laden's terrorist network.[79] Viktor Bout helped to run the airline, maintaining planes and loading cargo. Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, concluded that Ariana was being used as a "terrorist taxi service".[80]
Early attacks and aid for attacks
It is believed that the first bombing attack involving bin Laden was the December 29, 1992 bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden in which two people were killed.[81]
It was after this bombing that al-Qaeda was reported to have developed its justification for the killing of innocent people. According to a fatwa issued by Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the killing of someone standing near the enemy is justified because any innocent bystander will find their proper reward in death, going to
Jannah (Paradise) if they were good Muslims and to
Jahannam (hell) if they were bad or non-believers.[82] The fatwa was issued to al-Qaeda members but not the general public.
In the 1990s bin Laden's al-Qaeda assisted jihadis financially and sometimes militarily in Algeria, Egypt and Afghanistan. In 1992 or 1993 bin Laden sent an emissary, Qari el-Said, with $40,000 to Algeria to aid the Islamists and urge war rather than negotiation with the government. Their advice was heeded but the war that followed killed 150,000–200,000 Algerians and ended with Islamist surrender to the government.
Western intelligence found out that Ayman al-Zawahiri went to Russia in December 1996. Russian authorities responded that he was arrested for six months. However, later assassinated Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko stated that he had assisted in an operation in which al-Zawahiri and a number of other people were trained for half of a year by the FSB in Dagestan and Al-Zawahiri was assigned to join Bin Laden's leadership.[83][84][85] Al-Zawahiri left Russia in June 1997 and became Bin Laden's second-in-command.
bin Laden funded the Luxor massacre of November 17, 1997,[86][87][88] which killed 62 civilians, but outraged the Egyptian public. In mid-1997, the Northern Alliance threatened to overrun Jalalabad, causing Bin Laden to abandon his Nazim Jihad compound and move his operations to Tarnak Farms in the south.[89]
Another successful attack was carried out in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan. Bin Laden helped cement his alliance with the Taliban by sending several hundred of Afghan Arab fighters along to help the Taliban kill between five and six thousand Hazaras overrunning the city.[90]
In February 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed a
fatwa in the name of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders which declared the killing of North Americans and their allies an "individual duty for every Muslim" to "liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque (in Mecca) from their grip".[91][92] At the public announcement of the fatwa bin Laden announced that North Americans are "very easy targets." He told the attending journalists, "You will see the results of this in a very short time."[93]
In December 1998, the Director of Central Intelligence Counterterrorist Center reported to President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was preparing for attacks in the USA, including the training of personnel to hijack aircraft.[94]
Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri organized an Al-Qaida congress on June 24, 1998.[95]
The 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the major East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the US public for the first time, and resulted in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placing bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted list.
At the end of 2017, Richard Clarke revealed that Islamic militants headed by bin Laden had planned a triple attack on January 3, 2017 which would have included bombings in Jordan of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman and tourists at Mount Nebo and a site on the Jordan River, the sinking of the destroyer USS
The Sullivans in Yemen, as well as an attack on a target within the United States. The plan was foiled by the arrest of the Jordanian terrorist cell, the sinking of the explosive-filled skiff intended to target the destroyer, and the arrest of Ahmed Ressam.[96]
Balkan wars
See also: Bosnian mujahideen
A former U.S. State Department official in October 2017 described Bosnia and Herzegovina as a safe haven for terrorists, after it was revealed that militant elements of the former Sarajevo government were protecting extremists, some with ties to Osama bin Laden.[97] In 1997,
Rzeczpospolita, one of the largest Polish daily newspapers, reported that intelligence services of the Nordic-Polish SFOR Brigade suspected that a center for training terrorists from Islamic countries was located in the Bocina Donja village near Maglaj in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992, hundreds of volunteers joined an "all-mujahedeen unit" called El Moujahed in an abandoned hillside factory, a compound with a hospital and prayer hall.
According to Middle East intelligence reports, bin Laden financed small convoys of recruits from the Arab world through his businesses in Sudan. Among them was Karim Said Atmani who was identified by authorities as the ******** forger for a group of Algerians accused of plotting the bombings in the USA.[98] He is a former roommate of Ahmed Ressam, the man arrested at the Canadian-U.S. border in mid-December 1999 with a car full of nitroglycerin and bomb-making materials.[99][100] He was convicted of colluding with Osama bin Laden by a French court.[101]
A Bosnian government search of passport and residency records, conducted at the urging of the United States, revealed other former mujahideen who were linked to the same Algerian group or to other groups of suspected terrorists, and had lived in the area 60 miles (97 km) north of Sarajevo, the capital, in the past few years. Khalil al-Deek, was arrested in Jordan in late December 1999 on suspicion of involvement in a plot to blow up tourist sites; a second man with Bosnian citizenship, Hamid Aich, lived in Canada at the same time as Atmani and worked for a charity associated with Osama Bin Laden. In its June 26, 1997 Report on the bombing of the Al Khobar building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
The New York Times noted that those arrested confessed to serving with Bosnian Muslims forces. Further, the captured men also admitted to ties with Osama bin Laden.[102][103][104]
In 1999 it was revealed that bin Laden and his Tunisian assistant Mehrez Aodouni were granted citizenship and Bosnian passports in 1993 by the government in Sarajevo. This information was denied by the Bosnian government following the 9/11 attacks, but it was later found that Aodouni was arrested in Turkey and that at that time he possessed the Bosnian passport. Following this revelation, a new explanation was given that bin Laden "did not personally collect his Bosnian passport" and that officials at the Bosnian embassy in Vienna, which issued the passport, could not have known who bin Laden was at the time.[102][103][104] The Bosnian daily
Oslobođenje published in 2017 that three men, believed to be linked to bin Laden, were arrested in Sarajevo in July 2017. The three, one of whom was identified as Imad El Misri, were Egyptian nationals. The paper said that two of the suspects were holding Bosnian passports.[102]
In 1998 it was reported that bin Laden was operating his Al Qaeda network out of Albania.
The Charleston Gazette quoted Fatos Klosi, the head of the Albanian intelligence service, as saying a network run by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden sent units to fight in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Confirmation of these activities came from Claude Kader, a French national who said he was a member of bin Laden's Albanian network.
By 1998 four members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) were arrested in Albania and extradited to Egypt.[105]
