Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was a Saudi-born extremist militant who founded al-Qaeda and served as its leader from 1988 until his death in 2011. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, his group is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and various countries.

Belonging to the wealthy Bin Laden family, Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia. His father was Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire from Hadhramaut, Yemen, and the founder of the construction company, Saudi Binladin Group. His mother, Alia Ghanem, was from a secular middle-class family in Latakia, Syria. He studied at university in the country until 1979, when he joined Mujahideen forces in Pakistan fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He helped to fund the Mujahideen by funneling arms, money, and fighters from the Arab world into Afghanistan, and gained popularity among many Arabs. In 1988, he founded al-Qaeda. He was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1992, lost his Saudi citizenship in 1994, and shifted his base to Sudan until US pressure forced him to leave in 1996. After establishing a new base in Afghanistan, he declared ''jihad'' against the United States, launching a series of bombings and related attacks. His involvement in the 1998 US embassy bombings landed him on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists.

Bin Laden orchestrated the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people and led President George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and launch the "War on Terror". He became the subject of a decade-long international manhunt, during which the FBI offered a $25million bounty on him. Under bin Laden, al-Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 attacks in the United States and many other mass-casualty attacks worldwide. On 2 May 2011, he was killed by U.S. special operations forces at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Name

There is no universally accepted standard for transliterating Arabic words and Arabic names into English; however, 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 "Usama bin Ladin". Less common renderings include "Ussamah bin Ladin" and, in the French-language media, "Oussama ben Laden". Other spellings include "Binladen" or, as used by his family in the West, "Binladin". The decapitalization of is based on the convention of leaving short prepositions, articles, and patronymics uncapitalized in surnames; the ( patrynomic) means "son of". The spellings with ''o'' and ''e'' come from a Persian-influenced pronunciation also used in Afghanistan, where bin Laden spent many years.

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" refers not to bin Laden's great-grandfather, who was named Aboud, but to Aboud's father, Laden Ali al-Qahtani. 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 bin Laden's son Omar bin Laden, the family's hereditary surname is " al-Qahtani" ( ar, القحطاني, āl-Qaḥṭānī), but bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, never officially registered the name.

Osama bin Laden assumed the (teknonym) , meaning the "father of Abd Allah". His admirers have referred to him by several nicknames, including the "Emir" ( ar, الأمير, al-Amīr, label=none, the Prince), the "Sheikh" ( ar, الشيخ, aš-Šaykh, label=none), or "Shaykh al-Mujahid" ( ar, شيخ المجاهد, Šaykh al-Mujāhid, label=none), and the "Director". The Arabic word () means "lion", earning him the nicknames "Lion Sheik".

Early life and education

Bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a son of Yemeni Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, 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. In 1977, bin Laden performed the Islamic pilgrimage of "Hajj" ( ar, حج, Ḥajj, label=none) in Mecca, at the age of 20.

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. 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 , 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 and in height and weighing about , 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 tall". Eventually, 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. 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.

Beliefs and ideology

A major component of bin Laden's ideology was the concept that civilians from enemy countries, including women and children, were legitimate targets for jihadists to kill. 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. Bin Laden is said to have been influenced from Salafism and Wahhabism.

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 United States and sometimes by other non-Muslim states. He also called for the elimination of Israel, and called upon the United States to withdraw all of its civilians and military personnel from the Middle East, as well as from every Islamic country of the world.

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
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