Bin Laden became the poster boy for Islamist anti-Western militancy, yet he had not always been seen as an enemy of the West. During the war to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, he and his allies in the Mujahideen were feted as freedom fighters against communist repression. His organisation, al-Qaeda, a loose coalition of militant Islamists and jihadist groups founded in the dying days of that conflict, had initially set its sights on fomenting jihad in “ungodly” Muslim states.
Until bin Laden emerged on the scene, terror networks had usually been run by “rogue” states such as Libya or had been agents of such states. The bin Laden enterprise was all the more deadly because it followed its own fanatical agenda while sharing the deadly operational capability of state-sponsored outfits.
Bin Laden’s initial aim was to bring all Muslim lands and holy places into a “Caliphate” under strict Sharia (Islamic law), and in the 1990s extremists trained in al-Qaeda camps became a destabilising factor throughout the Middle East. In Algeria they led the Armed Islamic Group in the vicious civil war which broke out in 1992. In Egypt they led the struggle to overthrow the American-backed government of Hosni Mubarak and were behind the massacre of tourists at Luxor in 1997. They fought in Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Kashmir and even the Philippines.
The road to 9/11 began in 1990 when an 800,000-strong American-led force arrived in Saudi Arabia following the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. To bin Laden, America’s presence represented a violation of Islam’s holiest sanctuaries and proof of the irredeemable corruption of the ruling Al Saud dynasty. As a result he vowed to “liberate the Holy Places” in a jihad against the American superpower and its acolytes in the region.
In the run-up to 9/11, al-Qaeda terrorists were held responsible for a series of attacks on American targets, including the killing in 1996 of 19 American soldiers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; the bombings in 1998 of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed more than 250 people and injured more than 5,500; and the bombing in 2000 of the US Navy destroyer Cole during a brief refuelling stop in Aden which killed 17 US servicemen.
There was nothing inevitable about 9/11. Al-Qaeda’s previous attacks had left a trail of clues that could have been followed up — but were not. For the story of Osama bin Laden is also a story of bureaucratic bungling in the American intelligence services, and of tactical miscalculation and political failure at the highest reaches of the American administration.
Osama bin Mohammed bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 10 1957. His father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, had started out as an illiterate dockside labourer in Yemen before buying a place on a camel caravan to the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There he worked as a porter, saved money, and founded a construction company. During the 1950s he underbid other contractors to work on the palaces of King Abdel-Aziz al Saud.
He became close to the king, who granted him an exclusive contract to transform Mecca and Medina and (at least in theory) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. He also became close to Crown Prince Faisal, who would replace Abdel-Aziz as king in 1964. As a result, Mohammed and his family grew extremely rich even by Saudi standards, and the family construction company opened businesses and subsidiaries across the Middle East, often forged by ties of marriage. Mohammed notched up a total of 22 wives, though by process of divorce he contrived to have only four at any one time — in line with Muslim law.
Osama (which means “young lion” in Arabic) was the 17th of Mohammed’s 52 (or 53) children. His Syrian-born mother, Alia Ghanem, was Mohammed’s 10th wife and the least favoured of his four wives at that time (a claim bolstered by the fact that Osama was their only child). Osama was said to have resented living in the shadow of his older half-brothers and to being referred to by some of his relatives as “son of a slave”.
When he was four or five his father divorced his mother and awarded her to one of his company executives, Mohammad al-Attas, by whom she had several more children. Soon afterwards Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash on his way to marry his 23rd wife. His estate passed to his children in the form of shares in the family company. Estimates of Osama’s share range from $35 million (the figure given by sources close to the family) to $250 million, as cited by American officials in 1991.
While most of Osama’s siblings were sent to Lebanon to be educated, Osama remained in Jeddah and enrolled at al-Thager, Jeddah’s best school. He was shy, immature and not particularly bright, but at the age of 14 seems to have experienced some sort of religious awakening, possibly influenced by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. As a result he stopped watching the Western films he had loved and refused to wear western dress outside school.
His religious views hardened at King Abdel Aziz University in Jeddah, where he studied Economics and Public Administration during the late 1970s. There he was inspired by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and in radical Islam. Qutb, who was executed by the Egyptian authorities in 1966, argued that modern societies, including most Muslim ones, are in “Jahiliyyah”, the state of ignorance that existed in pre-Islamic Arabia before the perfect revelations of the Koran. True Muslims, Qutb said, must free themselves from the “clutches of jahili society” by jihad.
Bin Laden dropped out of university early to work for the family company, but in 1979 he found the cause that was to change his life when the Soviets launched an invasion of Afghanistan. “I was enraged and went there at once,” he claimed, though some accounts suggest that he did not go there until 1984.
The key figure in his involvement was Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Palestinian theologian who had taught at King Abdel Aziz University. Immediately after the Soviet invasion, Azzam issued a fatwa (religious edict) declaring that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which it was every Muslim’s duty to join. Soon afterwards he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, where bin Laden joined him.
In 1984 they established the Maktab al-Khadamat (Services Office) to organise guesthouses in Peshawar and paramilitary training camps in Afghanistan for international recruits for the Afghan war front. The bin Laden group became a pipeline for radicals who wanted to fight in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden emerged as a talented fund-raiser, persuading wealthy individuals, including members of the Saudi royal family, to contribute to the cause. He brought in equipment from his family’s firm to build tunnels, camps and hideaways in the mountains. In 1986 he established his own training camp for Persian Gulf Arabs called al-Masadah, or the Lion’s Den.
Arab mythology holds that the “Arab Afghans” played a decisive role in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In fact there were never more than about 2,000 Arabs fighting at any one time — compared with about 250,000 Afghan fighters and 125,000 Soviet troops. They were a ragbag, ranging from disaffected radicals and suicidal zealots to rich kids looking for adventure. Journalists covering the conflict saw them as a curious sideshow, set apart from the other players in the conflict by their obsession with martyrdom and their indiscipline. Many Afghan fighters regarded them with barely concealed contempt.
After a series of humiliations (during one fracas in 1986, the Afghans asked bin Laden to withdraw because his forces were more of a hindrance than a help), in the dying days of the war in 1987 bin Laden helped lead the Arab Afghans in defending the Lion’s Den against attack by Soviet troops. From the Soviet perspective the battle was a small episode in their retreat from Afghanistan, but for bin Laden and his followers it was divine proof that they had crushed the mighty Soviets.
By this time bin Laden’s politics had moved in a more radical direction. In around 1986 he had met Ayman al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon from a notable Egyptian family and, as a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a long-time opponent of the secular regime of Hosni Mubarak. Zawahiri had moved to Peshawar after spending several years in a Cairo jail, from which he had emerged embittered, determined and short of cash. Bin Laden was exactly what he had been looking for.
The main obstacle to Zawahiri’s ambitions was bin Laden’s mentor Azzam. Unlike the other Arab volunteers, Zawahiri did not pledge himself to Azzam when he arrived in Afghanistan. From the start he concentrated his efforts on getting close to bin Laden. He soon succeeded in placing trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions in bin Laden’s entourage while making himself indispensable to the man himself. Bin Laden suffered from low blood pressure, and Zawahiri provided him with personal medical care.
Bin Laden’s final break with Azzam came in a dispute over the scope of jihad. Under Zawahiri’s influence bin Laden envisioned an all-Arab legion which would eventually wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt; Azzam strongly opposed making war against fellow-Muslims, limiting his ambitions to ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan. When, on November 24 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed in a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar, there were suspicions that either bin Laden or Zawahiri had ordered the attack, though there was never any definite proof.
In 1988, with the Soviets in full retreat, a meeting took place in the Afghan town of Khost at which it was agreed to establish a new organisation that would wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. The organisation came to be called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) and was conceived as a loose affiliation among individual mujahideen and jihadist groups dominated by Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad. The ultimate leader, however, was Osama bin Laden, who held the purse strings.
In March 1989 bin Laden’s forces were involved in the siege of Jalalabad, an episode billed as the beginning of the collapse of the Afghan Marxist government following the Soviet withdrawal. As the siege began to take effect, government forces in Jalalabad began negotiating the terms of surrender with the native Afghan Mujahideen. Negotiations were suspended, however, when bin Laden’s followers executed some 60 surrendering communists, cutting their corpses into small pieces and sending the remains back to the city in a truck.
Despite apologies and assurances of safety from Afghan resistance leaders, the communists suspended negotiations, broke the siege and won the first major government victory in years. Thanks largely to bin Laden, the communists renewed their determination to fight on, and the government survived three more years.
Yet when bin Laden returned to Jeddah and to the family business in autumn 1989, he was hailed as the conquering hero who had humbled a mighty superpower. Hoping to build on his celebrity, he approached Prince Turki Al Faisal, then head of Saudi Intelligence, with a plan to overthrow the Marxist regime in Yemen. The Saudi government refused and was worried enough to withdraw bin Laden’s passport. But it was America’s involvement in the Gulf War that turned bin Laden into an implacable opponent of the Saudi royal family. The Saudis were not disposed to tolerate his calls to insurrection, and quickly acted against him. In 1991 he was expelled from the country, and in 1994 his citizenship was revoked for “irresponsible behaviour”.
Together with his family and a large band of followers, bin Laden moved to Khartoum in Sudan, where he was joined by Zawahiri and his followers in Islamic Jihad. The Sudanese Islamist regime of Hassan al-Turabi regarded bin Laden as a godsend. He began building roads, for which he was paid in farms and factories, which provided work for unemployed Mujahideen. He grew peanuts and watermelons; imported trucks from Russia, bicycles from Azerbaijan and tanned leather for the luxury Italian market.
In the early 1990s al-Qaeda-trained fighters were involved in a number of attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But by the mid-1990s very little had come of them; there had been a series of high-profile defections and, as most of his business ventures lost money, for the first time in his life bin Laden found himself short of cash. Though his hatred for America remained undiminished, he reportedly told friends that he was thinking of quitting al-Qaeda to become a farmer.
Matters were taken out of his hands by Zawahiri, who had been using Sudan as a base to launch attacks on Egyptian targets around the world. This had led to some disagreement over priorities. Bin Laden, reportedly, did not approve of the 1995 Islamic Jihad suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, which killed 17 people and wounded 60 others, fearing the political consequences. He was right to be worried. The attack caused outrage throughout the Muslim world, and eventually the Sudanese authorities yielded to Saudi and American pressure to expel the two men and their followers.
In May 1996 bin Laden chartered a private jet and returned to Afghanistan, where he was greeted by a delegation sent by the Taliban’s leader Mullah Omar. The Taliban gave bin Laden a house in Kandahar, a force of bodyguards and the title “Sheikh”, though he was not a cleric. Working through faxes, satellite telephones and the internet, he kept in touch with an unknown number of followers all over the Arab world, as well as in Europe, the United States and Canada.
From then on, bin Laden began to lay out his case against America in a series of fatwas faxed to the outside world. These began in August 1996 with “The Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places” and culminated in 1998 with a fatwa issued jointly with Zawahiri, who had rejoined him the previous year. Under the title “World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders”, the fatwa ordered Muslims to kill American civilians anywhere in the world. The two men began to appear together in numerous video broadcasts.
In Islamic law, fatwas are formal legal opinions issued by a recognised religious legal authority. As neither man had any religious authority, they based their claim to legitimacy on the concept of Takfir (the practice of declaring a Muslim to be a non-believer, or Kaffir) as reinterpreted by Sayyid Qutb, who had claimed that Islam was “extinct” and therefore those who claimed to be Muslims, with the exception of Qutb’s self-appointed Islamic vanguard, were heretics.
The fatwa appeared initially in the Arabic-language London newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, but received little attention until August 1998, when hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous car bomb explosions at the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. The attacks, linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought bin Laden and Zawahiri to American attention for the first time, and resulted in the FBI placing bin Laden on its 10 Most Wanted list.
News of the attacks reached the White House three days after President Clinton had been forced into a humiliating apology to the nation for lying over his affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. In retaliation for the attacks, Clinton ordered a series of military strikes. The Americans fired some 100 cruise missiles at bin Laden’s guerrilla bases in Afghanistan and, through faulty intelligence, a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
Though around 20 casualties were inflicted, most of the missiles missed their intended targets and none of al-Qaeda’s leaders was harmed. The effect was to expose the inadequacy of US intelligence, while establishing bin Laden as a heroic symbol of resistance to the American superpower. As a result, donations began to pour in, and recruits — disaffected young men from the Muslim world and Muslim enclaves in the West — began to flock to al-Qaeda training camps.
The Taliban refused to hand bin Laden over to the Americans despite punitive sanctions imposed by the UN; but with a $5 million reward on his head, bin Laden could not afford to take chances. He led a peripatetic life, moving frequently between several bases in Afghanistan. Three attempts on his life were reportedly made, but all ended with the deaths of his would-be assassins.
The three years between the embassy attacks and 9/11 were notable for a series of bureaucratic and diplomatic blunders by those whose business it was to prevent another outrage. From phone tapping activities, the CIA knew that high-level al-Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on 9/11, yet the CIA failed to inform the FBI, which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot, until it was too late.
Following the suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole on October 12 2000, the FBI’s New York chief of counter-terrorism went out to Yemen hoping to interview suspects who had been arrested by the Yemeni security services. Gun-toting, brash and undiplomatic, he so enraged his hosts that the US ambassador in Yemen was driven to demand that he be recalled. The failure in Yemen — a major communications hub for al-Qaeda — may have blocked off lines of investigation that could have led directly to the terrorists preparing for September 11.
Bin Laden’s goal in striking the American embassies and bombing Cole in 2000 was to lure the Americans into that same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. When these attacks failed to provoke the massive retaliation he craved, he set to work to create an outrage that no one could ignore. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, US government officials named bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organisation as the prime suspects and offered a reward of $25 million for information leading to his capture or death.
A month after the attacks, the United States and its allies launched an invasion of Afghanistan with the stated purpose of capturing bin Laden, destroying al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban regime which had given them sanctuary.
The initial attack removed the Taliban from power, but was less successful in locating bin Laden. In December, anti-Taliban tribal militia, backed by American and British air power, launched an attack on caves in the mountain region of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was thought to be hiding. When US ground troops arrived 14 days later they discovered more than 100 bodies, and they were able to identify 18 of them as top al-Qaeda lieutenants. But of Zawahiri and bin Laden there was no sign.
For some time it looked as if the core of al-Qaeda had been destroyed as a genuine physical presence. But a mystery remained over bin Laden’s whereabouts. Over the next few years various claims were made as to his location, though none was definitely proven and some placed bin Laden in different places during overlapping time periods.
The consensus among experts was that he and his followers had slipped away into the tribal areas along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it was here that they began to regroup as the US-led coalition became bogged down in a war against a resurgent Taliban and in Iraq. The July 7 bomb attacks in London in 2005 and the discovery of a plot in August 2006 to blow up 10 aircraft en route from Britain to the US provided incontrovertible evidence that al-Qaeda was back, and that it was prepared to go after hard targets.
Zawahiri was the mastermind behind this process, and by 2006 he was reported to have taken over operational command of al-Qaeda, leaving bin Laden as the organisation’s charismatic figurehead. Zawahiri reformed the group around a core of some 100 Arab trainers — experts in explosives, finances, communications, military training, urban warfare and propaganda. In 2006 Afghanistan saw 139 suicide bombings, compared with 27 in 2005.
On September 17 2001 President Bush had publicly proclaimed that he wanted Osama bin Laden brought to justice “dead or alive”. There were several rumours of bin Laden’s death. Some had him among the 73,000 victims of the Pakistan earthquake in 2005. In 2006 a French newspaper reported that he might have died of typhoid in Pakistan. There were suggestions at various times that he might have died of kidney failure (Western intelligence reports claimed that he was on a dialysis machine after suffering kidney damage, possibly as the result of an attempt to poison him).
But when Bush left office in 2009, bin Laden was still at large and still dangerous. Bush’s successor Barack Obama had a vivid reminder of that fact when, shortly after his inauguration, an audio message was posted on an Islamic website in which bin Laden could be heard warning the new president that he had inherited “a long guerrilla war against a patient, stubborn adversary” that was looking to open new fronts.
In the event it was President Obama who, in the early hours of May 2, announced bin Laden’s death at the hands of US forces in a targeted attack on a compound 35 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Bin Laden seldom referred to his own family, but it is widely believed that he married his first cousin when he was 17 and later married four other women. He is believed to have fathered at least 13 children.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/religion-obituaries/8487348/Osama-bin-Laden.html
Osama bin Mohammed bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on March 10 1957. His father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, had started out as an illiterate dockside labourer in Yemen before buying a place on a camel caravan to the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There he worked as a porter, saved money, and founded a construction company. During the 1950s he underbid other contractors to work on the palaces of King Abdel-Aziz al Saud.
He became close to the king, who granted him an exclusive contract to transform Mecca and Medina and (at least in theory) the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. He also became close to Crown Prince Faisal, who would replace Abdel-Aziz as king in 1964. As a result, Mohammed and his family grew extremely rich even by Saudi standards, and the family construction company opened businesses and subsidiaries across the Middle East, often forged by ties of marriage. Mohammed notched up a total of 22 wives, though by process of divorce he contrived to have only four at any one time — in line with Muslim law.
Osama (which means “young lion” in Arabic) was the 17th of Mohammed’s 52 (or 53) children. His Syrian-born mother, Alia Ghanem, was Mohammed’s 10th wife and the least favoured of his four wives at that time (a claim bolstered by the fact that Osama was their only child). Osama was said to have resented living in the shadow of his older half-brothers and to being referred to by some of his relatives as “son of a slave”.
When he was four or five his father divorced his mother and awarded her to one of his company executives, Mohammad al-Attas, by whom she had several more children. Soon afterwards Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash on his way to marry his 23rd wife. His estate passed to his children in the form of shares in the family company. Estimates of Osama’s share range from $35 million (the figure given by sources close to the family) to $250 million, as cited by American officials in 1991.
While most of Osama’s siblings were sent to Lebanon to be educated, Osama remained in Jeddah and enrolled at al-Thager, Jeddah’s best school. He was shy, immature and not particularly bright, but at the age of 14 seems to have experienced some sort of religious awakening, possibly influenced by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. As a result he stopped watching the Western films he had loved and refused to wear western dress outside school.
His religious views hardened at King Abdel Aziz University in Jeddah, where he studied Economics and Public Administration during the late 1970s. There he was inspired by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood and in radical Islam. Qutb, who was executed by the Egyptian authorities in 1966, argued that modern societies, including most Muslim ones, are in “Jahiliyyah”, the state of ignorance that existed in pre-Islamic Arabia before the perfect revelations of the Koran. True Muslims, Qutb said, must free themselves from the “clutches of jahili society” by jihad.
Bin Laden dropped out of university early to work for the family company, but in 1979 he found the cause that was to change his life when the Soviets launched an invasion of Afghanistan. “I was enraged and went there at once,” he claimed, though some accounts suggest that he did not go there until 1984.
The key figure in his involvement was Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic Palestinian theologian who had taught at King Abdel Aziz University. Immediately after the Soviet invasion, Azzam issued a fatwa (religious edict) declaring that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which it was every Muslim’s duty to join. Soon afterwards he moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, where bin Laden joined him.
In 1984 they established the Maktab al-Khadamat (Services Office) to organise guesthouses in Peshawar and paramilitary training camps in Afghanistan for international recruits for the Afghan war front. The bin Laden group became a pipeline for radicals who wanted to fight in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden emerged as a talented fund-raiser, persuading wealthy individuals, including members of the Saudi royal family, to contribute to the cause. He brought in equipment from his family’s firm to build tunnels, camps and hideaways in the mountains. In 1986 he established his own training camp for Persian Gulf Arabs called al-Masadah, or the Lion’s Den.
Arab mythology holds that the “Arab Afghans” played a decisive role in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In fact there were never more than about 2,000 Arabs fighting at any one time — compared with about 250,000 Afghan fighters and 125,000 Soviet troops. They were a ragbag, ranging from disaffected radicals and suicidal zealots to rich kids looking for adventure. Journalists covering the conflict saw them as a curious sideshow, set apart from the other players in the conflict by their obsession with martyrdom and their indiscipline. Many Afghan fighters regarded them with barely concealed contempt.
After a series of humiliations (during one fracas in 1986, the Afghans asked bin Laden to withdraw because his forces were more of a hindrance than a help), in the dying days of the war in 1987 bin Laden helped lead the Arab Afghans in defending the Lion’s Den against attack by Soviet troops. From the Soviet perspective the battle was a small episode in their retreat from Afghanistan, but for bin Laden and his followers it was divine proof that they had crushed the mighty Soviets.
By this time bin Laden’s politics had moved in a more radical direction. In around 1986 he had met Ayman al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon from a notable Egyptian family and, as a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a long-time opponent of the secular regime of Hosni Mubarak. Zawahiri had moved to Peshawar after spending several years in a Cairo jail, from which he had emerged embittered, determined and short of cash. Bin Laden was exactly what he had been looking for.
The main obstacle to Zawahiri’s ambitions was bin Laden’s mentor Azzam. Unlike the other Arab volunteers, Zawahiri did not pledge himself to Azzam when he arrived in Afghanistan. From the start he concentrated his efforts on getting close to bin Laden. He soon succeeded in placing trusted members of Islamic Jihad in key positions in bin Laden’s entourage while making himself indispensable to the man himself. Bin Laden suffered from low blood pressure, and Zawahiri provided him with personal medical care.
Bin Laden’s final break with Azzam came in a dispute over the scope of jihad. Under Zawahiri’s influence bin Laden envisioned an all-Arab legion which would eventually wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt; Azzam strongly opposed making war against fellow-Muslims, limiting his ambitions to ousting the Soviets from Afghanistan. When, on November 24 1989, Azzam and two of his sons were killed in a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar, there were suspicions that either bin Laden or Zawahiri had ordered the attack, though there was never any definite proof.
In 1988, with the Soviets in full retreat, a meeting took place in the Afghan town of Khost at which it was agreed to establish a new organisation that would wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. The organisation came to be called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) and was conceived as a loose affiliation among individual mujahideen and jihadist groups dominated by Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad. The ultimate leader, however, was Osama bin Laden, who held the purse strings.
In March 1989 bin Laden’s forces were involved in the siege of Jalalabad, an episode billed as the beginning of the collapse of the Afghan Marxist government following the Soviet withdrawal. As the siege began to take effect, government forces in Jalalabad began negotiating the terms of surrender with the native Afghan Mujahideen. Negotiations were suspended, however, when bin Laden’s followers executed some 60 surrendering communists, cutting their corpses into small pieces and sending the remains back to the city in a truck.
Despite apologies and assurances of safety from Afghan resistance leaders, the communists suspended negotiations, broke the siege and won the first major government victory in years. Thanks largely to bin Laden, the communists renewed their determination to fight on, and the government survived three more years.
Yet when bin Laden returned to Jeddah and to the family business in autumn 1989, he was hailed as the conquering hero who had humbled a mighty superpower. Hoping to build on his celebrity, he approached Prince Turki Al Faisal, then head of Saudi Intelligence, with a plan to overthrow the Marxist regime in Yemen. The Saudi government refused and was worried enough to withdraw bin Laden’s passport. But it was America’s involvement in the Gulf War that turned bin Laden into an implacable opponent of the Saudi royal family. The Saudis were not disposed to tolerate his calls to insurrection, and quickly acted against him. In 1991 he was expelled from the country, and in 1994 his citizenship was revoked for “irresponsible behaviour”.
Together with his family and a large band of followers, bin Laden moved to Khartoum in Sudan, where he was joined by Zawahiri and his followers in Islamic Jihad. The Sudanese Islamist regime of Hassan al-Turabi regarded bin Laden as a godsend. He began building roads, for which he was paid in farms and factories, which provided work for unemployed Mujahideen. He grew peanuts and watermelons; imported trucks from Russia, bicycles from Azerbaijan and tanned leather for the luxury Italian market.
In the early 1990s al-Qaeda-trained fighters were involved in a number of attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But by the mid-1990s very little had come of them; there had been a series of high-profile defections and, as most of his business ventures lost money, for the first time in his life bin Laden found himself short of cash. Though his hatred for America remained undiminished, he reportedly told friends that he was thinking of quitting al-Qaeda to become a farmer.
Matters were taken out of his hands by Zawahiri, who had been using Sudan as a base to launch attacks on Egyptian targets around the world. This had led to some disagreement over priorities. Bin Laden, reportedly, did not approve of the 1995 Islamic Jihad suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, which killed 17 people and wounded 60 others, fearing the political consequences. He was right to be worried. The attack caused outrage throughout the Muslim world, and eventually the Sudanese authorities yielded to Saudi and American pressure to expel the two men and their followers.
In May 1996 bin Laden chartered a private jet and returned to Afghanistan, where he was greeted by a delegation sent by the Taliban’s leader Mullah Omar. The Taliban gave bin Laden a house in Kandahar, a force of bodyguards and the title “Sheikh”, though he was not a cleric. Working through faxes, satellite telephones and the internet, he kept in touch with an unknown number of followers all over the Arab world, as well as in Europe, the United States and Canada.
From then on, bin Laden began to lay out his case against America in a series of fatwas faxed to the outside world. These began in August 1996 with “The Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places” and culminated in 1998 with a fatwa issued jointly with Zawahiri, who had rejoined him the previous year. Under the title “World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders”, the fatwa ordered Muslims to kill American civilians anywhere in the world. The two men began to appear together in numerous video broadcasts.
In Islamic law, fatwas are formal legal opinions issued by a recognised religious legal authority. As neither man had any religious authority, they based their claim to legitimacy on the concept of Takfir (the practice of declaring a Muslim to be a non-believer, or Kaffir) as reinterpreted by Sayyid Qutb, who had claimed that Islam was “extinct” and therefore those who claimed to be Muslims, with the exception of Qutb’s self-appointed Islamic vanguard, were heretics.
The fatwa appeared initially in the Arabic-language London newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, but received little attention until August 1998, when hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous car bomb explosions at the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. The attacks, linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought bin Laden and Zawahiri to American attention for the first time, and resulted in the FBI placing bin Laden on its 10 Most Wanted list.
News of the attacks reached the White House three days after President Clinton had been forced into a humiliating apology to the nation for lying over his affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. In retaliation for the attacks, Clinton ordered a series of military strikes. The Americans fired some 100 cruise missiles at bin Laden’s guerrilla bases in Afghanistan and, through faulty intelligence, a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
Though around 20 casualties were inflicted, most of the missiles missed their intended targets and none of al-Qaeda’s leaders was harmed. The effect was to expose the inadequacy of US intelligence, while establishing bin Laden as a heroic symbol of resistance to the American superpower. As a result, donations began to pour in, and recruits — disaffected young men from the Muslim world and Muslim enclaves in the West — began to flock to al-Qaeda training camps.
The Taliban refused to hand bin Laden over to the Americans despite punitive sanctions imposed by the UN; but with a $5 million reward on his head, bin Laden could not afford to take chances. He led a peripatetic life, moving frequently between several bases in Afghanistan. Three attempts on his life were reportedly made, but all ended with the deaths of his would-be assassins.
The three years between the embassy attacks and 9/11 were notable for a series of bureaucratic and diplomatic blunders by those whose business it was to prevent another outrage. From phone tapping activities, the CIA knew that high-level al-Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on 9/11, yet the CIA failed to inform the FBI, which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot, until it was too late.
Following the suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole on October 12 2000, the FBI’s New York chief of counter-terrorism went out to Yemen hoping to interview suspects who had been arrested by the Yemeni security services. Gun-toting, brash and undiplomatic, he so enraged his hosts that the US ambassador in Yemen was driven to demand that he be recalled. The failure in Yemen — a major communications hub for al-Qaeda — may have blocked off lines of investigation that could have led directly to the terrorists preparing for September 11.
Bin Laden’s goal in striking the American embassies and bombing Cole in 2000 was to lure the Americans into that same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan. When these attacks failed to provoke the massive retaliation he craved, he set to work to create an outrage that no one could ignore. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, US government officials named bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organisation as the prime suspects and offered a reward of $25 million for information leading to his capture or death.
A month after the attacks, the United States and its allies launched an invasion of Afghanistan with the stated purpose of capturing bin Laden, destroying al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban regime which had given them sanctuary.
The initial attack removed the Taliban from power, but was less successful in locating bin Laden. In December, anti-Taliban tribal militia, backed by American and British air power, launched an attack on caves in the mountain region of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was thought to be hiding. When US ground troops arrived 14 days later they discovered more than 100 bodies, and they were able to identify 18 of them as top al-Qaeda lieutenants. But of Zawahiri and bin Laden there was no sign.
For some time it looked as if the core of al-Qaeda had been destroyed as a genuine physical presence. But a mystery remained over bin Laden’s whereabouts. Over the next few years various claims were made as to his location, though none was definitely proven and some placed bin Laden in different places during overlapping time periods.
The consensus among experts was that he and his followers had slipped away into the tribal areas along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And it was here that they began to regroup as the US-led coalition became bogged down in a war against a resurgent Taliban and in Iraq. The July 7 bomb attacks in London in 2005 and the discovery of a plot in August 2006 to blow up 10 aircraft en route from Britain to the US provided incontrovertible evidence that al-Qaeda was back, and that it was prepared to go after hard targets.
Zawahiri was the mastermind behind this process, and by 2006 he was reported to have taken over operational command of al-Qaeda, leaving bin Laden as the organisation’s charismatic figurehead. Zawahiri reformed the group around a core of some 100 Arab trainers — experts in explosives, finances, communications, military training, urban warfare and propaganda. In 2006 Afghanistan saw 139 suicide bombings, compared with 27 in 2005.
On September 17 2001 President Bush had publicly proclaimed that he wanted Osama bin Laden brought to justice “dead or alive”. There were several rumours of bin Laden’s death. Some had him among the 73,000 victims of the Pakistan earthquake in 2005. In 2006 a French newspaper reported that he might have died of typhoid in Pakistan. There were suggestions at various times that he might have died of kidney failure (Western intelligence reports claimed that he was on a dialysis machine after suffering kidney damage, possibly as the result of an attempt to poison him).
But when Bush left office in 2009, bin Laden was still at large and still dangerous. Bush’s successor Barack Obama had a vivid reminder of that fact when, shortly after his inauguration, an audio message was posted on an Islamic website in which bin Laden could be heard warning the new president that he had inherited “a long guerrilla war against a patient, stubborn adversary” that was looking to open new fronts.
In the event it was President Obama who, in the early hours of May 2, announced bin Laden’s death at the hands of US forces in a targeted attack on a compound 35 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad.
Bin Laden seldom referred to his own family, but it is widely believed that he married his first cousin when he was 17 and later married four other women. He is believed to have fathered at least 13 children.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/religion-obituaries/8487348/Osama-bin-Laden.html
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