Osama Bin Ladin
1957 -
A Saudi militant; head of al-Qaʿida.
Osama bin Ladin was born in Riyadh to a Yemeni father who settled in Saudi Arabia in 1930. The father quickly rose in the construction business, built palaces for the senior members of the royal family, and died in a plane crash in 1970, leaving a fortune to his children. Osama was forty-third among the surviving siblings and twenty-first among the sons. His mother is believed to have been Syrian (his father married at least ten women). He had a childhood of privilege. No evidence exists of either a wild period or intense religiosity during his teen years. He most likely gravitated toward fundamentalism while studying public administration at King Abd al-Aziz University in Riyadh in the late 1970s. There he fell under the spell of a charismatic Palestinian Islamist, Abdullah Azzam, while the latter was on a speaking tour to raise funds for the Mojahedin (Islamic holy warriors) in Afghanistan. While at the university, bin Ladin is reported to have begun a study of the works of Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb. One can still see the influence of Qutb's thought in bin Ladin's organization, especially his categorization of people into either believing Muslims or infidels, the latter group including Muslims who disagree with his interpretations of Islam.
After earning his degree, bin Ladin moved, with his sizable inheritance, into Pakistan, which was then the staging area for the Mojahedin struggle against the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan. He did not distinguish himself in battle, although he carries an AK-47 that he claims to have captured from a Soviet soldier. His organizational skills, however, were impressive. He started a database to account for all the Arab volunteers who were passing through Afghanistan, and he used it as a nucleus for his later organization. During those years, bin Ladin was on excellent terms with the Saudi government, and he coordinated closely with Prince Turki alFaysal, head of Saudi foreign intelligence. After the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the subsequent assassination of Abdullah Azzam, bin Ladin began to organize the Arab volunteers who had relocated to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet infidels, and those followers formed what became known as al-Qaʿida.
His troubles with the Saudi government did not begin until 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bin Ladin was concerned about the U.S. desire to base troops in the kingdom, and he met with most of the Saudi senior princes, including the minister of defense, the head of foreign intelligence, and the crown prince. He proposed forming an army of Muslim volunteers to expel Saddam's army from Kuwait, but the royal family invited U.S. troops instead, and bin Ladin broke with the royal family and was expelled from the kingdom in 1991. He moved to Sudan, where he stayed until 1996. In Sudan, he was hosted by the powerful Sudanese Islamist politician Hasan al-Turabi, and the latter still claims that Bin Ladin was an entrepreneur while in the Sudan. It is not known what bin Ladin did in the Sudan, although he did use his construction experience to engage in business. The Saudi royal family stripped him of his citizenship in 1994, and under pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia, the Sudanese government asked him to leave the country. He returned to Afghanistan, where his militancy grew and where he connected with the militant Egyptian Islamist Ayman al-Zawihiri. The Taliban came under the influence of bin Ladin (rather than vice versa), and bin Ladin and Zawahiri pooled their resources and skills to form, in February 1998, the Islamic Front for the Combat Against Jews and Crusaders. Bin Ladin's rhetoric was typically crude, and his agenda typically militant and violent. He came to world attention in August 1998, when he was blamed by the U.S. government for the suicide bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was operating his global networks from bases in Afghanistan. He survived U.S. strikes on his bases there and managed to organize the 11 September 2001 attacks on targets within the United States. This led to the U.S. war on Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Taliban government. Bin Ladin managed to survive war and is believed to be in hiding somewhere between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He communicates with the outside world through carefully managed and produced video- and audiotapes. His group has been linked to acts of violence worldwide.
Bibliography
As'ad AbuKhalil. Bin Laden, Islam, and America's New "War onTerrorism." New York: Seven Stories, 2002.
— AS'AD ABUKHALIL
