- Founder of the terrorist group al Qaeda
- Linked to many terrorist attacks around the world, most notably 9/11
- Was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan on May 1, 2011
See also: al
Qaeda
Born
in 1957 in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden was the 17th of 53
children fathered by Muhamad Awad bin Laden, a native Yemeni who
immigrated to Saudi Arabia and established numerous construction and
contracting ventures which yielded him a fortune of nearly $5
billion. Of that sum, Osama bin Laden is believed to have inherited
as much as $300 million when his father, who married at least 22
times, died in a 1968
helicopter crash.
After the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, bin Laden, then in his early twenties, became increasingly affiliated with extremist
groups such as Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, and he proclaimed that all
Muslims had a religious duty to take up arms against the Soviets. Starting in the mid-Eighties, he used his great
wealth to establish training camps in Afghanistan -- initially to
prepare the mujahedeen,
or “freedom fighters,” for combat against their Soviet adversaries, and
later to wage jihad
against other targets around the world. Together
with Palestinian Muslim
Brotherhood leader Abdullah
Azzam, bin Laden headed
one of the seven main militias that were involved in fighting the Soviets. He
attracted thousands of recruits from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt,
Yemen, Pakistan, and Sudan.
During his campaign against the
USSR, bin Laden received some
help from the American CIA, which sought to thwart Soviet
expansion into Afghanistan; the CIA purchased vast quantities of
weapons, ammunition, and supplies and sent
these to the Pakistani intelligence agency, which in turn distributed
them to the mujahedeen.
The U.S. did
not, however, train or directly finance bin Laden’s forces. The
Arabs had their own sources of funding and support. What training was
provided came from Pakistan. Bin Laden himself never had any relations with Americans or American officials.
By the time Soviet troops were
finally driven out of Afghanistan in February 1989, bin Laden had
acquired a sizable following, which he began to reference as “al
Qaeda,” an Arabic term meaning “the Base.” In 1989 he moved back to Saudi Arabia, expecting a hero's welcome in honor of his
successful effort against the Soviets. But when he was not received as
the liberator which he believed himself to be, he became
an outspoken, inveterate critic of Saudi authorities. His discontent
was further fueled by the Saudi regime's decision to permit U.S.
forces to use Saudi territory as a base for military operations during
the 1991 Gulf War -- and to thereby "pollut[e]" the
birthplace of the Prophet Mohammad with the presence of “infidels.” In retribution for this perceived affront, bin Laden
vowed to
depose the Saudi royal family and to install an Islamic
fundamentalist regime in its stead. His ultimate objective
was to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate.
Growing
increasingly uncomfortable with bin Laden's militant rhetoric, the
royal family expelled
the al Qaeda leader from
their country in 1991. For the next five years, bin Laden
headquartered
his operations in Sudan, where, with the help of his Sudanese hosts
as well as Iran, he established important connections
and collaborations with other terror groups.
Most notably, bin Laden played a role in the 1992 bombings
of two
hotels in Yemen; he maintained
a safe-house
in Pakistan for Ramzi
Ahmed Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade
Center (WTC) bombing; he gave financial support
to Omar
Abdel Rahman, who was also convicted for playing a role in the
WTC bombing; he gave massive
assistance to Somali militias whose efforts would eventually
force the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1994; and he was involved in a
1995 assassination
plot against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
In
1996 Mansoor Ijaz, a Muslim-American businessman and a supporter of
President Bill
Clinton, opened
an unofficial diplomatic channel between the Sudanese government and
the Clinton administration, whose State Department had recently
accused Sudan of harboring terrorists and had described
bin Laden
as “the greatest single financier of terrorist projects in the
world.” Said Ijaz:
“[Sudanese]
President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions
against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of bin Laden
and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed
by Egypt’s Islamic
Jihad,
Iran’s Hezbollah,
and the Palestinian Hamas.
Among the members of these networks were ... two hijackers who [would
later pilot] commercial airliners into the World Trade Center [on 9/11]. The
silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers
was deafening.”
According to a London Sunday
Times account
based on a Clinton administration source, this was one of three
separate occasions when President Clinton had an opportunity to seize bin Laden but
chose not to. Responsibility for those decisions to turn down
access to the al Qaeda kingpin, said the Times,
“went
to the very top of the White House.”
Ijaz reported
further that in May 1996 “the Sudanese capitulated to U.S. pressure
and asked bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be
monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere.” Thus bin Laden relocated
to Afghanistan,
where he was welcomed as an honored “guest”
by the brutal, authoritarian Taliban regime, and where he promptly
began to escalate
his anti-American rhetoric. In a July 1996 interview with the
Independent,
bin Laden praised a 1995 truck-bomb attack in Dhahran,
Saudi Arabia that had killed 19 U.S. servicemen as “the beginning
of war between Muslims and the United States.” Though he did
not take responsibility for the bombing, he noted that “not
long ago, I gave advice to the Americans to withdraw their troops
from Saudi Arabia.”
On August 23, 1996, bin Laden issued a
landmark fatwa,
or religious edict, entitled
“Declaration
of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy
Places.” First
published in Al
Quds Al Arabi,
a London-based newspaper, this fatwa
declared that “the people of Islam had suffered from aggression,
iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders
alliance and their collaborators”; it derided the Saudi government for
its “inability
... to protect the country” from the presence of “the American
crusader forces”; it stated that there was “no more important duty
[for Muslims] than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land”;
it called for a combination of “economical [sic] boycotting” and
“terrorizing” to be directed against U.S. interests; and it urged
Muslims to “slay the idolaters where ever you find them, and take
them captives [sic] and besiege them and lie in wait for them in
every ambush.”
On
February 23, 1998, bin Laden and several leading Muslim militants
announced the formation of a coalition
called the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and
Crusaders. The coalition's member groups included al Qaeda,
the Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, the Islamic
Group, and organizations engaged in Kashmir and Bangladesh. Its
council (shura)
members, led
by bin Laden, signed a fatwa -- published,
again, in Al
Quds Al Arabi -- which accused the United States of such transgressions as “occupying
the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula”;
plundering [Arabia's] riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating
its people, [and] terrorizing its neighbors”; conspiring “to
serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation
of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there”; and issuing “a
clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims.” “On
that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order,” wrote
bin Laden and his comrades, “we issue the following fatwa
to all Muslims: The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies –
civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who
can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
After
the foregoing fatwa
had been issued, bin Laden helped mastermind high-profile attacks like the August 7, 1998
bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (killing a combined
224 people); the October 2000 bombing
of the USS
Cole
in Yemen (which killed 17 American sailors); and, most famously, the
September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Responding
to 9/11 with military force, the United States quickly overthrew the
Taliban regime which had given bin Laden a safe haven in Afghanistan. A low-grade conflict dragged on for years afterward, however. Throughout that conflict, bin Laden remained in hiding; his
precise whereabouts were unknown,
though the
intelligence community’s general consensus was that the terror leader was
likely in a remote region somewhere near the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border. He
occasionally released audio or video tapes (aired by the Al
Jazeera broadcast network) praising and encouraging further
strikes against American interests in various places. “I
have sworn to only live free,” said
bin Laden in one such audiotape. “Even if I find bitter the taste
of death, I don't want to die humiliated or deceived.... The jihad
is continuing with strength ...”
A key
development in the search for the elusive bin Laden occurred in
2007, when two Guantanamo Bay detainees -- Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi -- were shipped to an “extraordinary
rendition” site in Eastern Europe where they were waterboarded. As a direct result of that waterboarding, these men provided U.S. officials with the nom
de guerre of one
of bin Laden's most trusted personal couriers. The informants indicated that the courier in question might be living
with, and protecting, the al Qaeda leader. Proceeding from that tip, U.S.
intelligence officials painstakingly set out to locate
the courier.
In
August 2010 they finally succeeded in tracing
him to a
three-story residence in
Abbottabad, an affluent suburb about 35 miles north of Islamabad,
Pakistan.
Further surveillance suggested that
bin Laden himself was also living there.
Late on the
night of
May 1, 2011, forty U.S. Navy SEALS raided
the Abbottabad residence, found bin Laden therein, and fatally
shot him in the face. Soon after bin Laden's death, U.S. military personnel washed
his body, wrapped it in a white sheet, and gave
him a religious Islamic funeral on
the deck of the USS
Carl Vinson
aircraft carrier. Then they buried bin Laden at sea
at 2
a.m. local time on May 2.
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