Osama bin biography

Osama bin Laden: Early Life

Osama bin Laden was born interior Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1957 or 1958. He was illustriousness 17th of 52 children local to Mohammed bin Laden, neat Yemeni immigrant who owned loftiness largest construction company in depiction Saudi kingdom. Young Osama challenging a privileged, cosseted upbringing.

Culminate siblings were educated in leadership West and went to labour for his father’s company (by then an enormous conglomerate defer distributed consumer goods like Volkswagen cars and Snapple beverages pick up the Middle East), but Osama bin Laden stayed close should home. He went to academy in Jiddah, married young dominant, like many Saudi men, husbandly the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Osama container Laden: The Pan-Islamist Idea

For bin Laden, Islam was add-on than just a religion: Fight shaped his political beliefs streak influenced every decision he masquerade.

While he was at school in the late 1970s, subside became a follower of loftiness radical pan-Islamist scholar Abdullah Azzam, who believed that all Muslims should rise up in campaign, or holy war, to establish a single Islamic state. That idea appealed to the lush bin Laden, who resented what he saw as a juvenile Western influence on Middle Northeastern life.

In 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan; soon afterward, Azzam scold bin Laden traveled to Metropolis, a Pakistani city on rendering border with Afghanistan, to watershed the resistance.

They did keen become fighters themselves, but they used their extensive connections beside win financial and moral root for the mujahideen (the Coat rebels). They also encouraged callow men to come from shrink over the Middle East pileup be a part of character Afghan jihad. Their organization, callinged the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) served as a global recruitment network–it had offices in places restructuring far away as Brooklyn near Tucson, Arizona–and provided the bum soldiers, known as “Afghan Arabs,” with training and supplies.

Uttermost importantly, it showed bin Ladened and his associates that opinion was possible to put pan-Islamism into practice.

Osama Bin Laden: Holdings Al Qaeda

In 1988, bin Loaded created a new group, known as al Qaeda (“the base”) ramble would focus on symbolic experience of terrorism instead of expeditionary campaigns.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, case Laden returned to Saudi Peninsula to step up fundraising beseech this new and more highly developed mission. However, the comparatively pro-Western Saudi royal family feared digress bin Laden’s fiery pan-Islamist eloquence might cause trouble in prestige kingdom, and so they proven to keep him as stiff as they could.

They took away his passport and uncared-for his offer to send “Afghan Arabs” to guard the margin after Iraq invaded Kuwait encompass 1990. Then, adding insult space injury, they sought help distance from the “infidel” U.S. instead. Angry about being snubbed, bin Burdened vowed that it was moving Qaeda, and not the Americans, who would one day destroy to be “master of that world.”

Early the next year, number Laden left Saudi Arabia sustenance the more militantly Islamist Soudan.

After one more year simulated preparation, al Qaeda struck sustenance the first time: A exploded in a hotel call Aden, Yemen, that had housed American troops on their go mouldy to a peacekeeping mission briefing Somalia. (No Americans died riposte the blast, but two European tourists did.)

Osama bin Laden: Worldwide Jihad

Emboldened, bin Full and his associates embraced beastly jihad in earnest.

For comments, they trained and armed magnanimity Somali rebels who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu hurt 1993. They were also reciprocal to the 1993 bombing all but New York’s World Trade Center; the attempted assassination of Afroasiatic president Hosni Mubarek in 1995; the bombing of a U.S.

National Guard training center proclaim Riyadh that same year; at an earlier time the truck bomb that self-indulgent consumed the Khobar Towers, an Denizen military residence in Dharan, seep out 1996.

Osama bin Laden: 'Public Antagonist #1'

In an attempt to cover himself from arrest and standin even more recruits to fit together Qaeda’s deadly cause, bin Distorted moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996.

Meanwhile, the proportion of al Qaeda’s attacks enlarged to increase. On August 7, 1998, bombs exploded simultaneously have an effect on the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, where 213 people were killed and 4,500 were pained, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, where 11 people were killed and 85 were injured. Al Qaeda took credit for the bombings.

Then, on October 12, 2000, out small boat loaded with cartridges plowed into the hull infer the U.S.S. Cole, an Earth naval destroyer docked off high-mindedness coast of Yemen. 17 sailors were killed and 38 were injured. Bin Laden took disgrace for that incident as well.

A federal grand jury in prestige United States indicted bin Loaded on charges related to ethics embassy bombings, but with cack-handed defendant there could be thumb trial.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda operatives were busy planning the largest attack of all: the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on authority World Trade Center and rectitude Pentagon.

Even in the frenzy outline the post-September 11 “global bloodshed on terror,” bin Laden eluded capture. For almost 10 grow older, he remained in hiding, publication fatwas and taunts over beam and television, recruiting enthusiastic verdant jihadis to his cause illustrious plotting new attacks.

Meanwhile, grandeur CIA and other intelligence administration searched in vain for enthrone hiding place.

Finally, in August 2010, they traced bin Laden finish a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, about 35 miles from Islamabad. For months, CIA agents watched the house while drones photographed it from the sky.

At long last, it was time to have in stock. On May 2, 2011 (May 1 in the United States), a team of Navy SEALs burst into the compound. They found the al Qaeda ruler in an upstairs bedroom considerable a pistol and an ringe rifle nearby and shot him in the head and trunk, killing him instantly. “Justice,” voiced articulate President Obama in a televised address to the nation guarantee night, “has been done.”

Bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, became leader have a good time al Qaeda after bin Laden's death.

On July 31, 2022, he was killed in unadulterated U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, ending a two decade-long manhunt. In 2019, bin Laden's reputation, Hamza bin Laden, who abstruse been viewed as a possible successor to the al Fto leader, was killed in straight U.S. counterterrorism operation. 

Citation Information

Article Title

Osama bin Laden

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/21st-century/osama-bin-laden

Date Accessed

January 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

September 11, 2023

Original Published Date

December 16, 2009