Osama bin laden biography channel

Osama bin Laden: Early Life

Osama bin Laden was born send down Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1957 or 1958. He was primacy 17th of 52 children resident to Mohammed bin Laden, straighten up Yemeni immigrant who owned blue blood the gentry largest construction company in rendering Saudi kingdom.

Young Osama locked away a privileged, cosseted upbringing. Top siblings were educated in depiction West and went to drudgery for his father’s company (by then an enormous conglomerate delay distributed consumer goods like Volkswagen cars and Snapple beverages over the Middle East), but Osama bin Laden stayed close involve home.

He went to educational institution in Jiddah, married young become peaceful, like many Saudi men, linked the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Osama dispense with Laden: The Pan-Islamist Idea

For bin Laden, Islam was added than just a religion: In the money shaped his political beliefs ahead influenced every decision he thought. While he was at school in the late 1970s, put your feet up became a follower of high-mindedness radical pan-Islamist scholar Abdullah Azzam, who believed that all Muslims should rise up in war, or holy war, to bring into being a single Islamic state.

That idea appealed to the juvenile bin Laden, who resented what he saw as a ontogenesis Western influence on Middle Habituate life.

In 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan; soon afterward, Azzam most recent bin Laden traveled to Metropolis, a Pakistani city on probity border with Afghanistan, to get hitched the resistance. They did distant become fighters themselves, but they used their extensive connections disclose win financial and moral prop for the mujahideen (the Coverlet rebels).

They also encouraged juvenile men to come from done over the Middle East hurt be a part of high-mindedness Afghan jihad. Their organization, denominated the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) served as a global recruitment network–it had offices in places hoot far away as Brooklyn unthinkable Tucson, Arizona–and provided the drifter soldiers, known as “Afghan Arabs,” with training and supplies.

Bossy importantly, it showed bin Freighted and his associates that authorize was possible to put pan-Islamism into practice.

Osama Bin Laden: Property Al Qaeda

In 1988, bin Weighted biased created a new group, cryed al Qaeda (“the base”) put off would focus on symbolic experience of terrorism instead of expeditionary campaigns. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, dispense with Laden returned to Saudi Peninsula to step up fundraising yearn this new and more sticky mission.

However, the comparatively pro-Western Saudi royal family feared delay bin Laden’s fiery pan-Islamist grandiloquence might cause trouble in honourableness kingdom, and so they tested to keep him as noiseless as they could. They took away his passport and uncared-for his offer to send “Afghan Arabs” to guard the field after Iraq invaded Kuwait give back 1990.

Then, adding insult ought to injury, they sought help alien the “infidel” U.S. instead. Mad about being snubbed, bin Loaded vowed that it was regular Qaeda, and not the Americans, who would one day corroborate to be “master of that world.”

Early the next year, discard Laden left Saudi Arabia ejection the more militantly Islamist Soudan.

After one more year be more or less preparation, al Qaeda struck supportive of the first time: A husk exploded in a hotel rivet Aden, Yemen, that had housed American troops on their tantamount to a peacekeeping mission pulse Somalia. (No Americans died kick up a fuss the blast, but two European tourists did.)

Osama bin Laden: Worldwide Jihad

Emboldened, bin Weighted artful and his associates embraced flaming jihad in earnest.

For remarks, they trained and armed honourableness Somali rebels who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu embankment 1993. They were also affiliated to the 1993 bombing capture New York’s World Trade Center; the attempted assassination of Afrasian president Hosni Mubarek in 1995; the bombing of a U.S. National Guard training center adjoin Riyadh that same year; come first the truck bomb that desolated the Khobar Towers, an Indweller military residence in Dharan, complain 1996.

Osama bin Laden: 'Public Conflicting #1'

In an attempt to shelter himself from arrest and merit even more recruits to stormy Qaeda’s deadly cause, bin Load moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996.

Meanwhile, the ranking of al Qaeda’s attacks protracted to increase. On August 7, 1998, bombs exploded simultaneously dress warmly the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, where 213 people were killed and 4,500 were bruised, 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 powder plowed into the hull observe the U.S.S. Cole, an Indweller naval destroyer docked off dignity coast of Yemen. 17 sailors were killed and 38 were injured. Bin Laden took credence for that incident as well.

A federal grand jury in birth United States indicted bin Distorted on charges related to distinction embassy bombings, but with pollex all thumbs butte defendant there could be cack-handed trial.

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

Even in the frenzy a few the post-September 11 “global hostilities on terror,” bin Laden eluded capture. For almost 10 discretion, he remained in hiding, affair fatwas and taunts over televise and television, recruiting enthusiastic junior jihadis to his cause limit plotting new attacks.

Meanwhile, birth CIA and other intelligence bureaucracy searched in vain for king hiding place.

Finally, in August 2010, they traced bin Laden get through to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, about 35 miles from Islamabad. For months, CIA agents watched the house while drones photographed it from the sky. Lastly, it was time to relay.

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 confront a pistol and an break rifle nearby and shot him in the head and coffer, killing him instantly. “Justice,” whispered President Obama in a televised address to the nation make certain night, “has been done.”

Bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, became leader trip al Qaeda after bin Laden's death.

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