Titans of History

Osama bin Laden, at the wedding of his son following the murder of seventeen US soldiers in the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, October 12, 2000

Osama bin Laden was the fanatical mastermind of the murderously spectacular 9/11 plane-bomb attacks against the Twin Towers and Pentagon that killed thousands of innocent people in the name of an intolerant and dogmatic distortion of the Islamic faith. Promoting a jihadi ideology that glories in killing and endorses a nihilistic cult of suicide, he aimed to eliminate American and Western power, wipe out Israel and restore a caliphate over any part of the world ever ruled by Islam. But his only real practical policy was terrorizing innocent people and destroying tolerant democratic societies, using impressionable youths as living bombs against victims chosen solely because they are citizens of the free, democratic West.

Bin Laden was born in Riyadh in 1957, the son of Muhammad Awad bin Laden—who acquired huge wealth after his construction company secured exclusive rights from the Saudi royal family to religious building projects within the country—and his tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas, subsequently divorced. The only son of that marriage, though with numerous siblings on his father’s side, Osama—after his mother’s remarriage to Muhammad al-Attas—was raised as a Sunni Muslim, displaying uncompromising piety from an early age. He studied at an elite school and then King Abdulaziz University, marrying his first wife, Najwa Ghanem, in 1974. He has had another four wives, divorcing two, and has fathered between twelve and twenty-four children.

In 1979, bin Laden, together with thousands of other devout jihadists—known collectively as the mujahedeen—traveled to Afghanistan to repel the Soviet Union’s invasion of the country. He joined fellow militant Abdullah Azzam and established Maktab al-Khadamat, a paramilitary organization devoted to fighting what he saw as jihad. The war was also backed and funded by the United States, ever fearful of Soviet expansion, and when bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990, he was widely feted for having resisted the forces of communism. Already, though, he was making plans for a new organization to further his goal of driving America (“the Great Satan”) out of the Muslim world. It would become known as Al-Qaeda (the Base).

Following the Gulf War of 1991, bin Laden denounced the Saudi royal family for allowing US troops to be stationed in the country, upon which, in 1992, they expelled him. He moved to Sudan, from where, working with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), he masterminded the December 29, 1992 attack on Aden in which two people were killed. Following an unsuccessful assassination attempt, however, on President Mubarak of Egypt in 1995, the EIJ were expelled from Sudan, prompting bin Laden to return to Afghanistan, where he allied himself with the Taliban, bankrolling training camps for thousands of jihadists.

In 1997, he sponsored the infamous Luxor massacre of November 17, which killed sixty-two civilians, and the following year Al-Qaeda bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing nearly 300 people. A more sinister trend emerged in October 2000 when, once more in Aden, a suicide bomber attacked the US Navy ship USS Cole, killing seventeen. Such bombing swiftly became Al-Qaeda’s weapon of choice, militant young Muslims being indoctrinated to seek martyrdom. Later the same year, bin Laden, with his lieutenant Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri—whom he had first met during the Afghan war—co-signed a fatwa declaring that Muslims had a duty to kill Americans and their allies.

Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri subsequently concocted their most ambitious plan yet. Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, two teams of jihadists boarded four passenger jets at airports in Washington DC, Boston and Newark. Authorities learned shortly afterward that the planes had been hijacked by nineteen Middle Eastern men. At 8:46 a.m. local time, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the north of the Twin Towers in New York, the biggest buildings in Manhattan. Then, as television cameras were trained on the unfolding disaster, United Airlines Flight 175 slammed at 9:02 a.m. into the south tower. Thirty-five minutes later, news filtered through that American Airlines Flight 77 had crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia, and at 10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93, destined for the White House, was brought down over Pennsylvania by heroic passengers who had heard the fate of the other planes as they frantically called their relatives on onboard telephones.