Osama: The Life of A Terrorist

The story of one of the world's most dangerous terrorists.

When one says bin Laden, the word “terrorist” instantly comes to mind. For nearly three decades, he was the public face of global jihadism, inciting Islamist revolutions in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan. All of that was before he perpetrated 9/11, one of the worst terrorist attacks in American history.

But who was this man? What could have motivated his ghastly deeds of terrorism? 

Early life

Osama was born in Riyadh in 1957. His father, Mohammad bin Awad, was a billionaire in the construction industry who had close ties with the Saudi Crown. Mohammad’s tenth wife, a Syrian woman named Hamida, was Osama’s mother. The two divorced soon after bin Laden’s birth. Hamida was handed off to another man, named Mohammed al-Attas, who was an associate of Mohammad’s. 

Bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim. From 1968 to 1976, he attended Al-Thager Model School in Jeddah. He studied at King Abdulaziz University, probably in the field of economics, business administration, or civil engineering. Osama attended a course at Oxford in 1971. He enjoyed poetry and reading. He was fascinated by the lives of Bernard Montgomery and Charles de Gaulle. He liked soccer, and followed the English football club Arsenal. 

Wives

The 17-year-old Osama married his wife Najwa in Syria in 1974. He married many wives throughout his life, including Khadijah, Khairiah, Siham, and Amal. It is possible that he had a sixth wife, whose marriage was annulled soon after the ceremony. With his wives, he fathered as many as 26 kids, many of whom fled to Iran after 9/11. 

Political ideology

Politically, Osama espoused a jihadist ideology. He felt that the Islamic world was in civilizational crisis. To reverse this, he called for a full restoration of sharia law. This means that he rejected all secular forms of government. He was equally opposed to democracy, socialism, communism, and Arab nationalism. One could say that the sheik of terror had theologian’s blood; he took strong inspiration for the Athari school of fundamentalist Islam. Osama was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian jihadist who opposed Nasser’s secular Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Bin Laden’s main motive was a fierce opposition to US foreign policy. He incited jihad to avenge what he saw as the injustices perpetrated by the US and other non-Islamic states against Muslims globally. He called for the full withdrawal of the US from the Middle East and other Islamic countries, and sought to completely eliminate Israel. For al-Qaeda, the four enemies of Islam were the United States, Israel, Shia Muslims (meaning Iran), and heretics. 

In truly religious fashion, Osama was an obstinate opponent of technology. He refused to listen to music or drink chilled water. Oddly enough, Osama did believe in climate change, and he urged Americans to work with President Obama to mitigate its effects on humanity. 

The Soviet jihad

Osama first implemented his jihadist ideology during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. It began when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979. As part of a covert network of funding, the US aligned itself with Saudi Arabia and China to funnel money to tens of thousands of Arab mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan. This was all coordinated centrally through Pakistan’s intelligence service, called the ISI. 

Infidels in the Gulf

When Osama returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989, he was proclaimed as a hero. But having expelled the Soviets from Afghanistan, bin Laden and his fellow jihadists turned their ire toward the Saudi Crown. 

When the Saudi monarchy accepted US intervention to expel Saddam’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Osama was outraged. Al-Qaeda began to regard the Saudi regime as selling out to the American infidels, and he called for holy war. 

Bin Laden argued that, according to the Quran, non-Muslims were prohibited from setting foot on the Arabian peninsula, especially the two holy sites at Mecca and Medina. Osama tried to encourage the Saudi ulama to issue a fatwa against the Americans, but was unsuccessful. Eventually, bin Laden’s criticisms of the Saudi regime got him locked up in house arrest. He was forced into exile in 1991. 

Sudan and Afghanistan

Osama briefly ended up in Afghanistan, before establishing himself in Sudan by 1992. This was where the terrorist emir caught the attention of US intelligence, which began to surveil him. The al-Qaeda militant led his operations from his base at Khartoum. Bin Laden oversaw a merger with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a similar terrorist group that made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in 1995.

The US State Department accused Sudan of being a state sponsor of terrorism, because of Osama’s training camps in the Sudanese desert. As international pressure mounted from the US, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, Osama was forced to leave Sudan. The jihadist leader ended up back in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where he forged close ties with the Taliban regime of Mullah Mohammed Omar. 

Fatwas

In August of 1996, Osama issued a fatwa against the United States. It was titled, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. Six years after the Gulf War, the US maintained a military presence in the Arabian Peninsula to prevent any further aggression by Saddam’s Iraq. Bin Laden accused Saudi Arabia of turning itself into a colony of America and Israel. 

Bin Laden issued a second fatwa, this time in 1998. Titled Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders, Osama incited Muslims around the world to wage war against America and its allies. However, Osama’s fatwa broke with classical Sunni legal tradition, because bin Laden refused to distinguish between civilians and combatants. 

East Africa bombings

These were far from just fighting words; Osama was dead serious. Not long after his fatwas, bin Laden and a friend named Ayman al-Zawahiri orchestrated terrorist attacks against US embassies in East Africa. On August 7, 1998, truck bombs killed hundreds of people in Tanzania and Kenya. For the first time, US intelligence became alerted to the existence of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. 

In retaliation, President Clinton ordered missile strikes against bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Sudan and Afghanistan on August 20, 1998. 

By December of 1998, a shocking revelation was made. The Counterterrorist Center, which works with the Director of Central Intelligence, informed President Clinton that al-Qaeda was planning imminent attacks on the United States, including the use of pilot training to hijack aircraft. 

The stakes got even higher when, on June 7, 1999, the FBI placed bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted List. 

The War on Terror

Osama was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. “God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the Towers,” he claimed in a tape in 2004, “but after the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it.” Bin Laden went on to explain how Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982—and America’s alleged complicity in this affair—is what ultimately caused him to orchestrate the terrorist attack. 

In the aftermath of 9/11, Osama went into hiding. He was last seen in December of 2001, at the Battle of Tora Bora, where he evaded capture. He would not be brought to justice for another ten years. During this intermission, he remained completely out of the public eye. Despite initial denials of his involvement in 9/11, bin Laden admitted to personally directing the 19 hijackers in a 2004 tape. 

In April of 2011, President Obama ordered a covert kill or capture mission against the terrorist leader. On May 1, the White House announced that SEAL Team Six had successfully assassinated bin Laden at his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan. 

Conclusion

Bin Laden’s biography is intensely interesting to study, because it has numerous lessons for present-day, ongoing conflicts. By studying his life, one gains priceless insight into the psychology and motivation of jihadists around the world. 

First of all, Osama was a religious fanatic. From a young age, he was steeped in the superstitions of his Middle Eastern upbringing. While many people of various faiths, including Islam, have distanced themselves from such extremism, no one can seriously deny that Islamic theology played a tantamount role in Osama’s acts of violence. The Old Testament, which is regarded as revealed Scripture by all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity alike—explicitly preaches a doctrine of warfare against nonbelievers. In the Bible, the practice of other religions is equated with idolatry; the death penalty is prescribed for such offenses. The Abrahamic faiths simply don’t allow for religious toleration. Osama is just a modern-day example of an Old Testament prophet, waging holy war against the enemies of Yahweh. To quote a popular paraphrasing of Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

Second of all, Osama’s hatred of America came from the US-Israel alliance. Bin Laden explicitly stated his intention for attacking the US, and it was not the Quran’s imperative to wage jihad. Instead, it came from Osama’s deep resentment and dissatisfaction with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Neither side of the Arab-Israel conflict is completely blameless. As a Jewish state, Israel’s overt affiliation with the Jewish religion and ethnicity does little to resolve the problem of sectarianism. Furthermore, Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories has been accused of apartheid by various international groups. Whether or not those accusations are true, the US still has to consider the ramifications of its special relationship with Israel. Believe it or not, the US was once beloved by the Arab world. Take the Suez Crisis of 1956, for example. When America took a principled opposition against the invasion of Egypt by three colonial powers—Britain, France, and Israel—many Arabs came to deeply respect the United States. Jihadist leaders like Osama thrive on these Arab feelings of Western betrayal and anti-colonialism, however misguided those may be. 

Third of all, Osama did not become a terrorist because of poverty or economic necessity. He was not poor at all! He had tens of millions of dollars at his disposal. Bin Laden is best described as a disgruntled Saudi prince who, due to a strange mixture of religious fundamentalism and ethnic solidarity, waged war against the American-led international order. His impressive finances gave him the means of spreading his hateful jihadist fervor across the globe. 

Fourth and finally, one cannot understand Osama without recognizing the international—even civilizational—scope of his ambitions. Bin Laden was not a nationalist, pure and simple. He spent his terrorist career moving from country to country. For Osama, no one owed any allegiance to a nation-state; his political alliances were purely pragmatic. He was not a Saudi nationalist, or an Arab nationalist, or even an Afghan nationalist. To him, nations and ethnicities didn’t really matter much; only religion mattered. The international community of pious Muslims, called the Ummah, transcended all other forms of social and political allegiance. The militant jihadism of bin Laden was designed as a response to the geopolitical inferiority of the Islamic world. The collapse of the Ottoman caliphate at the hands of the Western powers was a major defeat for the Arabs, and Osama exploited this to his advantage. He sought to revive Islam’s golden age, not through the elegant rationalism of Averroes, Avicenna, and al-Nafis, but rather by the mighty sword of Islam’s blood-stained history. 

These are just a handful of lessons that can be learned from Osama’s life. Western security analysts would do well to understand how the terrorists actually think. Failure to do so has only resulted in reckless foreign policy blunders in the already-convoluted web of Middle Eastern politics.