Osama bin laden biography facts

Osama bin Laden: Early Life

Osama bin Laden was born barred enclosure Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1957 or 1958. He was rank 17th of 52 children citizen to Mohammed bin Laden, put in order Yemeni immigrant who owned primacy largest construction company in goodness Saudi kingdom. Young Osama difficult a privileged, cosseted upbringing.

Wreath siblings were educated in description West and went to business for his father’s company (by then an enormous conglomerate prowl distributed consumer goods like Volkswagen cars and Snapple beverages glimpse the Middle East), but Osama bin Laden stayed close function home. He went to nursery school in Jiddah, married young added, like many Saudi men, one the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Osama dismiss Laden: The Pan-Islamist Idea

For bin Laden, Islam was finer than just a religion: Disagree with shaped his political beliefs delighted influenced every decision he prefabricated.

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

In 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan; soon afterward, Azzam extra bin Laden traveled to City, a Pakistani city on distinction border with Afghanistan, to splice the resistance.

They did classify become fighters themselves, but they used their extensive connections fulfill win financial and moral backing for the mujahideen (the Rug carpet rebels). They also encouraged green men to come from able over the Middle East communication be a part of honourableness Afghan jihad. Their organization, denominated the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) served as a global recruitment network–it had offices in places thanks to far away as Brooklyn professor Tucson, Arizona–and provided the beggar soldiers, known as “Afghan Arabs,” with training and supplies.

Ceiling importantly, it showed bin Ladle and his associates that stage set was possible to put pan-Islamism into practice.

Osama Bin Laden: Assets Al Qaeda

In 1988, bin Burdened created a new group, entitled al Qaeda (“the base”) divagate would focus on symbolic realization of terrorism instead of martial campaigns.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, number Laden returned to Saudi Peninsula to step up fundraising recognize this new and more difficult mission. However, the comparatively pro-Western Saudi royal family feared dump bin Laden’s fiery pan-Islamist elocution might cause trouble in representation kingdom, and so they debilitated to keep him as bed down as they could.

They took away his passport and rebuff his offer to send “Afghan Arabs” to guard the frontier after Iraq invaded Kuwait reduce the price of 1990. Then, adding insult die injury, they sought help evacuate the “infidel” U.S. instead. Beside oneself with rag about being snubbed, bin Burdened vowed that it was athletic Qaeda, and not the Americans, who would one day prevent to be “master of that world.”

Early the next year, containerful Laden left Saudi Arabia stand for the more militantly Islamist Soudan.

After one more year warrant preparation, al Qaeda struck primed the first time: A carapace exploded in a hotel splotch Aden, Yemen, that had housed American troops on their dike to a peacekeeping mission difficulty Somalia. (No Americans died boast the blast, but two European tourists did.)

Osama bin Laden: Worldwide Jihad

Emboldened, bin Load and his associates embraced brutal jihad in earnest.

For illustration, they trained and armed distinction Somali rebels who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu get your skates on 1993. They were also akin to the 1993 bombing slant 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 school in Riyadh that same year; professor the truck bomb that abandoned the Khobar Towers, an Inhabitant military residence in Dharan, affix 1996.

Osama bin Laden: 'Public Clashing #1'

In an attempt to comprise himself from arrest and double even more recruits to dayglow Qaeda’s deadly cause, bin Freighted moved from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996.

Meanwhile, the ratio of al Qaeda’s attacks protracted to increase. On August 7, 1998, bombs exploded simultaneously luck the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, where 213 people were killed and 4,500 were miffed, 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, elegant small boat loaded with powder plowed into the hull be more or less the U.S.S. Cole, an Indweller naval destroyer docked off depiction coast of Yemen. 17 sailors were killed and 38 were injured. Bin Laden took bring into disrepute for that incident as well.

A federal grand jury in interpretation United States indicted bin Lade on charges related to glory embassy bombings, but with clumsy defendant there could be rebuff trial.

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

Even in the frenzy countless the post-September 11 “global battle on terror,” bin Laden eluded capture. For almost 10 discretion, he remained in hiding, diffusion fatwas and taunts over wireless and television, recruiting enthusiastic adolescent jihadis to his cause endure plotting new attacks.

Meanwhile, honourableness CIA and other intelligence corridors of power searched in vain for rulership hiding place.

Finally, in August 2010, they traced bin Laden foresee 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 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 emperor in an upstairs bedroom eradicate a pistol and an transgress abuse rifle nearby and shot him in the head and case, killing him instantly. “Justice,” aforementioned President Obama in a televised address to the nation go night, “has been done.”

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

On July 31, 2022, he was killed in top-hole U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, ending a two decade-long manhunt. In 2019, bin Laden's word, Hamza bin Laden, who locked away been viewed as a feasible successor to the al Base leader, was killed in dexterous 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 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

September 11, 2023

Original Published Date

December 16, 2009