Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden, born in 1957, Saudi Arabian multimillionaire and founder of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, which was responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. In 1999 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placed bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in connection with the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Little is known in the West about bin Laden’s life. He inherited his great personal wealth from his father, whose construction company prospered through close connections with the Saudi royal family.

Bin Laden first came to international attention in the 1980s in Afghanistan for his role in the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation forces. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. During his youth bin Laden had embraced fundamentalist Islamic teachings, and he regarded the Soviet invasion as an unforgivable assault on Muslim land. To aid the resistance, bin Laden provided funds and supplies, built guerrilla training camps, trenches, and roads, and recruited and transported large numbers of military volunteers from Arab nations. The United States also aided the Afghan rebels who fought the Soviet invaders. In 1988 near the end of the war, bin Laden established al-Qaeda (Arabic for “the Base”), an organization that, according to U.S. officials, connects and coordinates fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups around the world.

After Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia. In the following year Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the United States responded by organizing an international coalition against Iraq in what became the Persian Gulf War. During and after this war Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy allowed the United States to station troops in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was angered by the presence of the U.S. military, which he considers an enemy of Islam, near Mecca and Medina, Saudi cities that are two of Islam’s holiest sites. He led criticism of the Saudi monarchy and in 1992 left Saudi Arabia for Sudan, where a fundamentalist Islamic regime had taken power. Two years later, the Saudi government revoked his citizenship and froze his assets in Saudi Arabia.

Many veterans of the Afghan war, who had become known as Arab Afghans, joined bin Laden in Sudan. There he formed several businesses, including a road-construction company, and reportedly set up training camps and strengthened the international structure of al-Qaeda with help from the Arab Afghans. In 1996, under pressure from the U.S. and Saudi governments, Sudan expelled bin Laden, and he went into hiding in Afghanistan.

In 1996 bin Laden issued the first of several calls for a jihad, or holy war, against the United States and its presence abroad. According to the U.S. State Department, al-Qaeda has stated its goals as driving U.S. forces from the Arabian Peninsula, overthrowing the Saudi government, and supporting Islamic revolutionary groups around the world. Bin Laden denounces U.S. activities in the Middle East—such as its leadership in the Gulf War and its support of Israel—as a continuation of the Crusades. In that series of wars during the Middle Ages, Western Christians sought to capture the Holy Lands from Muslims. United States officials believe that al-Qaeda funds and coordinates terrorist cells (small teams responsible for preparing and executing terrorist acts) in dozens of countries around the world.

Al-Qaeda’s first confirmed attack was the bombing in 1995 of a joint Saudi-American military training center in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, which caused the deaths of five Americans. This attack was followed by the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and a suicide bombing in 2000 of the USS Cole. Officials of the U.S. government named bin Laden as the primary suspect behind the hijacking of airplanes that were deliberately crashed into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001. The United States invaded Afghanistan shortly after the attack and ousted the Taliban government that sheltered bin Laden and al-Qaeda. However, bin Laden eluded capture. In 2002 an audiotape believed to have been made by bin Laden took responsibility for the September 11 attacks.

In October 2004, shortly before the U.S. presidential election, bin Laden appeared in a videotape delivered to the al-Jazeera television network. In it, bin Laden warned the American people, “If you play havoc with our security, we play havoc with yours.” Bin Laden said he was motivated to attack the World Trade Center towers because of the U.S. alliance with Israel. “The events which affected me directly go back to 1982…when America gave the Israelis the green light to invade Lebanon.…As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me that the unjust should suffer the same—that the towers in America must be destroyed so that America gets a taste of what we went through, so that it will stop killing our children and women.”

Just days before the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, bin Laden issued another videotape message, his first since 2004. Intelligence experts verified the voice on the tape as that of bin Laden, and the taped message contained references to recent events. In it bin Laden railed against capitalism and global corporations as the chief cause of war and military conflict while maintaining that democracy was a failed system. In late September 2007 bin Laden issued an audiotape calling for the ouster of Pakistan’s leader at the time, Pervez Musharraf. The message condemned Musharraf for a crackdown on Islamic militants associated with the Red Mosque in Islāmābād in July 2007.

Bin Laden focused attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2008 and 2009. In May 2008, on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s creation, bin Laden issued an audio message that called on his followers to help liberate Palestine, the land that was divided by a United Nations mandate in 1948 (see Palestine, Modern). In January 2009 bin Laden issued an audiotape message that condemned Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip and took note of the global financial crisis (see Banking).