The man known to history as Osama
bin Laden was born on the 10th of March 1957. His birthplace is a matter
of dispute, with international police organisations believing for years that he was
born in the city of Jeddah in western Arabia, but it is now generally accepted that
he was born in the Saudi capital Riyadh. His father was Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, who
was born in Yemen in 1908. When he was a child his family had emigrated from Yemen, north to the
Red Coast of western Arabia in a region which now forms part of Saudi Arabia, but which was at the
time disputed between the Ottoman Empire and the royal house of Saud. In the 1930s he had emerged
as a successful construction contractor working for the first ruler of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz
Ibn Saud. Under the patronage of the royal family the company he founded, the Saudi Binladin
Group, emerged as an enormously successful and wealthy construction company in the fledgling
nation, even as it became the world’s largest oil exporter and an extremely wealthy nation for
successful families such as the Bin Ladens. Osama’s mother was Hamida al-Attas, a native
Syrian who came from a family of successful citrus farmers operating around the port city of
Latakia. She became Mohammed’s tenth wife in 1956 when she married the 48 year old millionaire when
she was just 14 years of age. A year later Osama was born. He was their only child and Mohammed and
Hamida separated soon afterwards. This has caused speculation that they never actually married and
Hamida was just briefly Mohammed’s concubine. Osama’s youth and upbringing was one
of privilege. By the time he was born his father was a multi-millionaire, though his
wealth would have stretched into the billions if adjusted for inflation today. Shortly after
his parents’ divorce Osama’s mother remarried to a business associate of Mohammed bin Laden’s,
Mohammed al-Attas. They had four children together in the 1960s, three boys and one girl. Osama
was sent to live with them and so he grew up in his mother’s and step-father’s household
with several step-siblings. But it would be wrong to suggest that he was estranged from his
father. Mohammed bin Laden played a major role in his son’s development, instilling in him much of
his conservative religious fervour. Beginning in 1968 Osama attended the Al-Thager Model School,
a secondary school in Jeddah. In 1971 he gained direct experience of the western world when
he was sent to Oxford University in Britain to undertake an English language course.
Beyond this he is believed to have displayed some traits typical of young boys during
his childhood and early teenage years, being a football fan who followed Arsenal football
club and showed an interest in military history. For all that Osama’s younger years had an air of
normality to it whereas there is no doubting that his background was anything but normal. By the
1960s the Saudi Binladin Group was one of the most significant corporations in the entire Arab world.
Its ties to the Saudi royal family were extremely extensive and the company had even been granted
the contracts to manage the ongoing repairs of the mosques in the two most holy cities in the Islamic
world, Mecca and Medina. In 1964 the company acquired the contract to re-clad the exterior of
the Dome of the Rock, the most important Muslim religious site in Jerusalem. By that time
the ties between Mohammed bin Laden and the Saudi royal family had become extremely extensive,
however in 1967 Mohammed was killed at 59 years of age in an airplane accident in Saudi Arabia when
the pilot misjudged the plane’s landing. Despite this setback the Saudi Binladin Group continued
to prosper under the leadership of several of Mohammed’s sons from his earlier marriages and
indeed as it diversified in the 1970s and 1980s it became a multi-billion dollar company with
lucrative contracts all over the Middle East. Osama was not involved in the Saudi Binladin
Group’s business activities in the years after his father’s death for the simple reason that
he was too young. Instead he was continuing his education. When he was nineteen years
of age, in 1976, Osama entered the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where he began
studying economics and business administration, no doubt with a view to taking up some sort of
position within the family business in years to come. Already however he had begun to stray
from an interest in business, with reports by people who knew Bin Laden there, stating
that his primary interests were in religion, poetry and Arab literature. He certainly didn’t
need to worry about money, his education and future work as Osama stood to inherit upwards
of $30 million dollars from his father’s estate. He was also married by this time, having wed his
first wife, a Syrian woman named Najwa Ghanem in 1974 when he was just 17 years old. She was
also his first cousin on his mother’s side and the first of at least five wives. Osama would
father over two dozen children during his life. Clearly the mid-to-late 1970s were a formative
period in Osama’s life and his ideological views, though much of the evidence concerning these
years is frustratingly patchy and sometimes contradictory. Nevertheless the broad thrust
of his views is clear. Osama began to develop a pan-Islamist ideology from early on in his
life, a movement which espouses the idea that Muslims in all nations should be unified in
defence and promotion of their faith. This view harks back to the age of the Arab Caliphate
which between the eighth and eleventh centuries ruled most of the Middle East, North Africa and
adjoining regions from the Caliphate’s capital of Baghdad. Central to pan-Islamism in the 1960s
and 1970s was a commitment to reducing and if possible ending western involvement in the Middle
East, a region which had been dominated by the British and French since the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War and wherein the United States was becoming an
increasingly interested party even as British and French influence declined. The Middle Eastern
world which Osama grew up in was also one in which the new state of Israel, backed strongly by
the United States, was frequently at war with its Muslim neighbours, notably the Six Day War
of 1967 and the War of Yom Kippur in 1973. A particularly strong influence on Osama in
the 1970s were the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamic scholar and religious and
political theorist who had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood until his arrest and execution
in 1966. Qutb’s extensive writings were widely taught in schools and universities across the
Muslim world from the 1940s onwards and included arguments that Islamic jihad, or struggle against
evil, was entirely justifiable in the interests of a new Islamic Caliphate and that Sharia Law, the
law based on a rigid interpretation of the Quran should be imposed across all Muslim states. A
strain of virulent anti-western sentiment also ran through much of Qutb’s writings, with him
denouncing the United States as materialistic, godless and lacking in spiritual values
of any kind. If there was one defining influence on Bin Laden’s ideological beliefs in
the 1960s and 1970s it was Qutb. Significantly, Qutb’s brother Muhammad, who became a passionate
promoter of his brother’s ideas was a teacher at Abdulaziz University in Jeddah while Osama
was a student there in the late 1970s.
Osama finished his studies at Abdulaziz in 1979.
It is unclear if he finished with a degree or not. The timing was significant, as the Islamic
world was in turmoil at this moment. Firstly, the Iranian Revolution of 1978 had seen the
western-backed Shah removed from power in Iran and the creation of a new Islamic state headed by
the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. While this was occurring in Iran to the north-east in Afghanistan
the country was descending into political chaos. In 1978 the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan or PDPA had seized power and begun to establish a socialist, non-religious state.
The PDPA had long-standing ties with the Soviet Union and indeed Russia had always had an interest
in Afghanistan dating back to the mid-nineteenth century when the country had been an important
buffer state between Russia and the British presence in India and Pakistan. Yet there is no
major evidence that the Soviets were the driving force behind the PDPA’s seizure of power in
Afghanistan in 1978. However, they did forge close ties with the new Marxist regime in Kabul once it
was in control of the country. Thus, once Islamist groups and other opponents of the PDPA began
revolts against the new government in the course of 1978 and 1979 the Marxist regime soon called
on Moscow for help. Limited support was sent at first, but as the situation for the PDPA continued
to deteriorate the Soviet Union effectively invaded Afghanistan in the finals days of December
1979. By early 1980 thousands of Soviet tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers had been deployed
as Moscow occupied the main cities of the country. Even before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
bin Laden had travelled to Pakistan very quickly after finishing his studies at King Abdulaziz
University. Pakistan played and continues to play a significant role in international jihadist
movements of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Ostensibly the country has claimed to
be opposed to Islamic fundamentalism operating on its soil, but for decades it has turned a
blind eye to this in actuality, in large part because Muslim Pakistan has been involved in
a long-running Cold War with its bitter enemy, Hindu India, since the British Raj was split up
along religious lines in 1947. Pakistan would play a role in Bin Laden’s life over the next
three decades. Once he arrived there in 1979 he quickly came under the wing of Abdullah Azzam, a
Palestinian-born jihadist who was an influence on many of the most senior Islamic terrorists of the
late twentieth century. Azzam encouraged Bin Laden shortly afterwards to join the tens of thousands
of Muslim men who were heading to Afghanistan to fight against the atheistic Soviet invaders. These
individuals became known as Mujahidin, a term which translates roughly as ‘one who engages in
holy war’ or jihad. In the early 1980s bin Laden began using his inherited fortune to recruit and
train Mujahidin in Pakistan before they headed into the mountainous regions of Afghanistan,
though this financing paled in comparison with the billions of dollars spent by the United States
and the Saudi Arabian governments in equipping and training anti-Soviet forces in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan which were used as their proxies to fight the Soviet invasion. Moreover, while
statements about the extent to which Bin Laden was financed and trained himself by American agents
at this time have been exaggerated, there is no doubt that he did have some limited contacts with
US Special Forces in the region in the 1980s.
The war which bin Laden became involved
in from 1980 onwards developed much like conflicts in Afghanistan have for the last two
centuries. With 80,000 troops committed by the Soviets by the end of 1980 and far superior
weaponry they were able to occupy and hold the main cities and prop up the Marxist PDPA.
But the Mujahidin groups, of which there were more moderate and fundamentalist branches, were
largely in control of the regions outside of the city. The Hindu Kush Mountains which dominate
much of the country, particularly in the east and north are ideal territory for the waging
of guerrilla warfare and this is exactly the shape the Soviet-Afghan War took on in the
1980s. The fighting became extremely bloody as the Soviets used indiscriminate bombing and
destruction of rural villages to try to root out the insurgents. By the mid-1980s upwards of four
million people out of Afghanistan’s population of 14 million had been displaced, with hundreds of
thousands becoming refugees in Pakistan and Iran, while the conflict resulted in at least half
a million deaths, and perhaps as many as three times this amount. It soon became known as
the Soviet equivalent of what the Vietnam War had been for America as the Russians
faced an enemy which they could not defeat. Throughout this period bin Laden was a major
figure in the Mujahidin movement in Afghanistan. At first he had begun supplying goods to the
fighters in the country and also facilitating the movement of individuals who wanted to take
up arms against the Soviets from his native Saudi Arabia to Pakistan where they were trained and
equipped before they were sent north. Throughout these years bin Laden moved between Pakistan
and the Mujahidin strongholds in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. In 1984 he and his mentor
Abdullah Azzam established Maktab al-Khidamat, an organisation which aimed to raise funds from
both within the Arab world and the western world to continue fighting the war against the
Soviets. This funding was then used to purchase weapons and train Mujahidin. By 1986
the network had trained hundreds of fighters who were based in eastern Afghanistan at bin
Laden’s base known as Al-Masada, the Lion’s Den. These led the Mujahidin action against the
Soviets and the Marxist regime at the Battle of Jaji in the late spring and early summer
of 1987. The battle was ultimately of little strategic significance in the wider war, but
it gained Bin Laden a significant reputation amongst the Mujahidin and within the wider
Arab world, in part owing to the reports on the battle produced by an emerging Saudi
journalist by the name of Jamal Khashoggi, with whom bin Laden was associated, but who held very
different political and religious views to him. The establishment of Maktab al-Khidamat was
significant in the 1980s as it laid the groundwork for the jihadist movement with which bin Laden
has become synonymous. As the war in Afghanistan headed towards inexorable defeat for the Soviets
and the Marxist regime which they propped up in the late 1980s, thoughts turned to the future
of the organisation. Some members wanted it to remain a moderate entity which continued the
initiative against the Soviets, but Bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam and others were opposed to this
and believed that Maktab al-Khidamat should be transformed into a larger organisation which would
seek to continue the expulsion of non-Arab powers from the Arab and Muslim world. Ultimately
this more extremist wing of the movement resulted in Bin Laden and Azzam establishing
a new organisation in 1988 known as Al-Qaeda, meaning ‘The Base’ or ‘The Foundation’.
In time it would become the largest jihadist organisation in the world and is
notorious around the world as such today.
Al-Qaeda’s goal from its inception was to begin
waging holy war or jihad against non-Muslims anywhere in the traditional Muslim world, that is
the Middle East, Lower Central Asia, the Maghreb in North Africa and also more peripheral
parts of the Muslim world such as Somalia, Mali and Nigeria, Sub-Saharan Africa and Muslim
regions further to the east in Indonesia and elsewhere. Much of its ideological framework
centred on removing American influence from the Middle East and also destroying the state of
Israel, which it perceived as a western enclave in the Levant. Over time the group began to
believe it needed to incite a major war against the United States in order to radicalise the
Muslim world against the kafir or non-Muslims. Because the organisation could not hope to engage
in outright conflict early on, its modus operandi during its early years would be terrorist tactics.
Additionally, Al-Qaeda viewed moderate Muslims as having wavered from traditional Islam and it
wished to establish a rigid form of Islamic rule across the Muslim world, one based on Sharia
Law and a literal interpretation of the Quran. By the time Al-Qaeda was established in 1988 the
war in Afghanistan was winding down already. Upon becoming leader of the Soviet Union in 1985,
Mikhail Gorbachev publicly stated that it was his intention to bring Soviet involvement in the
country to an end. But much like it took America years to fully extricate itself from Vietnam, the
Soviets could not pull out overnight. Indeed in the short term there was a significant increase
in the number of Soviet troops on the ground in Afghanistan as Moscow attempted to win the war
quickly through a troop surge. This did not meet with success as Ronald Reagan’s administration
continued to send significant amounts of military and financial aid to the Mujahidin. Indeed
once they were equipped with Stinger missiles to shoot down Soviet helicopters the Mujahidin
guerrilla war entered a period of unprecedented success for the insurgents. Eventually peace
accords were signed by the Afghan government, the Soviet Union, the US and Pakistan in
1988 and in 1989 the last Soviet troops were withdrawn. In the years that followed
the Marxist regime began to lose ever greater amounts of ground to the Mujahidin groups
and eventually collapsed in 1992. But no sooner was the communist regime out of the
way than the various Mujahidin groups turned on each other. Four years of civil war would
follow before one group, known as the Taliban, emerged victorious in 1996, though they would
never acquire complete control of the country and indeed much of the north was held into the late
1990s and early 2000s by the Northern Alliance. In the aftermath of the Soviet-Afghan War Bin
Laden initially returned to his native Saudi Arabia in 1989. He received a hero’s welcome for
his role in having helped to oust the Russians from Afghanistan. Back in the Arabian Peninsula
he began working with the Saudi Binladin Group, his family’s business, in an effort to
leverage its economic might and business ties to help grow Al-Qaeda. In tandem he
began meeting with other leading members of the Islamic jihadist movement in Egypt
and elsewhere. During this time relations between bin Laden and the Saudi government
began to deteriorate. Bin Laden was bent on developing an ever more confrontational path
against non-Muslims, while the Saudi government continued to foster its position as a key
American ally in the Middle East. A point of conflict which arose between Bin Laden and the
Saudi regime was over the South Yemen Civil War. Bin Laden wished for Saudi Arabia to intervene
directly to oust the Soviet-backed Yemeni Socialist Party, but the royal government
in Riyadh blocked his efforts to do so.
Another issue involving another neighbour
of Saudi Arabia was soon to cause friction between Bin Laden and the Saudi government in
ways which would ultimately sever relations between him and the Saudi royal family.
On the 2nd of August 1990 Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq who had spent much
of the 1980s fighting a war against Iran in which he was heavily supported by the United
States, invaded the small Gulf State of Kuwait, one of the richest nations per capita on earth
and one which Iraq owed billions of dollars to, which it had borrowed to finance its war
against Iran in the 1980s. The invasion, which saw the small city state conquered within
two days, caused international uproar and within weeks the United States was building a coalition
of military allies to launch a counter-invasion of Iraq, one which included Britain, France,
Germany and dozens of other countries. It was also supported by several Arab and Muslim
countries, notably Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. By the autumn of 1990, as negotiations to
find a peaceful settlement were still underway, American troops began travelling to the Middle
East for a military build-up. They headed primarily for Saudi Arabia which was to be used as
the staging post for the liberation of Kuwait and the attack on Iraq if negotiations failed. That
is exactly what happened, and so what was termed Operation Desert Storm by the US military
was initiated on the 16th of January 1991. Bin Laden was outraged from the very beginning
of the military build-up as the Saudi government agreed to a proposal by the US Secretary of
Defence, Dick Cheney that America should intervene to prevent any extension of Iraq’s aggression
into Saudi Arabia. In response to this Bin Laden organised a meeting with the Saudi ruler,
King Fahd, and requested that the country should prohibit American troops from assembling in Saudi
Arabia and that he would use his own Arab Legion, formed in Afghanistan during the war, to defend
the Saudi border against any Iraqi incursion. This offer was spurned and the US and coalition troop
build-up intensified in the weeks that followed. As it did bin Laden began publicly denouncing the
Saudi government, engaging in a hostile propaganda campaign in which he stated that the royal family
was inviting western infidels into the kingdom which was the defender of the holiest sites
in Islam, Mecca and Medina. He also attempted to convince the Ulama, the senior Saudi religious
scholars to issue a fatwa or religious declaration condemning the American incursion into the Arabian
Peninsula. All of this combined to cause a fatal breach between Bin Laden and the Saudi government
and in 1991 they expelled him from the country. Meanwhile Operation Desert Storm had resulted
in a swift defeat of Iraq and the liberation of Kuwait in the spring of 1991. Rather than try
to pursue regime change, the US left Saddam Hussein in charge, pulled its troops out of the
region and imposed crippling sanctions on Iraq. Following his expulsion from Saudi Arabia
in 1991 Bin Laden headed for Sudan, settling there in 1992. In 1989 Colonel
Omar al-Bashir had seized power in a largely bloodless military coup. He quickly
implemented a form of Sharia Law across Sudan, making the country a suitable haven for
Bin Laden to continue his activities from. The Saudi Mujahidin was invited
to Sudan personally by Hassan al-Turabi, the speaker of the Sudanese National Assembly
and the second most powerful figure within Sudan next to Al-Bashir. Here Bin Laden was soon
established in his own well defended compound, with his followers within Al-Qaeda defending
the site with advanced weaponry. New training bases for Mujahidin were established near the
capital of Khartoum and Bin Laden had a manor in the city. As a result of the free reign he was
given in Sudan the country was designated as a state sponsor of international terrorism, as
in the aftermath of the Gulf War bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had come under increasing observation by
the American intelligence service and the State Department. Thus, while Bin Laden remained in
Sudan from 1992 to 1996 the US was monitoring his activities on an almost daily basis with flyovers
of his compound and other intelligence gathering. By 1996 US sanctions against Sudan over its
harbouring of bin Laden and many other prominent Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists had begun
to damage considerably the country’s economy. Moreover, the president, Omar al-Bashir, had
outflanked Bin Laden’s primary supporter within the government, Hassan al-Turabi. Consequently
it was made clear to Bin Laden by 1996 that Sudan was no longer a safe refuge. As a result of the
expulsion he headed that year back to Afghanistan where the Taliban had just cemented its control
over much of the country. There he became the personal guest of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the
first leader of the Taliban government after seizing power. He quickly issued a declaration
of war against the United States in August 1996 through various Islamic media channels, arguing
that the US had occupied Saudi Arabia through its military bases since 1990 and that it was the
principal supporter of Israel in the region. It has been speculated that bin Laden’s actions in
1996 were owing to the loss of much of his wealth from his family background when he left Sudan and
that the expulsion order served to radicalise bin Laden further and set him on a path of all-out
war with the government of the United States, the sanctions of which against Sudan had pressured
the Sudanese government into the stance it took. From his return to Afghanistan in 1996 onwards
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were wholly committed to confrontational terrorist actions towards
the United States in particular. These had always been a part of the organisation’s modus
operandi. As early as 1990 the Federal Bureau of Investigation had raided the home of El Sayyid
Nosair, an Al-Qaeda affiliate, in New Jersey, where they had discovered documents concerning
plans to blow-up skyscrapers in New York City. In 1993 a truck bomb was detonated outside the North
Tower of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan. The leader of the attack was Ramzi Yousef, another
known affiliate of Al-Qaeda who had trained in one of their camps in Afghanistan in the late 1980s.
In 1992 bin Laden had financed and organised the bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in the city of
Aden in Yemen. It is also widely believed that Al-Qaeda was involved in the Luxor Massacre
of November 1997 when 62 individuals, most of them western tourists, were killed
in the Egyptian city near the Valley of the Kings by six Islamic fundamentalist
gunmen. Thus, by the second half of the 1990s Al-Qaeda was stepping up its attacks
on western targets through terrorist methods. These attacks soon escalated even further. On the
7th of August 1998 simultaneous truck bombings occurred in the cities of Dar es Saalam, the
capital of Tanzania, and the capital of Kenya, Nairobi. There was no doubt which nation
the symbolic target of these attacks was, as the bombs were detonated outside the United
States embassies in the two capital cities. These were complex terrorist attacks. For instance, the
bombing in Nairobi involved 500 cylinders of TNT, while the Dar es Saalam bombing was undertaken
with two 2,000 pound bombs. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer was used to pack and direct the blast
so that it caused maximum damage to the embassies. Moreover, both bombs were detonated almost
simultaneously, resulting in the deaths of 213 people in Nairobi and 85 in Dar es Saalam, while
thousands more were injured. There is no doubt also that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were responsible
and in the immediate aftermath of the bombings bin Laden was placed on the FBI’s 10 most wanted
individuals list. It also brought Al-Qaeda to the attention of all intelligence services
in the western world, though unfortunately the risk which was posed by the terrorist
organisation was still not fully grasped.
In the aftermath of the US embassies bombings Bin Laden continued to
escalate his rhetoric against the United States. His grievances were multifarious, including US
support for Israel and for a number of regimes who were persecuting Muslims within their borders,
notably Russia’s crackdown on Chechnya, the Philippine government’s attacks on the Muslim Moro
population of the southern islands and India’s oppression of Muslims in the Kashmir region in
the north of the country. However, his foremost complaint was with the presence of American troops
in the Arabian Peninsula and their proximity to the holiest places of Islam, Mecca and Medina.
In 1998 Al-Qaeda stated that, quote, “for seven years the United States has been occupying the
lands of Islam in the holiest of place.” Thus, after the already sizeable attacks on the US
embassies Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda turned their attention to an even more substantial attack, this
time on American soil. Remarkably they decided to target the World Trade Centre in New York
City, which associates of Al-Qaeda had already tried to attack with a truck bomb back in 1993.
The second attempt would be more devastating. Late in 1998 or early 1999 bin Laden gave his
approval to the World Trade Centre initiative, which had first been proposed by an Al-Qaeda
affiliate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in 1996. The remainder of 1999 saw potential candidates
to carry out the attacks being screened in Afghanistan. A pre-requisite for the leaders were
that they needed to be able to speak English and be familiar with living in western society for
a time. A number of individuals such as Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah were
quickly selected. Another, one Hani Hanjour, was picked once it was realised that he had a
commercial pilot’s licence and was a skilled air-plane pilot. By 2000 19 individuals had been
selected and were being established in terrorist cells in the United States, operating in
Arizona, Florida and California. Final targets were selected in early 2001, with the
intention being to hijack a number of commercial airline planes and fly them into buildings in
suicide terrorist attacks. The Twin Towers, the two central buildings of the World
Trade Centre, were the primary targets, while the Pentagon in Virginia was also a target.
It is also believed there were plans to fly a fourth plane into the US Capitol Building,
the seat of government in Washington D.C. With the plan in place and terrorist cells
in position in the US to carry it out, a date was fixed for the simultaneous attacks.
The day chosen was the 11th of September 2001. It is a popular belief that this date was
chosen as September is the ninth month of the year and the date when written out using
the American dating system comes out as 911, the same number used for emergency call services
in the United States. However, it seems more likely that Bin Laden chose the 11th of September
as it was the day in 1683 that John Sobieski III, the King of Poland, arrived at Vienna, the capital
of Austria, which was under siege by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The siege was broken
by Sobieski, marking the conclusion of Ottoman expansion in Southern Europe. Prior
to it the Christian world had been under pressure for centuries from Muslim expansion
in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, but after the siege of Vienna the Christian,
western powers began to encroach into the Muslim world. Bin Laden chose this symbolic date as
a statement that these attacks on the United States by Al-Qaeda in 2001 would mark a new
turning of the tide back in favour of Islam.
On the morning of the 11th of September 2001 the
19 hijackers, operating in independent cells began to implement their orders. Five hijackers
boarded American Airlines Flight 11 which was scheduled to fly out of Logan International
Airport in Boston at 7.59am bound for Los Angeles International Airport. Five others boarded United
Airlines 175 which was making the same journey from Logan to Los Angeles. That plane took off
from the runway in Boston fifteen minutes after American Airlines Flight 11. Meanwhile six
minutes later, at 8.20am, American Airlines Flight 77 took off from Washington Dulles
International Airport in Virginia not far from Washington D.C. Five hijackers were also on
board. Finally, 22 minutes after this, at 8.42am, a fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93 departed
from Newark International Airport in New Jersey, bound for San Francisco. There were just four
hijackers on this plane. What followed was a day of infamy. Within minutes of becoming airborne
the hijackers on all four planes were moving to take over the aircrafts. As a result, at 8.46am
American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre travelling
at a speed of approximately 750 kilometres per hour. While people all over Manhattan wondered if
this could have been an accident United Airlines Flight 175 was changing direction in the skies.
At 9.03am, seventeen minutes after the first plane had hit the North Tower, it crashed into
the South Tower at a speed of 800 kilometres per hour. Just over a half an hour later American
Airlines Flight 77 hit the west wall of the Pentagon in Virginia. Only United Airlines Flight
93 missed its target as it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania while the passengers were attempting
to wrest control of it from the hijackers. The plane crashes were only the beginning of
the carnage. When the planes struck the Twin Towers well over ten-thousand people were
already inside beginning their day’s work. With the elevators crippled by the damage from
the initial impact and fires devastating the upper floors the evacuation efforts could only
proceed at a moderate pace as people had to head down dozens of staircases. The upper stories where
the planes had hit were turned into an inferno and within minutes many of those who were still alive
were jumping to their deaths. The South Tower, which had been hit second, collapsed at 9.59am.
It was followed 29 minutes later by the North Tower. In total it is believed that 2,606 people
lost their lives in the Towers and on the ground, along with 147 passengers and crew on the two
planes. The damage at the Pentagon was less severe but even here 125 died on the ground, along with
59 crew and passengers. The 40 crew and passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 all lost their lives.
The September 11th 2001 attacks accordingly were the most devastating terrorist attacks in world
history. Moreover, because media outlets had begun covering the story within minutes around the world
and footage of the planes striking the Towers was soon available, the psychological impact of the
attacks was unparalleled as an act of terrorism. At first Bin Laden denied having been involved in
planning the 9/11 attacks on the United States. On the 16th of September a statement was made by him,
which was subsequently broadcast by Al Jazeera in which he denied responsibility. However, in
the months and years that followed a growing amount of evidence was produced to substantiate an
American intelligence services’ claim that he and Al-Qaeda had orchestrated the attacks. In 2004 Al
Jazeera released a new video from him in which he unequivocally stated that he had been responsible
for directing the 19 hijackers who boarded the four planes on the 11th of September 2001. This
was supplemented by further admissions in 2006 and the surfacing of video footage in which Osama was
seen conversing with some of the hijackers in the period leading up to the attacks. In the course
of these it was also stated by Bin Laden that his purpose in targeting the Twin Towers was to seek
symbolic revenge for the destruction of numerous towers and multi-story buildings in Beirut in
1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. At the time of the 9/11 attacks Bin Laden was
believed to be hiding in the White Mountains to the south of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan
in the east of the country near the border with Pakistan. The administration of the
US President George W. Bush moved quickly to pass a joint congressional resolution on
the 18th of September 2001 authorising the use of force against those who were deemed
to be responsible for the 9/11 attacks. As the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had sheltered
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda since 1996 and refused to hand him over to America authorities, the
regime as a whole was deemed to be a target. American and British aircraft consequently began
bombing strategic targets in Afghanistan on the 7th of October 2001. Ties were established with
the Northern Alliance which held parts of the north of the country against the Taliban.
In tandem US special operatives had been inserted into the country in small numbers
as early as late September, but it was not until the 19th of October that the principal
land invasion began as American troops, with allied contingents from dozens of other nations,
began entering Afghanistan in large numbers. The war in Afghanistan resulted in a swift
initial victory for the United States and its allies. By early November American forces
had encircled the capital Kabul. An air strike on the city on the 12th of November succeeded
in killing one of Bin Laden’s closest allies, the number three figure within Al-Qaeda,
Mohammed Atef. The following day Northern Alliance and US troops began entering the city
as the Taliban either fled into the mountains or towards the southern city of Kandahar. It was in
the latter city that the Taliban made their last major stand in late November. The remaining
forces there surrendered in early December, ostensibly bringing the war to an end.
It was also in early December that a new interim administration was established with
Hamid Karzai as the first president of a new Afghanistan. However, this initial victory
was effectively a false dawn and Afghanistan would soon be riddled with insurgent revolts
which the US would never be able to defeat. The invasion of Afghanistan had also failed to
bring Bin Laden to justice. The US though had come tantalizingly close. Just as Kandahar was
falling to the West, a group of several hundred allied fighters, including 70 US Special Forces
and dozens of other special operatives, along with a few hundred Northern Alliance fighters conducted
a campaign in the Tora Bora cave complex in the White Mountains where Bin Laden and many other
Al-Qaeda members were believed to be in hiding. A near two week battle followed in the mountains
and caves, a conflict which has become known as the Battle of Tora Bora. American intelligence
services believe Bin Laden was present during these clashes, but that he escaped as the
allied military presence was insufficient to apprehend him. He is believed to have made his
way over the southern border into Pakistan in the days or weeks that followed. By now bin
Laden was the most wanted man in the world, with a bounty of 25 million dollars on offer by
the US government for information leading to his capture or death. That figure would be increased
to 50 million dollars in 2007 as the manhunt for the leader of Al-Qaeda and the architect of the
9/11 attacks continued. However, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda would pose a threat to America and
the western world for many years to come.
Bin Laden’s whereabouts in the years following
his escape from Afghanistan in the winter of 2001 have been a matter of widespread speculation.
By this time he was the world’s most wanted man and well-known all over the world. As such
his movements were secretive and even the US intelligence services today can only patch
together some of his whereabouts during the 2000s. Evidently he, along with many other senior
Al-Qaeda affiliates, spent the vast majority of these years in Pakistan. His presence here was not
officially tolerated by the Pakistani government. Successive regimes in the capital Islamabad had
been effectively supporters of Islamic terrorist organisations over the years, but in Bin Laden’s
case it was not possible for them to approve of his presence on Pakistani soil. Nevertheless, a
light-touch approach to apprehending Bin Laden, even when it was clear that he was in hiding
in the country was adopted, one which meant that the US intelligence services had to try
to locate the terrorist leader within the country with lukewarm support from the Pakistani
security services at best. For much of the time after his initial flight from Afghanistan
he is believed to have been in Waziristan, the mountainous region of northern Pakistan
near the Afghan border. Reports in the second half of the 2000s sometimes placed him as
having moved over the western border to Iran, but these were probably spurious and the reality
is that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were able to live in Pakistan largely un-harassed and
in some comfort for years with the tacit support of powerful elements within
Pakistan’s politics and security services. During this time Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda continued
to organise terrorist activities throughout the wider Muslim world. Attacks on the United States
became much more difficult in the aftermath of 9/11 as a massive security apparatus was put in
place in American airports and other locations. However, there was no shortage of western
targets now in the Middle East. Firstly, Afghanistan had been occupied by American,
British and other allied troops in late 2001 and they would remain there in one form or
another for the next twenty years. But the more intense western presence was soon to be
found in Iraq. Following the initial victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan the administration
of President George W. Bush in the US began making it clear that it intended to engage in further
regime change in the Middle East, targeting states which it deemed to be supporters of
terrorism. The regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who had clung on to power following the Gulf War,
was a noted priority. This policy would not meet with as much support from America’s allies as
the invasion of Afghanistan, with countries like France arguing that the Bush administration
was now using the 9/11 attacks as a smokescreen for regime change in oil-producing countries and
a form of US neo-imperialism in the region.
Despite these reservations, the US and Britain,
with several other smaller allied nations, invaded Iraq in March 2003, claiming that
Hussein’s regime was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction and was a supporter of
Bin Laden’s. Bin Laden had often cited the crippling economic sanctions which the US
had imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War as one of his grievances against America, but
there is no substantive evidence to show that the Hussein regime had ever materially supported
Bin Laden in any significant manner. The invasion proceeded much as it had in Afghanistan. A swift
victory was won over the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein and within two months President
Bush announced US victory in the war. But, it was not so simple and as in Afghanistan a
vicious counter-insurgency campaign began in the summer of 2003 and lasted for years as many
elements within Iraq tried to remove US forces from the country. Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were
involved in this internecine conflict. Their methods focused on trying to sow divisions
between the Sunni Muslim minority and the Shiite Muslim majority in an effort to foment
a civil war across Iraq. Traditional terrorist methods were employed such as the bombing of the
Al-Askari Shrine in the city of Samara on the 22nd of February 2006. While this action did not
result in widespread loss of human life, it did see the destruction of one of the holiest places
in Iraq for Shiite Muslims and triggered days of sectarian violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in
which at least a thousand people lost their lives. Eventually by the late 2000s the war in Iraq began
to stabilise as a significant American troop surge in 2007 combined with political reforms served
to quell the worst of the violence. Nevertheless, Al-Qaeda continued their campaign and from
Pakistan Bin Laden sanctioned bombings in Baghdad and a suicide bombing on the Shiite
Imam Husayn Shrine in the city of Karbala in March 2008 which resulted in 42 deaths and
the injuring of dozens of others. Meanwhile back in Pakistan Bin Laden had moved into a new
purpose-built compound in the city of Abbottabad in northern Pakistan. Construction on this had
evidently begun shortly after Bin Laden arrived in the country at the beginning of 2002 and it was
completed in 2005. The compound was laid out on a 38,000 square foot estate and was surrounded
by a concrete perimeter fence up to five and a half metres high and topped with barbed wire.
There were few windows here and many screens to block vision of the interior, including a screen
on a third floor balcony tall enough to ensure privacy there for Bin Laden, who was six foot four
inches tall. It is hard to believe the authorities could have failed to recognise how unusual the
new property was and it was clearly built with security in mind. Bin Laden was probably living
there from 2006 onwards with some of his wives, children and followers in a city not far
from the Pakistan capital Islamabad.
While bin Laden’s compound sheltered him
in Pakistan for many years, eventually his over reliance on it would be his undoing. In
2009 US intelligence services determined that Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a close confidante of
bin Laden’s who is believed to have been with him at the Battle of Tora Bora in December
2001 when the terrorist leader narrowly avoided apprehension by the US, had
begun to work as a trusted courier and messenger for bin Laden while he was in hiding
in Pakistan. In 2009 the CIA determined that Al-Kuwaiti was living in Abbottabad. Further
intelligence-gathering led them to identify the Bin Laden compound as a peculiar building
in the city. Tens of millions of dollars of funding were obtained from the US Congress
to finance the establishment of a CIA team on the ground in Abbottabad which in 2010 began
monitoring the compound and those who entered and left it. Despite this extensive initiative
and the use of the most sophisticated drone and surveillance devices available anywhere in
the world the team was never able to obtain a photograph or any other evidence which
concretely established that Bin Laden was living within the compound. But by early 2011
the range of circumstantial evidence was such that they were convinced that this was the
hideout of the architect of the 9/11 attacks. US President Barack Obama authorised
what was codenamed Operation Neptune Spear on the 1st of May 2011. It was lunchtime
in Washington D.C. but only half an hour later, at nearly 11pm at night in Afghanistan, two black
hawk helicopters carrying two dozen Navy Seals took off from an American airbase in Afghanistan
and flew over the border to Pakistan. Just over an hour and a half later at what was half past
midnight in Pakistan on the 2nd of May the helicopters landed in the compound at Abbottabad.
One of the helicopters crashed during the landing, but none of the Navy Seals were injured. Fighting
commenced as soon as they landed with a brief fire fight with some of Bin Laden’s followers. Then the
Navy Seals proceeded into the main compound. Back in Washington D.C. President Obama and senior
government and defence officials watched live footage of the raid from the Situation Room in
the White House. On the second floor the Navy Seals encountered and shot one of Bin Laden’s
many adult sons as well as another follower, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti whose presence in Abbottabad
had first suggested to security services that Bin Laden might be sheltering in the city. Then
as they headed upstairs again they found Bin Laden on the third floor. Their orders were to
kill rather than apprehend the Al-Qaeda leader. There are conflicting accounts as to what then
occurred as different Navy Seals have sought to claim credit for killing Bin Laden, but it
seems most likely that it was Matt Bissonnette who shot Bin Laden at 39 minutes past midnight
local time, in the body and head in the doorway of his bedroom and he then staggered backwards
into the room and fell to the floor dead.
Bin Laden was found to have €500 and two mobile
phones sown into his robes, no doubt for use if he found himself fleeing an attack on the compound
such as the one which led to his death. It was a rather pathetic demise. A decision had been taken
in advance that Bin Laden’s body would be disposed of quickly somewhere where his resting place would
never be identified and turned into a shrine for Islamic fundamentalists and jihadists. Thus,
shortly after he was killed and the compound was fully secured the Navy Seals placed the Al-Qaeda
leader’s corpse in a body-bag and then brought it out to the helicopter that was still intact. After
a sweep of the compound to gather any intelligence which might be useful for offsetting further
terrorist attacks or establishing a more concrete idea of what Bin Laden had been doing over the
years, the team exited the compound with the body on the sole functioning helicopter. A backup
helicopter was called in to collect some of the remaining Navy Seals. By 8pm back in Washington
it had been confirmed that the body was that of bin Laden. President Obama addressed the nation
a few hours later to announce news of the raid’s success. As he was doing so Bin Laden’s body was
being taken out to some undisclosed location at sea and was disposed of there, weighted down
with iron chains and rocks to ensure it sunk to the sea floor. This was done within 24 hours
of his death to comply with Islamic tradition. Sadly the death of Osama bin Laden did not
lead to any reduction in the threat which Islamic fundamentalists and jihadists posed to
the western world or indeed to most Muslims in the Islamic world. As brutal as their tactics
were Al-Qaeda was already being eclipsed by more extreme jihadi movements by the time of Bin
Laden’s death. In 2004 a Jordanian jihadist by the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had become an
associate of Al-Qaeda in Iraq during the early stages of the counter-insurgency against the
US occupation. In 2006 Al-Zarqawi and several of his closest allies merged to form what they
called the Islamic State of Iraq. In the years that followed they went from strength to strength,
but their methods also became ever more brutal, including the use of vicious tactics
against Muslims who refused to live according to anything other than the most
severe forms of Sharia Law. By the time US forces were withdrawn from Iraq in the early
2010s Al-Qaeda were increasingly unwilling to tolerate this approach to jihad in the Middle
East and a full split followed between the two organisations in the years following Bin
Laden’s death under Al-Qaeda’s new leader, Ayman al-Zawahri. Incredibly, by the 2010s
Al-Qaeda, the organisation who carried out the 9/11 attacks, was being seen as too moderate
by many Islamic fundamentalists and the Islamic State of Iraq group were now garnering many
more followers amongst would-be jihadists.
In the years that followed, Islamic State of Iraq
burst onto the consciousness of the entire world. Following the Arab Spring of 2011 a brutal civil
war erupted in Syria, while the US departure from neighbouring Iraq saw significant parts of
the country fall out of the control of the government in Baghdad. In this environment Islamic
State under its new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was able to begin taking direct control over a
vast swathe of territory across northern Iraq and eastern Syria. In the course of 2014 and 2015 the
newly named Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, came to international attention as they
declared the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate over the lands they had taken control of; ISIL
brought Islamic jihad to a new level of brutality which even Al-Qaeda distanced itself from.
Gradually control over eastern Syria and northern Iraq was wrested from ISIL between 2014 and 2017
as the US sent troops back into the region. As of the early 2020s, Islamic fundamentalism
would seem to be on the decline, driven in part by rapidly improving living standards in the
Middle East, a reduced inclination towards nation building by the United States in the region, and
a warming of relations between Israel and many of its Muslim neighbours. Indeed the main threat of
Islamic fundamentalism seems to have shifted from the Middle East to the Sahel, the region along
the southern edge of the Sahara Desert where jihadi groups have undermined the stability
of nations like Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso. The Taliban has also returned to power in
Afghanistan following the US withdrawal in 2021. Osama bin Laden was arguably the most
significant figure in the history of modern Islamic fundamentalism. Beginning in
the 1970s he was gradually radicalised through his exposure to the ideas of Islamist scholars
such as Sayyid Qutb. This growing radicalism, combined with the financial power available to
him through the enormous Bin Laden business empire in Saudi Arabia, and the connections he enjoyed
throughout Saudi society, ensured that when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan commenced in 1979
he was able to bring extensive powers to bear in training and equipping Mujahidin to fight the
Russians throughout the 1980s. Had his career of opposition to non-Muslim incursions into the
Islamic world ended there he would simply be a footnote to history. But once the war against
the Soviets wound down he committed himself to a wider programme of Islamic fundamentalism.
His actions during the Gulf War highlighted his growing anti-Americanism and his willingness
to split with Muslim regimes such as that of the Saudi royal family if they engaged in actions
which he deemed antithetical to Islam. Thus, by the 1990s a more extreme version of
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda was emerging, as reflected in the increasingly brutal
bombing campaigns being launched, the most severe being the US Embassy Bombings of
1998, which killed hundreds and injured thousands. But it is ultimately the 9/11 attacks on the
United States which Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have become most infamous for. On that fateful
September morning in 2001, 19 hijackers acting on Bin Laden’s orders launched attacks which killed
over 2,700 people in the space of a few hours, while thousands more had their lives cut short in
the years that followed as a result of ancillary injuries. Just as damaging was the psychological
impact. Most people have clear memories of where they were and what they were doing on the 11th of
September 2001 as news of the attacks emerged and footage of the planes striking the Twin Towers
surfaced on news outlets. Life changed in many ways that day as additional security measures were
imposed across the western world to combat future attacks. Wars followed in the Middle East and
for years there was hardly a week went by when news of a major incident in Afghanistan, Iraq or
somewhere was on the front pages of newspapers. All of this culminated in the rise of ISIL and a
migrant crisis in the Mediterranean as millions of people sought to flee from Syria and Iraq. By
that time Bin Laden was dead, killed in a rather ignominious end in a fortified compound he had
been holed up in, in Abbottabad for half a decade, but the world had been changed
immeasurably by his violent extremism. What do you think of Osama bin Laden? Would it
have been better for him to have been captured alive and placed on trial for his crimes?
Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank
you very much for watching.
