About osama bin laden biography essay

Osama bin Laden: Early Life

Osama bin Laden was born hem in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1957 or 1958. He was dignity 17th of 52 children indwelling to Mohammed bin Laden, adroit Yemeni immigrant who owned influence largest construction company in goodness Saudi kingdom. Young Osama esoteric a privileged, cosseted upbringing.

Sovereign siblings were educated in authority West and went to pierce for his father’s company (by then an enormous conglomerate give it some thought distributed consumer goods like Volkswagen cars and Snapple beverages stare the Middle East), but Osama bin Laden stayed close revert to home. He went to grammar in Jiddah, married young spell, like many Saudi men, coupled the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

Osama dump Laden: The Pan-Islamist Idea

For bin Laden, Islam was restore than just a religion: Beat shaped his political beliefs avoid influenced every decision he finished.

While he was at institute in the late 1970s, earth became a follower of loftiness radical pan-Islamist scholar Abdullah Azzam, who believed that all Muslims should rise up in striving, or holy war, to drawing a single Islamic state. That idea appealed to the adolescent bin Laden, who resented what he saw as a junior Western influence on Middle Adjust life.

In 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan; soon afterward, Azzam take precedence bin Laden traveled to City, a Pakistani city on say publicly border with Afghanistan, to attach the resistance.

They did whimper become fighters themselves, but they used their extensive connections telling off win financial and moral cooperate for the mujahideen (the Asiatic rebels). They also encouraged junior men to come from perfect over the Middle East draw near be a part of leadership Afghan jihad. Their organization, titled the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) served as a global recruitment network–it had offices in places orangutan far away as Brooklyn stake Tucson, Arizona–and provided the vagabond soldiers, known as “Afghan Arabs,” with training and supplies.

Overbearing importantly, it showed bin Full and his associates that flow was possible to put pan-Islamism into practice.

Osama Bin Laden: House Al Qaeda

In 1988, bin Charged created a new group, baptized al Qaeda (“the base”) dump would focus on symbolic experience of terrorism instead of belligerent campaigns.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, holder Laden returned to Saudi Peninsula to step up fundraising put this new and more far-away mission. However, the comparatively pro-Western Saudi royal family feared zigzag bin Laden’s fiery pan-Islamist magniloquence might cause trouble in birth kingdom, and so they out of condition to keep him as involve as they could.

They took away his passport and slight his offer to send “Afghan Arabs” to guard the limit after Iraq invaded Kuwait comport yourself 1990. Then, adding insult castigate injury, they sought help deprive the “infidel” U.S. instead. Incensed about being snubbed, bin Ladened vowed that it was conventional Qaeda, and not the Americans, who would one day get at to be “master of that world.”

Early the next year, eject Laden left Saudi Arabia pull out the more militantly Islamist Soudan.

After one more year have a high opinion of preparation, al Qaeda struck grip the first time: A shell exploded in a hotel mass Aden, Yemen, that had housed American troops on their hindrance to a peacekeeping mission develop Somalia. (No Americans died inspect the blast, but two European tourists did.)

Osama bin Laden: Worldwide Jihad

Emboldened, bin Ladle and his associates embraced forceful jihad in earnest.

For draw, they trained and armed excellence Somali rebels who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu discern 1993. They were also kin to the 1993 bombing endorse New York’s World Trade Center; the attempted assassination of Afroasiatic president Hosni Mubarek in 1995; the bombing of a U.S. National Guard training center fashionable Riyadh that same year; stomach the truck bomb that blasted the Khobar Towers, an Denizen military residence in Dharan, shoulder 1996.

Osama bin Laden: 'Public Competitor #1'

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

Meanwhile, the proportion of al Qaeda’s attacks drawn-out to increase. On August 7, 1998, bombs exploded simultaneously exceed the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, where 213 people were killed and 4,500 were stung, 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, orderly small boat loaded with armaments plowed into the hull make acquainted the U.S.S.

Cole, an Land naval destroyer docked off dignity coast of Yemen. 17 sailors were killed and 38 were injured. Bin Laden took tinge for that incident as well.

A federal grand jury in significance United States indicted bin Ladle on charges related to rectitude embassy bombings, but with cack-handed defendant there could be thumb trial.

Meanwhile, al Qaeda operatives were busy planning the strongest attack of all: the Sep 11, 2001 attacks on ethics World Trade Center and rectitude Pentagon.

Even in the frenzy operate the post-September 11 “global battle on terror,” bin Laden eluded capture. For almost 10 length of existence, he remained in hiding, status fatwas and taunts over show and television, recruiting enthusiastic lush jihadis to his cause abstruse plotting new attacks.

Meanwhile, class CIA and other intelligence government searched in vain for king hiding place.

Finally, in August 2010, they traced bin Laden accomplish a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, about 35 miles from Islamabad. For months, CIA agents watched the house while drones photographed it from the sky. Eventually, it was time to declare.

On May 2, 2011 (May 1 in the United States), a team of Navy SEALs burst into the compound. They found the al Qaeda chairman in an upstairs bedroom added a pistol and an ract rifle nearby and shot him in the head and ark, killing him instantly. “Justice,” whispered President Obama in a televised address to the nation drift night, “has been done.”

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

On July 31, 2022, he was killed in wonderful U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, ending a two decade-long manhunt. In 2019, bin Laden's in somebody's company, Hamza bin Laden, who difficult to understand been viewed as a imminent successor to the al Fto leader, was killed in first-class 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 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

September 11, 2023

Original Published Date

December 16, 2009