"Osama" and "bin Laden" redirect here. For other uses, see
Osama (disambiguation) and
bin Laden (disambiguation).
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (
/oʊˈsɑːmə bɪn ˈlɑːdən/;
Arabic:
أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن,
ʾUsāmah bin Muḥammad bin ʿAwaḍ bin Lādin; March 10, 1957 – May 2, 2011)
note a[3][4][5] was the founder of
al-Qaeda, the organization responsible for the
September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other
mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets. He was a member of the wealthy
Saudi bin Laden family and an ethnic
Yemeni Kindite.
[6]
Bin Laden was on the American
Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) lists of
Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and
Most Wanted Terrorists for his involvement in the
1998 U.S. embassy bombings.
[7][8][9] From 2001 to 2011 bin Laden was a major target of the
War on Terror.
After being put on the FBI's Most Wanted list, bin Laden managed to remain in hiding during three U.S. presidential administrations. On May 2, 2011, bin Laden
was shot and killed inside a
secured private residential compound in
Abbottabad, Pakistan, by
U.S. Navy SEALs in a covert operation ordered by U.S.
President Barack Obama. Shortly after his death, bin Laden's body was buried at sea. Al-Qaeda acknowledged his death on May 6, 2011, concurrently vowing to retaliate.
[10]
Name
There is no universally accepted standard for
transliterating Arabic words and
Arabic names into English;
[11] bin Laden's name is most frequently rendered "Osama bin Laden". The FBI and
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as other U.S. governmental agencies, have used either "Usama bin Laden" or "Usama bin Ladin", both of which may be abbreviated as "UBL". Less common renderings include "Ussamah bin Ladin" and, in the French-language media, "Oussama ben Laden". Other spellings include "Binladen" or, as used by his family in the West, "Binladin". The decapitalization of
bin is based on the convention of leaving short prepositions and articles uncapitalized in surnames; however,
bin means "son of" and is not strictly speaking a preposition or article.
[citation needed] The spellings with
o and
e come from a
Persian-influenced pronunciation also used in Afghanistan, where bin Laden spent many years.
The Arabic
linguistic convention would be to refer to him as "Osama" or "Osama bin Laden", not "bin Laden" alone, as "bin Laden" is a
patronymic, not a surname in the Western manner. In its expanded form, it means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of Awad, son of Laden". According to bin Laden's son
Omar bin Laden, the family's hereditary surname is "al-Qahtani" (
Arabic:
القحطاني,
āl-Qaḥṭānī), but bin Laden's father
Mohammed bin Laden never officially registered the name.
[12]
Osama bin Laden had also assumed the
kunyah "Abū ʿAbdāllāh" ("father of
Abdallah"). His admirers have referred to him by several
nicknames, including the "Prince" or "
Emir" (الالمجاهد,
al-Amīr), the "
Sheik" (الشيخ,
aš-Šayḫ), the "
Jihadist Shiek" or "Sheik al-
Mujahid" (شيخ المجاهد,
al-Muǧāhid Šayḫ), "
Hajj" (حج,
Ḥaǧǧ), and the "Director".
[13] The word
ʾusāmah (أسامة) means "lion",
[14] earning him the nicknames "Lion" and "Lion Sheik".
[15]
Childhood, education and personal life
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (
/oʊˈsɑːmə bɪn moʊˈhɑːmɪd bɪn əˈwɑːd bɪn ˈlɑːdən/) was born in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
[16] a son of
Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a wealthy businessman with close ties to the
Saudi royal family,
[17] and Mohammed bin Laden's tenth wife,
Hamida al-Attas (then called Alia Ghanem).
[18] In a 1998 interview, Osama gave his birth date as March 10, 1957.
[19]
Osama's parents divorced soon after he was born; Osama's mother then
[when?] remarried Mohammed al-Attas. The couple had four children, and Osama lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister.
[18]
Osama was raised as a devout
Wahhabi Muslim.
[20] From 1968 to 1976, he attended the élite secular
Al-Thager Model School.
[18][21] He studied economics and
business administration[22] at
King Abdulaziz University. Some reports suggest he earned a degree in
civil engineering in 1979,
[23] or a degree in
public administration in 1981.
[24] One source described him as "hard working",
[25]; another said he left university during his third year without completing a college degree.
[26] At university, Osama's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the
Quran and
jihad" and charitable work.
[27] Other interests included writing poetry;
[28] reading, with the works of
Field Marshal Montgomery and
Charles de Gaulle said to be among his favorites; black
stallions; and
football, in which he enjoyed playing at
centre forward and followed the fortunes of
Arsenal F.C..
[29]
In 1974, at the age of 17, Osama married
Najwa Ghanem at
Latakia;
[30] Najwa divorced him in 2001 before the attacks. He married five other women: Khadijah Sharif (1983), who divorced him in the 1990s; Khairiah Sabar (1985), whose fate is unknown; Siham Sabar (1987), whose fate is also unknown; an unknown wife with whom his marriage was immediately annulled; and Amal al-Sadah (2000).
[31] Through these women bin Laden fathered between 20 and 26 children.
[32][33] Many of bin Laden's children fled to Iran following the September 11 attacks and as of 2010 Iranian authorities reportedly continued to control their movement.
[34]
Bin Laden's father Mohammed died in 1967 in an airplane crash in Saudi Arabia when his American pilot misjudged a landing.
[35] Osama's eldest half-brother,
Salem bin Laden, the subsequent head of the bin Laden family, was killed in 1988 near
San Antonio, Texas in the United States, when he accidentally flew a plane into power lines.
The FBI described Osama as an adult as tall and thin, between 6 ft. 4 in and 6 ft. 6 in. (193– 198 cm) in height and weighing about 165 pounds (75 kg). Interviewer
Lawrence Wright, on the other hand, described him as quite slender, but not particularly tall.
[36] Osama had an olive complexion and was left-handed, usually walking with a cane. He wore a plain white turban and he had stopped wearing the traditional Saudi male headdress.
[37] Bin Laden was described as soft-spoken and mild mannered in demeanor.
[38]
i /bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his success in the 2008 presidential election.
