HELLO I AM ALI RAZA AND TODAY IN GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT OSAMA BIN LADEN

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