Osama bin Laden
Usāma bin Muhammad bin `Awad bin Lādin (in Arabic, أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن, ʔUsāmah bin Muḥammad bin ʕAwaḍ bin Lādin; Riyadh, March 10, 1957-Abbottabad, May 2, 2011), was a Saudi-born terrorist and founder of the militant pan-Islamic organization Al-Qaeda. The group is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and several countries. Bin Laden, as the leader of Al-Qaeda, was responsible for the 9/11 attacks in the United States and many other mass casualty attacks around the world. On May 2, 2011, he was killed by special operations forces at his compound in Abbottabad Pakistan.
Bin Laden is best known for his role in masterminding the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed more than 3,000 people. The fact that he served the United States, by order of President George W. Bush, to start the so-called War on Terrorism. He subsequently became the subject of a decade-long international manhunt, from 2001 to 2011.
He was also responsible for other terrorist attacks against the United States and other Western powers, including the attacks on the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998. Until the time of his death, the FBI had Bin Laden indicted for the attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and for his connection "with other terrorist attacks around the world".
For a long time part of international public opinion affirmed the possibility that Osama bin Laden could have been dead for several years, something that was clearly denied by the terrorist group Al-Qaeda through Aymán al-Zawahirí, second in command to the command of the organization, in an interview broadcast by the Arabic television network Al Jazeera. His death was also denied by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), more specifically by its director Michael Vincent Hayden, who said that Bin Laden was still alive but isolated. It has also been noted that his figure has been mythologized in Europe and the United States as the absolute head of Al Qaeda, simplifying the organization's decentralized structure.
There was a reward for Osama bin Laden of $50,000,000. An additional $2,000,000 would be awarded through a program established by the Airline Pilots Association and the Air Transport Association.
At about 11:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 1, 2011 (Washington, D.C. time; in Pakistan and other parts of the world it was already May 2), United States President Barack Obama announced officially the death of Bin Laden, after a military operation carried out by US commandos in a residence on the outskirts of Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Biography
Beginnings
Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he was the seventeenth child (among more than fifty) of Mohammad bin Awad bin Laden, one of the richest construction entrepreneurs in that country, and his tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas. Bin Laden was raised as a Wahhabi Muslim.From 1968 to 1976 he attended an elite secular school called Al-Thager.He studied at King Abdul Aziz University although it is not known for certain if he graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration or Engineering. When his father died in a plane crash in 1967, his huge industrial empire, the Saudi Binladin Group, was taken over by his sons.
Beliefs and ideology
Bin Laden believed that the restoration of sharia law would make the Islamic world a better place, and was opposed to all other ideologies—pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, democracy. Afghanistan, under the rule of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, was the only 'Islamic country' in the world. in the Muslim world. He always supported the use of violence in the form of jihad in order to combat the injustices perpetrated by the United States and sometimes by Western countries against the Arab world, end the State of Israel and push the United States to leave the Middle East. In addition, he disqualified the American people in a letter written in 2002, condemning them for "their immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, drug addiction, gambling, and usury."
Probably the idea that made bin Laden most unpopular was the one that justified the death of civilians (including women and children) as inevitable damages of the holy jihad. Bin Laden was anti-Jewish and anti-Israel, as his warnings demonstrated against alleged Jewish conspiracies: «The Jews are great usurers, as well as born traitors. They will leave nothing for you, neither in this world nor in the next.” He denounced the Shiite Muslims, along with the “heretics”–USA. USA and Israel–, as the four great threats to the Islamic world in its class ideology of the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda.
In accordance with Sunni Wahhabi beliefs, Bin Laden was opposed to the existence of music in the religious realm, and his acceptance of technology was not full. He was interested in the mechanics of terrestrial planetary motion, as well as in the genetic engineering of plants. His methods would have led him to be described as a terrorist by academics, journalists from the New York Times, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the news network Al Jazeera and even by several analysts, such as Peter Bergen, Marc Sageman or Bruce Hoffman.
Participation in the war in Afghanistan
Shortly after the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, bin Laden, as well as thousands of other Islamists around the world, joined the "holy war". In 1980 he began recruiting guerrillas and established his first camps. Trained by the CIA, he learned how to move money through shell companies and tax havens; to prepare explosives; to use encrypted codes to communicate; and to hide. At that time, the United States collaborated unconditionally with the Afghan groups, due to their participation in the war against the USSR (between 1979 and 1989 the Americans gave close to three billion dollars to the Afghan resistance, which favored bin Laden). After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, bin Laden returned home a hero, but his objection to the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War led to a growing rift with his country's leaders. Despite this progressive departure in the 1990s from the positions of the Saudi government and its Western allies, even in 1993 the British press described Bin Laden as "an anti-Soviet warrior who puts his army on the path to peace."
Formation of Al Qaeda
Between August 1988 and late 1989, he founded a terrorist network known as al Qaeda (Arabic: القاعدة al-qā `ida, 'the Base'), which consisted largely of Muslim militants bin Laden had met in Afghanistan, such as his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with bin Laden himself. The group allegedly financed and organized several attacks around the world, including the detonation of car bombings against US targets in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the killing of tourists in Egypt in 1997, and the simultaneous bombing of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya.) and in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) in 1998, which killed 224 people and injured thousands.
In 1994, after the Saudi government confiscated his passport after accusing him of subversion, bin Laden fled to Sudan, where he is accused of organizing terrorist training camps and was eventually expelled in 1996. He then returned to Afghanistan, where he received protection from the Taliban, the ruling militia.
Between 1996 and 1998, bin Laden issued a series of fatwas (Arabic: 'religious decrees') declaring a holy war against the United States, which he accused, among other things, of to plunder the natural resources of the Muslim world and to aid and abet the enemies of Islam. Bin Laden's goal was apparently to involve the United States in a full-scale war in the Muslim world, which would end moderate Muslim governments. and re-establish the caliphate (i.e., a single Muslim state). To this end, al Qaeda trained and equipped terrorists with the help of bin Laden's considerable wealth. He had thousands of followers around the world, in places as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Bosnia, Chechnya, and the Philippines.
9/11 attacks
On September 11, 2001, four commercial planes were hijacked, of which two crashed into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into Pennsylvania. The US authorities blamed him for the preparation and financing of the attack after the claim made by bin Laden himself, although the mastermind was a Pakistani Islamic radical named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, information that was corroborated in 2006. Faced with the Taliban regime's refusal to hand him over, the US military invaded Afghanistan to find him.
The search was unsuccessful: the whereabouts of the main leaders of the Taliban regime were found, but despite having cornered Bin Laden in the Tora Bora region, he managed to escape to Pakistan. It came to be stated that he had already died in one of the bombardments that took place during the invasion. However, in the city of Jalalabad they located a video where Bin Laden appeared claiming responsibility for the attacks, with which the US government was able to justify the invasion of Afghanistan, since this constituted proof of his guilt.
Some doubt that the person in the video is actually Osama bin Laden, arguing:
- the little resemblance of the video man with previous photographs of Bin Laden
- the fact that he wears a gold ring on a finger, which is forbidden by the Islamic doctrine that professes
- and use your right hand when you are supposed to be left-handed.
Some people believe that the video is nothing more than a fake to blame bin Laden and have a justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and the guilt of Al Qaeda. Despite all this, the US authorities claim that the video is authentic, that the person appearing in it is Osama bin Laden and that therefore the video is proof that he masterminded the attacks of September 11.
Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks in October 2004, that is, three years after they were committed, just before the presidential elections in the United States, sending a video to the television channel Al Jazeera, in which he seen in apparent good health, reading a paper, and making gestures to the camera to emphasize part of the speech, in the video in addition to claiming responsibility for the attacks, bin Laden also condemned the Bush administration for the decision to have invaded Afghanistan.
Bin Laden's role in 9/11 remains unclear; but according to the confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bin Laden only provided the resources and the preparatory management. On the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives page, several terrorist attacks were attributed to him but 9/11 was not specifically mentioned, merely stating that he was wanted for his connection to "attacks around the world" 34;, following the usual practice of prosecuting fugitives for only one or two crimes, regardless of the actual number of crimes attributed to them. Journalist Ed Haas (editor and writer of the Muckraker Report) contacted FBI headquarters on June 5, 2006 about this matter. Rex Tomb, retired FBI Chief of Investigative Publicity, told him He said: "The reason why 9/11 is not listed on Osama bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no convincing evidence of his connection to 9/11." All of this has been mentioned by the Movement. for the truth of 9/11. The FBI disavowed Tomb's statements, arguing that the information he possessed was not accurate and that Tomb is not a specialist in terrorism. The official FBI position is that bin Laden is responsible for the attacks on the USS Cole, the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies and that his involvement in the 9/11 attacks is irrefutable.
Alleged deaths
On November 2, 2007, Benazir Bhutto revealed that Osama bin Laden was assassinated by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. This revelation was suppressed by the BBC from the original interview.
Bin Laden appears in a new video in 2007 and according to members of the United States intelligence service they assure that the tape is "genuine and that the voice emanating from the video belongs to the leader of al-Qaeda".
On January 31, 2010, the Spanish newspaper El País and the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, presented an interview with Sultan Tarar, the "right hand" of the fugitive Taliban Mullah Omar, in which he states that bin Laden died of kidney cancer between May and June 2002.
However, on March 25, 2010 Osama bin Laden appears and sends a warning to the United States Government through an audio broadcast by the Qatari television network Al Jazeera, Bin Laden said that the day the United States. If the US decides to execute Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the alleged mastermind of these attacks, Al Qaeda will execute all Americans in its possession.
His personality according to his women
Osama Bin Laden had more than twenty children by five wives. Some wives and lovers have testified about his personality. His first wife was his cousin Najwa Ghanem, with whom he had eleven children but later left him and left Afghanistan a few months before 9/11. His second wife Khadija Sharif, three children, could not bear the austere life in Sudan, divorcing in the 1990s. His third wife Khairiah Sabar, with one child, would not survive the 2001 Afghan bombings.
Her African lover between 1996 and 1998, Kola Boof, confessed that he raped her on a few occasions and even kidnapped her for ten months in a Moroccan hotel. He commented that he had a violent attitude in sex, he hit her to make him consent to his sexual whims, he bit very hard until he made him scream in pain, in addition to emitting horrifying animal sounds and having a horrible body odor, as revealed in his Diary of a Lost Girl. He also described him as a genius, poet, racist, very passionate, very delicate and confused, also with a love for Western culture, an obsession with the singer Whitney Houston, as well as with the marijuana.
His fourth wife, Siham Sabar, bore him four children and abandoned him when his last wife of seventeen years arrived, telling ABC that he "treated his family like dogs", describing him as a monster who lived in constant alert, only slept two or three hours and ate very little. The fifth marriage only lasted forty-eight hours. His last wife was Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah, twenty-six years his junior, for whom he paid five thousand dollars, very religious, with whom he probably had six children and who was injured during the assassination of Bin Laden for defending him, as she admired him very much.. US special forces found abundant pornographic material in his Abbottabad home, both on videos and on his computers.
On the other hand, it is likely that bin Laden's marital relations were his undoing. According to Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani brigadier general, one of his wives reportedly reported him to US forces. His third wife, Khairiah, reportedly did not die in 2001, but instead fled to Iran, where she was placed under house arrest, then reunited with bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. After bin Laden's death, his widows were reunited in Islamabad in the custody of security forces; there, Khairiah (61), who would have lived secluded on the lower floor in Abbottabad, accused Amal (29), his last wife, of being a prostitute who monopolized Osama's twenty-four hours. In turn, Amal accused Khairiah of treason and of being the actual murderer of Osama. Other relatives supported Amal; one of the sons, named Khalid, would have warned bin Laden of a probable betrayal by Khairiah. However, neither the US nor the Pakistani government have confirmed these facts.
Whereabouts unknown for years
There have been a large number of unverified claims about his status and location, including rumors of his death several years ago, and claims of his visits to various countries. However, although there are video recordings where Bin Laden appears, it was not possible to know his exact location at that time.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States asked Taliban authorities to hand over bin Laden to face terrorism charges. The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden without evidence or indication of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks and counter-offered to have bin Laden go to an Islamic court or extradited to another country, both offers were rejected by the government of the United States.
Rumors of his death continued, it was said that he was killed or fatally wounded during the bombing raids of the United States after the September 11 attacks, or that he had died of natural causes. According to Gary Berntsen, in In his 2005 book, Jawbreaker, a number of al-Qaeda detainees later confirmed that bin Laden had escaped from Pakistan, via an eastern route through snow-capped mountains in the Parachinar area., Pakistan. The media reported that bin Laden suffered from kidney disease that required him to have access to advanced medical services, possibly kidney dialysis. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is the second Chief in command of Al Qaeda, is the one who has provided bin Laden with medical care.
The CIA claimed at the time that Osama bin Laden was alive and hiding in northwest Pakistan, largely cut off from al Qaeda's daily operations.
On the other hand, in January 2010 the FBI released some virtual images of Osama bin Laden, in which he projected what the leader of Al Qaeda would look like at that moment. Forensic experts from the FBI assured that bin Laden would continue to have a beard, in addition, it was speculated that the leader of Al Qaeda would walk with a cane.
The whereabouts reports
Claims about the location of Osama bin Laden have been made since December 2001, although none have been definitively proven and some have placed Osama in different locations during overlapping time periods. Since a major military offensive in Afghanistan in the wake of al Qaeda attacks on the United States failed to uncover his whereabouts, Pakistan had regularly been identified as a suspected hiding place for him.
Death
On May 1, 2011, it was reported that Osama bin Laden was killed during a US military action. Bin Laden's identity was confirmed by comparing preserved DNA samples from his dead sister with DNA from the dead body. The corpse was taken by elements of the US armed forces after the attack, and remained in their possession.
At 10:40 p.m. (GMT -05:00) that day, President Obama addressed the nation stating, after confirmation by US officials, that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a secret operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a city 50 kilometers northeast of Islamabad and 150 kilometers east of Peshawar. Obama indicated that the operation was the work of a small group that acted under his orders and with the help of the Pakistani government.
The location and death of Bin Laden was facilitated by following in the footsteps of one of the members and messengers of his intimate group. Two years earlier, US intelligence services located the region where his messenger was operating. Based on these data, in August 2010, the area where he could live was located, about 55 kilometers north of the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, in a fortified mansion. In February 2011, the intelligence services were already sure that the bin Laden family was in the residence under investigation. In March, the president of the United States, Barack Obama, learned of the intelligence data and on April 29 approved the operation. This was not communicated to any country, not even to Pakistan, and it was carried out in forty minutes by a small elite group of the US army. Bin Laden himself died in the operation — from two shots, one in the chest and the other in the the head—, a son of this, an unidentified woman, the messenger who had served to locate him and his brother. According to later information provided by the US administration, Bin Laden was not armed when he was killed, but he did there was the woman who tried to protect him, who fired at the US commandos and for that was wounded in the leg (but not killed as first reported).
His body was transferred to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, where after a funeral was held according to Islamic rites, he was entombed in the Arabian Sea.
However, some analysts known for having previously offered alternative explanations for the 9/11 attacks have argued that the announcement of bin Laden's death is incongruous and the circumstances surrounding it bizarre. In relation to the above, they have suggested that his murder could have been a setup by the US government, since, according to the data they handle, he could have died a long time before, even in December 2001. Among the various conspiratorial versions is that of the journalist American Seymour Hersh, who believes that the Pakistani ISI had been holding Bin Laden since 2006 and that after his death, caused by American soldiers guided by Pakistani spies, his body was not thrown into the ocean.