Osama bin Laden

Al-Attas married Hamida in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

The couple had four children, and Bin Laden lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister.

The Bin Laden family made $5 billion in the construction industry, of which Osama later inherited around $25–30 million.

Bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim.

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن; 10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was a Saudi-born Islamic militant who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death in 2011.

Ideologically a pan-Islamist, his organization is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and various other countries.

He is most widely known as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks in the United States.

Osama was born in Riyadh to the aristocratic bin Laden family.

Osama bin Laden was born on 10 March 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

His father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, was a billionaire construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family, and Mohammed bin Laden's tenth wife, Syrian Hamida al-Attas (then called Alia Ghanem).

In a 1998 interview, Bin Laden gave his birth date as 10 March 1957.

Despite it being generally accepted that Bin Laden was born in Riyadh, his birthplace was listed as Jeddah in the initial FBI and Interpol documents.

Mohammed bin Laden divorced Hamida soon after Osama bin Laden was born.

Mohammed recommended Hamida to Mohammed al-Attas, an associate.

From 1968 to 1976, he attended the elite Al-Thager Model School.

He studied at local universities until 1979, when he joined the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviet Union in the wake of the Afghan–Soviet War.

In 1984, he co-founded Maktab al-Khidamat which recruited foreign mujahidin into the war.

He founded al-Qaeda in 1988 for worldwide jihad.

In the Gulf War (1990–1991), Bin Laden's offer for support against Iraq was rebuked by the Saudi royal family, which instead sought American aid.

Bin Laden's views on pan-Islamism and anti-Americanism resulted in his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1991.

He subsequently shifted his headquarters to Sudan until 1996 when he left the country to establish a new base in Afghanistan, where he was supported by the Taliban.

Bin Laden declared two fatawa, the first in August 1996, and the second in February 1998, declaring holy war against the United States.

He orchestrated the 1998 United States embassy bombings in East Africa.

He was then listed on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists and Most Wanted Fugitives lists.

Bin Laden was the organizer of the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

This resulted in the United States invading Afghanistan, which launched the war on terror.

Bin Laden became the subject of nearly a decade-long international manhunt.

During this period, he hid in several mountainous regions of Afghanistan and later escaped to neighboring Pakistan.

On 2 May 2011, Bin Laden was killed by U.S. special operations forces at his compound in Abbottabad.

His corpse was buried at the Arabian Sea and he was officially succeeded by his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri on 16 June 2011.

Bin Laden grew to become a highly influential ideologue in the Islamic world.

He was considered a war hero due to his role in successfully opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and offered an articulate voice and organizational structure to many across the region harboring grievances against Western imperialism, often having approval ratings in some countries higher than those of national leaders.

Nonetheless, his justification and orchestration of attacks against civilian targets in the United States, including the September 11 attacks, have made him a hated figure in the West, where public opinion holds bin Laden to be a reviled figurehead of mass murder.

Osama bin Laden's name is most frequently rendered as "Osama bin Laden".

The FBI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as other US governmental agencies, have used either "Usama bin Laden" or the accepted transliteration "Usama bin Ladin".

Osama bin Laden's full name, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, means "Osama, son of Mohammed, son of Awad, son of Laden".

"Mohammed" refers to Bin Laden's father Mohammed bin Laden; "Awad" refers to his grandfather, Awad bin Aboud bin Laden, a Kindite Hadhrami tribesman; "Laden" therefore refers to Bin Laden's great-great-grandfather, Laden Ali al-Qahtani.

He was named, meaning "lion", after Usama ibn Zayd, one of the companions of Muhammad.

Osama bin Laden had assumed the (teknonym), meaning "father of Abdallah" 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.

According to one of his sons Omar, the family's hereditary surname is, but Bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, never officially registered the name.