Zaynab Khadr

The Khadr family (أسرة خضر) is an Egyptian-Canadian family noted for their ties to Osama bin Laden and connections to al-Qaeda.

The Khadr family is composed of:

Zaynab Ahmed Said Khadr (زينب أحمد سعيد خضر; born 1979) is the eldest daughter and first child of Ahmed Khadr, an Egyptian immigrant to Canada noted for being a terrorist and senior al-Qaeda member.

Zaynab Khadr was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1979, the eldest daughter and first child of Maha el-Samnah and Ahmed Khadr, Egyptian-Canadian citizens.

Her father was in graduate school.

The family moved to Pakistan in 1985, where her father worked for charities assisting Afghan refugees after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The children went to school there and were also home schooled by their mother.

Zaynab has five younger brothers: Abdullah, Abdurahman, Abdulkareem (known as Kareem), Ismail (died), and Omar, and a younger sister.

Following a severe 1992 injury that left her father disabled, Zaynab became a "second mother" to the younger children of the family.

She was married and divorced three times, and has a daughter from her second marriage.

In July 1995, her father arranged for the 15-year-old Zaynab to marry Khalid Abdullah, an Egyptian, in December.

Her mother began preparing an apartment for the couple in the family's house in Pakistan.

On November 19, 1995, Ayman al-Zawahiri bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan.

Named as one of the conspirators, Zaynab's fiancé Abdullah went into hiding.

When police arrived eight days later to arrest her father on suspicion of involvement, Zaynab grabbed his rifle and screamed at them, while her mother barricaded the door.

Zaynab later recalled having celebrated the engagement of her friend Umayma al-Zawahiri at the girl's family house in an all-day party.

Umayma's father, al-Zawahiri, had knocked at Umayma's door to ask the two girls to keep their singing and partying quiet as it was nighttime.

In October 1997, Khalid Abdullah re-surfaced in Tehran and contacted the Khadr family to reschedule his wedding with Zaynab.

Khadr agreed to take his family on a long vacation, which they ended in Iran.

They said farewell to Zaynab, by then reluctant, as she started a new life with Abdullah.

Six months after the couple began living in a rented Tehran apartment, Abdullah phoned his father-in-law to report that Zaynab was inconsolable at being separated from her family.

The marriage was not working out, and Zaynab returned to live with her family.

In 1999, Zaynab was introduced to Yacoub al-Bahr, a Yemeni who had fought in Bosnia.

He was better-known as a wedding singer in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Her father asked the boys of the family to vote on whether he should give his consent to the marriage, and did so after Abdurahman and Kareem voiced their enthusiasm; the younger Abdullah and Omar abstained.

The wedding was in Kabul.

Both al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden attended.

Zaynab later explained that nobody was individually invited, and that word of mouth informed interested parties about the open invitation to their upcoming wedding.

The couple moved into a separate wing of the Khadr household.

The following year, Zaynab and her mother returned to Canada for several months late in her pregnancy, where she gave birth to a daughter, named Safia.

Two of her younger brothers, Abdurahman and Omar, were held by the United States as enemy combatants in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp after being captured in Afghanistan in 2002.

With her family, she grew up in Pakistan and Canada, as they frequently traveled back and forth.

Abdurahman Khadr was also detained, but he had claimed to have been working for the United States CIA when he was held as a detainee in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, 2002–2003.

She and her widowed mother returned to Canada in February 2005.

Khadr has since fought for the family members' legal rights to remain there.

She has also worked for justice for her brothers.

Abdullah Khadr was detained in Pakistan and resisted extradition to the United States; he finally returned to Canada in 2005.

In October 2010, her youngest brother Omar Khadr pleaded guilty to charges in a plea agreement, and was repatriated to Canada in 2012 to serve the rest of his eight-year sentence.

On January 31, 2016, Michelle Shephard and Peter Edwards, writing in the Toronto Star, reported that Zaynab had been apprehended, in Turkey for a visa violation.

In August 2017, it was reported that she lived in Sudan with her husband and four children, but by December 2018 she had moved to Georgia.