The most wanted face of terrorism

Kate Zernike and Michael T. Kaufman

Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Sunday (May 1), was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical, violent campaign to re-create a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century.

With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for leaders like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters, gloating on videotape, taunting the United States and Western civilization.

The United States went on a manhunt that culminated in a December 2001 battle at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border of Pakistan, where bin Laden and his allies were hiding. Despite days of pounding by American bombers, bin Laden escaped. Five years later, he was believed to be alive, safe in hiding somewhere across the border in western Pakistan, and plotting new attacks.

‘North Star' of terror

Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man what a long-time officer of the CIA called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to Chechnya, from Yemen to the Philippines, under the banner of his al-Qaeda organisation and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam.

Terrorism before bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. For five years, 1996 to 2001, he paid for the protection of the Taliban, then the rulers of Afghanistan. He bought the time and the freedom to make his group, al-Qaeda — the name means “the base” — a multinational corporation to export terror around the globe.

For years after the September 11 attacks, the name of al-Qaeda and the fame of bin Laden spread like a 21st-century political plague. Groups calling themselves al-Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali, and blew up passenger trains in Spain.

Used modern methods

He waged holy war with distinctly modern methods. He sent fatwas — religious decrees — by fax and declared war on Americans in an email message beamed by satellite around the world. Al-Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CD-ROM and communicated with encrypted memos on laptop computers, leading one American official to declare that bin Laden possessed better communication technology than the United States. He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire's son who gave it all up for the cause. But he was media-savvy and acutely image-conscious; before a CNN crew that interviewed him in 1997 was allowed to leave, his media advisers insisted on editing out unflattering shots. He summoned reporters to a cave in Afghanistan when he needed to get his message out, but like the most controlling of CEOs, he insisted on receiving written questions in advance.

Although he claimed to follow the purest form of Islam, many scholars insisted that he was glossing over Islam's edicts against killing innocents and civilians. Islam draws boundaries on where and why holy war can be waged; bin Laden declared the whole world fair territory.

The early life

By accounts of people close to the family, Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventh son and 17th child among 50 or more of his father's children.

His father, Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, had emigrated to what would soon become Saudi Arabia in 1931 from the family's ancestral village in a conservative province of southern Yemen. He found work in Jidda as a porter to the pilgrims on their way to Mecca, and years later, when he would own the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, he displayed his porter's bag in the main reception room of his palace as a reminder of his humble origins.

But some people close to the family paint a portrait of bin Laden as family misfit. His mother, the last of his father's four wives, was from Syria, the only one of the wives not from Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden Sr. had met her on a vacation, and Osama was their only child. Within the family, she was said to be known as “the slave” and Osama, “the slave child.”

According to his brother, Osama was the only one of the bin Laden children who never travelled abroad to study. A biography of bin Laden, provided to the PBS television program “Frontline” by an unidentified family friend, asserts that bin Laden never travelled outside the Middle East.

That lack of exposure to Western culture would prove a crucial distinction; the other siblings went on to lead lives that would not be unfamiliar to most Americans. They took over the family business, now estimated at $5 billion, distributing Snapple drinks, Volkswagen cars and Disney products across the Middle East. On September 11, 2001, several bin Laden siblings were living in the United States.

The aftermath

After the attacks of September 11, bin Laden did what had become routine: He took to Arab television. He appeared, in his statement to the world, to be at the top of his powers. President George W. Bush had declared that the nations of the world were either with the Americans or against them on terrorism; bin Laden held up a mirror image, declaring the world divided between infidels and believers.

Bin Laden had never before claimed or accepted responsibility for terrorist attacks. In a videotape found in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar weeks after the attacks, he firmly took responsibility for and revelled in the horror of September 11. In the videotape, showing him talking to followers nearly two months after the attacks, bin Laden smiles, hungers to hear more approval, and notes proudly that the attacks let loose a surge of interest in Islam around the world.

His greatest hope, he told supporters, was that if he died at the hands of the Americans, the Muslim world would rise up and defeat the nation that had killed him. ( Tim Weiner contributed reporting.) — © New York Times News Service