Bin Laden, Osama
(b. 1957), Islamic militant. Osama bin Laden, an Islamic militant and terrorist, was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the seventeenth son in a family of over fifty children. His father, Muhammad bin Laden (d. 1968), who came to Saudi Arabia around 1930 from South Yemen, founded the Bin Laden Corporation, one of the largest and richest construction companies in the Arab world.
Osama studied management and economics at Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, graduating in 1978. The continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 contributed to his increasing radicalism and anti-Western views. Osama went to Afghanistan shortly after the Soviet invasion, where he associated himself with the anti-Soviet mujahideen or guerrilla fighters and helped finance their operations. He was especially angered by American involvement in the Gulf War and moved to the Sudan in 1991, where he set up several terrorist training bases.
Osama returned to Afghanistan in 1996, to establish his headquarters, al-Qaeda ("the base"), with the support of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement. Osama is the alleged mastermind behind numerous terrorist attacks against Western countries, including the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, as well as the attacks on the New York World Trade Center and Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001. Although thought to be at large or killed in Afghanistan, his whereabouts as of mid-2002 were uncertain.
Further Reading
Bodansky, Yossef. (1999) Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America. Rocklin, CA: Forum.
Reeve, Simon. (1999) The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
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