We are also joined by a translator. He became a strong, driven, pious figure in his early 20s, she says, while studying economics at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where he was also radicalised. You can call it a cult. They got money for their cause. I would always tell him to stay away from them, and he would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much.
In the early s, Osama travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupation. Even the Saudi government would treat him in a very noble, respectful way. And then came Osama the mujahid. A long uncomfortable silence follows, as Hassan struggles to explain the transformation from zealot to global jihadist.
He reached superstardom on a global stage, and it was all for nothing. Very good at school. He really liked to study. He spent all his money on Afghanistan — he would sneak off under the guise of family business. I did not want any of this to happen. Why would he throw it all away like that? The family say they last saw Osama in Afghanistan in , a year in which they visited him twice at his base just outside Kandahar.
He was showing us around every day we were there. He killed an animal and we had a feast, and he invited everyone. Ghanem begins to relax, and talks about her childhood in the coastal Syrian city of Latakia, where she grew up in a family of Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam.
Syrian cuisine is superior to Saudi, she says, and so is the weather by the Mediterranean, where the warm, wet summer air was a stark contrast to the acetylene heat of Jeddah in June. Ghanem moved to Saudi Arabia in the mids, and Osama was born in Riyadh in She divorced his father three years later, and married al-Attas, then an administrator in the fledgling Bin Laden empire, in the early s.
Instead, she blames those around him. She only knows the good boy side, the side we all saw. She never got to know the jihadist side.
We knew from the beginning [that it was Osama], within the first 48 hours. From the youngest to the eldest, we all felt ashamed of him. We knew all of us were going to face horrible consequences. Our family abroad all came back to Saudi. When his supporters decided it was time for the family to settle, they chose Abbottabad, which bin Laden had visited and liked. On the ground floor, the new villa was designed with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, as well as a kitchen; the second floor had another four bedrooms and four bathrooms.
But the features that astonished locals were its walls. Customization went as far as applying an anti-snooping film on the upper floor windows. By the end of , bin Laden and at least three of his wives and several younger children, had arrived and been installed. Older bin Laden children and their spouses and children would come and go over the next half-dozen years. Life in the Abbottabad hideout was designed to be as self-contained and self-sufficient as possible, to minimize contact with the outside world.
The compound lacked telephone or Internet service—too easy to track—but did have satellite dishes allowing residents to watch the old TVs later found there. The residents burned their garbage rather than putting it out for collection. Only the two couriers left the compound on any kind of regular basis—to run errands, go to the mosque and occasionally attend funerals, weddings or other local ceremonies. Even local children were banned from entering the compound.
May 3, Pakistanis along with international and local media gather outside Osama Bin Laden's compound, where he was killed the previous day during a raid by U. For five years, he had concealed himself and his extended family—wives, children and grandchildren—in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but now it appeared that his carefully constructed hideaway was coming apart. His longtime bodyguards were two brothers, members of al Qaeda whose family originated nearby.
They did everything for bin Laden, from shopping in the local markets to hand delivering his lengthy memos to other leaders of al Qaeda. Things got so bad that on January 15, he wrote a formal letter to them, despite the fact that they all lived together, acknowledging how angry they were with him and begging them to give him time to find new protectors and a new hideout the compound was registered in the name of one of the brothers.
He set down in writing that they had agreed to separate by mid-July.
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