Who Was Osama bin Laden?

1. A wealthy childhood in Saudi Arabia

Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on 10 March 1957 according to the date most commonly given, although some sources give only the year 1957. He was one of more than fifty children of Mohammed bin Laden, a Yemeni-born construction businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family. He grew up in a wealthy family in Jeddah and Riyadh, and was raised in a conservative religious household. The family's construction business had built much of modern Saudi Arabia, including roads, airports and the expansion of the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, and bin Laden inherited a share of the family fortune.

Bin Laden studied at schools in Jeddah and then at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where he studied economics and business administration. He left university in 1979 without completing a degree, when he travelled to Afghanistan to join the resistance against the Soviet invasion. His education was not that of a theologian or a scholar: he was a businessman by training, and his later career as the organiser of a militant network drew on the skills of logistics, finance and management that he had learned in the family business. The contrast between his background and his later life is striking: he was born into wealth and privilege, and he gave it up to live as a fugitive in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

His religious views were formed in the conservative milieu of Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, and he was influenced by the teachings of the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb and by the Saudi religious establishment. He believed that Islam was under attack from the West and from secular governments in the Muslim world, and that armed struggle was the duty of Muslims. The belief was shared by many in his generation, but bin Laden was unusual in the scale of his commitment and in the resources he brought to it. The family fortune, the connections and the organisational skill were the foundation of what became al-Qaeda.

2. Afghanistan: the Soviet war and the Arab volunteers

In 1979 bin Laden travelled to Afghanistan to support the mujahideen fighting the Soviet invasion, using his family wealth to fund fighters and supplies. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, and the resistance was supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, who saw it as a way to weaken the Soviet Union. Bin Laden arrived as a volunteer, not as a commander, and his early role was to raise money and to organise the Arab volunteers who came to Afghanistan from across the Muslim world, building camps, roads and supply lines for them.

In 1984 he helped to found the Maktab al-Khidamat, an organisation that recruited and supported Arab volunteers in Afghanistan, and in 1988 he founded al-Qaeda, a militant organisation with the aim of carrying out armed jihad. The name al-Qaeda means the base, and it referred originally to the network of volunteers and the records kept of them. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and the Arab volunteers returned to their home countries, but bin Laden kept the network together, and it became the basis of an organisation that would operate in many countries. The Afghan war was the training ground for a generation of militants, and bin Laden was its most important organiser.

The Afghan experience shaped bin Laden's thinking in two ways. First, it convinced him that a superpower could be defeated by a determined resistance, a lesson he drew from the Soviet withdrawal. Second, it gave him a network of fighters, contacts and safe houses across the Muslim world, and a reputation as a man who had fought for Islam. The reputation was exaggerated: bin Laden was not a battlefield commander, and his role was logistical rather than military. But the reputation mattered, because it attracted recruits and donations, and it made him a figure of authority among militants who had fought in Afghanistan.

3. The break with Saudi Arabia and the move to Sudan

After the Gulf War of 1990-1991 bin Laden opposed the Saudi government's reliance on United States troops, left Saudi Arabia in 1991, and settled in Sudan. The Gulf War had been fought to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and the Saudi government had allowed American troops to be stationed on Saudi soil, the land of the two holy mosques. Bin Laden regarded the presence of non-Muslim troops in Saudi Arabia as a desecration, and he offered to raise an army of Arab volunteers to defend the kingdom instead. The offer was rejected, and his criticism of the royal family became public and increasingly bitter.

In April 1994 the Saudi government revoked his citizenship and froze his assets. He moved to Afghanistan in 1996 under the protection of the Taliban, the movement that had taken power in Kabul, and in 1996 and 1998 he issued declarations calling for attacks on the United States. The declarations, known as fatwas, called on Muslims to kill Americans and their allies wherever they could be found, and they were the public statement of the programme that al-Qaeda would carry out in the following years. The move to Afghanistan gave him a base from which to operate, and the Taliban's protection gave him security from the governments that were seeking him.

The years in Sudan and then in Afghanistan were the period in which al-Qaeda became an international organisation. Bin Laden built training camps, recruited fighters from many countries, and established a structure of regional commanders and cells. He also built a financial network, using businesses and charities to move money, and a media operation that distributed his statements on video and audio tape. The organisation was small, probably a few hundred core members, but it was disciplined, well funded and committed to a programme of mass-casualty attacks against the United States.

4. The embassy bombings and the USS Cole

Al-Qaeda carried out the bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998, killing more than 200 people, and the bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, killing 17 United States sailors. The embassy bombings were the first attacks that brought bin Laden to the attention of the American public: two truck bombs exploded almost simultaneously at the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, most of them African civilians, and wounding thousands. The United States responded with cruise missile strikes on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, which the American government said was linked to chemical weapons, a claim that remains disputed.

The USS Cole bombing, in the port of Aden in Yemen, was carried out by a small boat loaded with explosives that pulled alongside the destroyer as it was refuelling. The explosion killed 17 sailors and wounded 39, and it showed that al-Qaeda could strike an American warship, a target that had seemed secure. The attack was investigated by the United States, and bin Laden was indicted in absentia in 1998 for the embassy bombings, becoming one of the most wanted men in the world. The Federal Bureau of Investigation placed a reward on his head, and the United States government pressed the Taliban to hand him over, without success.

These attacks were the prelude to September 11. They established the pattern of al-Qaeda's operations: careful planning over a long period, the use of suicide attackers, and the choice of targets that were symbolic of American power. They also established the scale of the organisation's ambition: it was not seeking to win a war in the conventional sense, but to carry out attacks that would be seen around the world and that would provoke a response. The response, when it came after September 11, was the invasion of Afghanistan and the global war on terror, which reshaped international politics for decades.

5. September 11, 2001: the attacks and their victims

On 11 September 2001, 19 al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial aircraft in the United States and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon near Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. Two aircraft were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which collapsed, killing 2,753 people in New York. A third aircraft was flown into the Pentagon, killing 184 people. The fourth aircraft, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers attempted to retake control, killing all 44 people on board. The attacks were the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States, and they were acts of mass murder, organised by bin Laden and carried out by men he had recruited, trained and funded.

The United States government named bin Laden as the prime suspect and invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, removing the Taliban from power and destroying al-Qaeda's camps. The invasion was supported by a coalition of countries and by the United Nations, and it was followed by a war in Afghanistan that lasted for twenty years. The attacks also led to a transformation of American domestic security, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, new surveillance laws, and the detention of suspects at Guantanamo Bay, measures that remain controversial. The wars and security policies that followed September 11 reshaped international politics for decades, and their effects are still felt today.

The victims of September 11 were civilians: office workers, firefighters, police officers, military personnel and passengers, from more than ninety countries. The attacks are remembered in the United States as a national tragedy, and the memorials at the World Trade Center site and at the Pentagon record the names of the dead. The responsibility for the attacks is not disputed: al-Qaeda claimed them, bin Laden acknowledged them, and the evidence, including the identities of the hijackers and the planning documents recovered in Afghanistan, is extensive. This article records the attacks as mass murder, because that is what they were, and because the profiles on this site describe them in those terms.

6. The manhunt and the raid on Abbottabad

Bin Laden evaded capture for almost ten years, and on 2 May 2011 a team of United States Navy SEALs raided his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed him. The manhunt was one of the largest in history, involving intelligence agencies, military forces and a reward that reached 25 million dollars. For years the search focused on the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where bin Laden was believed to be hiding, but he was in fact living in a compound in Abbottabad, a town with a military academy, less than a hundred miles from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The compound was identified by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2010, after years of tracking a courier who worked for him.

The raid was carried out by helicopters from Afghanistan, without informing the Pakistani government in advance, and it lasted less than an hour. Bin Laden was killed in the raid, along with several others in the compound, and his body was taken by the American forces. His death was confirmed by DNA identification and announced by President Barack Obama, and he was buried at sea, in accordance with Islamic practice as described by the American government, within twenty-four hours. The decision to bury him at sea was controversial, and some critics argued that it prevented an independent verification of his death, but the DNA evidence and the testimony of those who took part in the raid are the basis of the official account.

The raid strained relations between the United States and Pakistan, which protested that its sovereignty had been violated, and it raised questions about whether elements of the Pakistani state had known of bin Laden's presence. The Pakistani government denied any knowledge, and a Pakistani commission of inquiry concluded that the failure to find him was the result of incompetence rather than complicity. The questions have never been fully resolved, and they remain a subject of debate. What is not disputed is that bin Laden was found in Abbottabad, that he was killed in the raid, and that his death was confirmed by the American government.

7. Aftermath and legacy: al-Qaeda, the wars and the condemnation

Bin Laden is remembered as the founder of al-Qaeda and as the organiser of the September 11 attacks, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States. The United States government and most governments and historians describe him as the organiser of mass-casualty terrorist attacks. Some of his supporters described him as a defender of Muslims against Western power; that view is rejected by the governments and the large majority of Muslim scholars and leaders who condemned the attacks. The distinction matters: bin Laden claimed to act in the name of Islam, but the scholars and leaders of the Muslim world, including the authorities in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, condemned his actions as contrary to Islamic teaching, and the victims of his attacks included Muslims as well as non-Muslims.

His death in 2011 did not end al-Qaeda, which continued under Ayman al-Zawahiri, his long-time deputy, and the organisation remains active in several countries, although it has been weakened by the loss of its leader and by the rise of other militant groups, above all the Islamic State. Al-Zawahiri was himself killed in a United States drone strike in Kabul in 2022. The wars that followed September 11, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and they are still debated: supporters argue that they were necessary to prevent further attacks, and critics argue that they caused more harm than they prevented. The debate will continue, and it is part of bin Laden's legacy.

The legacy of bin Laden is therefore a legacy of destruction: the destruction of lives on September 11, the destruction of the wars that followed, and the destruction of the reputation of Islam in the eyes of many in the West, a reputation that Muslim leaders have worked to repair. He is not remembered as a leader who built anything, but as a man who organised mass murder and whose actions reshaped the world for the worse. That is the assessment recorded in his profile, and it is the assessment recorded here, because it is the assessment of the governments, the historians and the scholars who have studied his life and his organisation.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Osama bin Laden
• Wikipedia — Osama bin Laden
• Counter Extremism Project — Osama bin Laden
• Al Jazeera — Profile: Osama bin Laden

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• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.