Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [177]
The burqa that women are forced to wear in Afghanistan. (Hill Bermont)
Omar and his son, Ahmed, in Jeddah, 2005. (Courtesy of Omar bin Laden Family Photo Collection)
Omar bin Laden with his beloved horse in Jeddah, 2007. (Courtesy of Omar bin Laden Family Photo Collection)
Appendix A
Osama bin Laden’s Family:
Who Were They? What Happened to Them?
A note about the spelling of the family name: According to Omar bin Laden, his father’s name is routinely misspelled, and “Ossama Binladen” is correct. For the sake of ease, however, the decision was made to use the preferred spelling adopted by most of the world’s publications, which is Osama bin Laden.
Osama bin Laden’s Parents
ALLIA GHANEM
Osama’s mother, Allia, was born in 1943 in Latakia, Syria. After marriage to Mohammed bin Laden in 1956, she moved to Saudi Arabia, where their only child, Osama, was born in Riyadh on February 15, 1957. When Osama was only a year old, Allia became pregnant a second time, but lost the child after a freak accident when she was injured by a faulty wringer-washer machine. Shortly after the miscarriage, Allia asked her husband for a divorce, which was granted. Living in a world where divorced women cannot live alone, Allia married for a second time, to Muhammad al-Attas, a kindly man and respected employee of her former husband’s rapidly expanding construction company.
Allia and Muhammad al-Attas became the parents of four children, three sons and a daughter. Osama lived with his mother, stepfather, and four siblings in the Mushraf neighborhood of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he grew up, and where he brought his first cousin and first bride, Najwa.
It is said that Allia, a loving mother, cannot accept the fact that her son was involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. Up until early 2009, Allia and Muhammad resided in the same villa where Osama grew up.
MUHAMMAD AL-ATTAS
Osama’s stepfather comes from an old Jeddah merchant family. Omar says that his step-grandfather is a gentle and kind man, loved and respected by all who know him, including his stepson, Osama.
MOHAMMED BIN LADEN
Although there are no official birth records, it is believed that Osama bin Laden’s father was born between 1906 and 1908 in Rubat, Hadramaut, located in southeastern Yemen. After Mohammed’s father died unexpectedly, he traveled with his younger brother, Abdullah, to seek employment outside Yemen. After a series of misadventures, the two brothers settled in Saudi Arabia, where Mohammed won the trust of the first king of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz al-Saud, for his work on various construction projects. With the backing of the king, Mohammed soon formed the Saudi bin Laden Group, which grew to be one of the largest companies in Saudi Arabia. Later the company spread into other countries in the region. The increasingly prosperous Mohammed bin Laden married many women and became the father of numerous children, twenty-two sons and thirty-three daughters. Omar says that his father is the eighteenth of the twenty-two sons. Mohammed bin Laden died in 1967 as a result of injuries sustained in a plane crash.
Wives
NAJWA GHANEM, MARRIED IN 1974
Najwa Ghanem was born in 1958 in Latakia, Syria, to Ibrahim and Nabeeha. Ibrahim married five times before marrying Nabeeha, but his were monogamous marriages. He had only one son from his previous marriages, a boy named Ali. Nabeeha was his sixth and final wife. Ibrahim and Nabeeha were the parents of five children, born in this order: Naji, Najwa, Nabeel, Ahmed, and Leila. Najwa married her seventeen-year-old cousin Osama in 1974 when she was fifteen. After four or five months, Osama, Allia, and Muhammad al-Attas traveled to Syria to escort Najwa to her new home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Ibrahim went with his daughter and remained in Jeddah for a visit.
Najwa and Osama became the parents of eleven children. Najwa moved with her husband from Saudi Arabia to Sudan, and then to Afghanistan. Between September 7 and 9, 2001, Najwa left Afghanistan for good. She now lives with her family in