Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [47]
As for me, I was very pleased to learn that I had a second daughter, a girl we named Iman. In a house with so many males I had fretted that my delicate first daughter, Fatima, felt isolated.
Siham was also the mother of a daughter named Miriam, but because she delivered too soon, little Miriam needed extra care, staying in the hospital for a week longer than her mother.
The end of 1990 brought less happy news, when the president of Iraq invaded his neighbor, Kuwait. At the time I was afraid for everyone in the region, but being a woman whose only business was the home and children, there was nothing I could do but be anxious. I know certain facts now only because my grown sons shared information with me. They told me that their father was so convinced that the Iraqi army would walk across the Kuwaiti border to Saudi Arabia that he gave speeches warning of the danger. But no one else believed the Iraqi president would be so foolish.
War came to the region, but I buried my head in the sand like those soldiers Osama had described in Afghanistan. I took care of my children and did not doubt that my husband would protect us.
After the war ended and the Iraqis ran through the desert and back into their own country, we all assumed that calm would return. That was not the case, at least not for my family. I noticed that my husband’s demeanor grew more serious with every passing month. He made the unusual arrangement for me to travel alone with my youngest children to Syria, telling me to remain there for a nice long visit. When I asked why he thought I should leave Saudi Arabia at such a tension-filled time, he told me, “Najwa, the time may unfurl into years before you see your parents and siblings again.”
And so it came to pass that Abdul Rahman and I took my daughters, Fatima and Iman, for a holiday in Syria. While I was worried about the events in Saudi Arabia, I did enjoy sharing my little daughters with my parents and siblings and other relatives. Although I had visited Syria on holidays, the visits were not as frequent as we would have wished.
While the visiting time was as sweet as candy, as the time passed and the day drew near when I would say goodbye, a strange feeling kept coming over me. I would be cheerful one moment and suddenly a dark cloud would be cast over my heart, like someone had tossed the “unhappy net” over me. In the past when I left after a holiday in Syria, all of us would say our goodbyes in the midst of joyful talk, reminiscing about the good times we had enjoyed at the beach or in the mountains.
But during that goodbye I had a difficult time finding a smile. I didn’t share my strange concerns. I just knew something terrible was going to happen to me or my family. Indeed, before I saw my family in Syria again, something wildly unexpected would happen, not only to me and my children, but to many other people in the world. But I was a woman confined to her home, so there was nothing I could do to alter anyone’s future, not even my own.
A Note Regarding Osama bin Laden’s Political Activities
JEAN SASSON
During these same years that Najwa continued having more children and Omar reached an age when he grasped that his life was different from those of other children, Osama bin Laden was fully involved with the conflict in Afghanistan. The war changed, with the Russians occupying the main cities and the Mujahideen fighters (of which Osama was a part) waging a guerrilla war. In fact, from 1980 until 1985, there were nine main Russian offensives resulting in heavy fighting.
In 1985, Abdullah Azzam and Osama established a formal office, called the Services Office, where Muslim volunteers were sent for training and then to fighting units in Afghanistan. Osama was no longer content to limit his activities to raising money and organizing the delivery of supplies, but expanded his participation in Jihad by helping to establish training camps, building roads, and forming his own fighting unit manned