Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [67]
Besides regular school, we older boys had additional classes back home. Our father had employed three instructors to teach his sons, each teacher highly qualified in such subjects as world affairs, maths, geography, history, and Arabic. One of the three was a Moroccan, whose expertise was religious training. All three men were patient and kindly and we boys respected them greatly.
The lessons were given in the guest house, which was one of our father’s villas used mainly to lodge his numerous visitors from the Muslim world and from Europe. The guest house climbed three spacious storeys, with twenty-two large rooms and a square footage much larger than our family home. The house was painted a light pink shade with a distinctive shiny black gate.
Inside the guest house there was a special room set aside for teaching, where my brothers and I spent three hours every afternoon. Tired of too much school, I retained little of what I read, dreaming of freedom to watch the sunset or play soccer.
In addition to our private residence and the guest house, our father had two other houses in the al-Riyadh Village area, all close to our family home. Those two villas were large as well and served as housing for some of our father’s many employees, mainly administrators, drivers, or security guards, with most of the men former Mujahideen veterans of the Russian-Afghan war. My father had not only employed the same veterans who had lived on our farm in Jeddah, but had brought in others. The ones who did not live in our area were scattered around the country in other housing.
Other than the few men who had worked on our father’s farm outside Jeddah, we had rarely been around our father’s soldiers. Besides, I was too young during my years in Saudi Arabia to fully comprehend everything I witnessed. Suddenly, I began to understand more of my father’s world, with its vast business and political interests, and people from many countries paying homage. It was in Sudan that I believe our father began to think of his sons as potential future partners, and it was there that we were first invited to take a peek into his convoluted world of politics and commercial activities.
After spending more time with our father at his offices, we began to meet the Mujahideen and slowly learn something of their life histories. That’s when we discovered that few of those former soldiers were allowed to return to their own nations.
Every soldier had an interesting story.
While the Afghan-Russian war was raging, governments in the area assisted my father and other organizers by sending groups of young men to fight at the front. The youthful soldiers were full of ideals, being given every reason to believe that they would be rewarded for giving up their schooling, their careers, and possible marriages, all to answer the call to violent Jihad, to assist their Muslim brothers in need. During their fighting years, they were showered with talk of glory, but after winning a war that everyone had told them was impossible to win, their governments discarded them. Some soldiers’ passports were not renewed, while others trying to go home were turned away at the borders.
Their countries’ leaders apparently feared that the Mujahideen had gained too much knowledge in the art of resistance and war. Perhaps if they returned, they would pose a threat to a repressive regime.
Those brave warriors suddenly discovered that they were men without a country. Desperate for jobs, they turned to my father. Although his own life was in such turmoil that he had to flee his own country, all were given jobs, with good salaries and housing. Many veterans told my brothers and me that our father was the only one who never forgot them and never broke a promise.
Many of the hardened soldiers became our father’s security guards, zealously protecting him and his family. Those burly soldiers looked as though they could kill my slim father with their bare hands, yet they treated him with awe and respect, standing humbly in the background, never speaking