The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [222]
view the ruins: interview with Stanley Guess.
70 al-Qaeda would use this: Wiktorowicz and Kaltner, “Killing in the Name of Islam.”
surrendered to the Ikhwan: Champion, The Paradoxical Kingdom, 49ff.; al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 66; Lacey, The Kingdom, 188.
He had a vision: interview with Prince Turki al-Faisal.
Bin Laden’s brilliant solution: anonymous bin Laden family spokesman, personal communication.
bin Laden pushed a donkey: interview with Mahmoud Alim. According to Ali Soufan, Osama bin Laden often recounted the same story.
For twenty months: anonymous bin Laden family spokesman, personal communication.
beginning in 1961: Saudi Binladin Group brochure.
dynamite charges: interview with Khaled Batarfi.
marking the path: interview with Jamal Khalifa.
71 unbudgeted expenses: interview with Prince Turki al-Faisal.
He paid for the operation: Othman Milyabaree and Abdullah Hassanein, “Al-Isamee al-Kabeer Alathee Faqadathoo al-Bilad” [The Big Self-Made Man the Country Has Lost], Okaz, September 7, 1967.
“What I remember”: “Walidee Ramama al-Aqsa Bilkhasara” [My Father Renovated Al Aqsa Mosque, with a Loss], Al-Umma al-Islamiyya, October 18, 1991.
fathered fifty-four children: interview with anonymous bin Laden family spokesman, who told me there were twenty-nine daughters and twenty-five sons. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (55), puts the total number of children at fifty-seven.
The total number of wives: interview with anonymous bin Laden family spokesman.
An assistant followed: interview with anonymous bin Laden family spokesman.
concubines: bin Ladin, Inside the Kingdom, 69.
“My father used to say”: Anonymous, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, 82.
72 his seventeenth son, Osama: The 9/11 Commission Report, 55.
Syrian wife: “Ashiqaa’ Wa Shaqiqat Oola Zawjat Bin Laden Billathiqiya Khaifoon ’Alayha wa ‘ala Atfaliha al 11 Fee Afghanistan” [The Brothers and Sisters of the First Wife of bin Laden in Latakya Are Afraid for Her and Her 11 Children in Afghanistan], Al-Sharq al-Awsat, November 14, 2001.
fourteen-year-old girl: interview with Khaled Batarfi.
Alia Ghanem: Ali Taha and Emad Sara, “Al-Majellah Fee Qaryat Akhwal Osama bin Laden Fee Suria” [Al-Majellah in the Village of the Uncles, of Osama bin Laden’s in Syria], Al-Majellah, December 8, 2001.
the Alawite sect: Joseph Bahout, personal communication. Whether Alia Ghanem herself was an Alawi is a subject of dispute. Ahmed Badeeb, an assistant to Prince Turki when he was head of Saudi intelligence, told me that she was an Alawite, as did Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Jamal Khalifa, and his friend Jamal Khashoggi. The family has denied it—which, of course, could be religious dissimulation. Ahmed Zaidan told me that he had asked the guests at the wedding of Osama’s son in Jalalabad in 2001 if Alia was an Alawite and was told that she was not. Wahib Ghanem, an Alawite from Lattakia in the 1940s, was a founder of the Baath Party. There are, however, Ghanems who are Christian or Sunni Islam, especially in Lebanon.
Alia joined bin Laden’s household: Nawaf Obaid says that Alia was actually a concubine, a point that is reinforced by Carmen bin Ladin. Jamal Khashoggi says, “The fact that she gave birth to Osama meant that they were married, but there was the business of buying concubines—it was a thing of that time, the 1950s, particularly from the Alawi sect.”
Alia was modern and secular: interview with Jamal Khalifa.
January 1958: Bin Laden says, “I was born in the month of Ragab in Hejira 1377.” “Walidee Ramama al-Aqsa Bilkhasara