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Osama Bin Laden: Saudi Arabia
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[A]s Afghan rebels fought Soviet invaders in the During the 1980s, the United States gave aid from afar while Saudi exile Osama Bin Laden provided support from within Afghanistan. In 1988, with U.S. knowledge, Bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries.
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Osama Bin Laden may have lost his Saudi citizenship, but not his following at home. The last issue of DEBKA-Net-Weeklycarries a special survey of the master-terrorist’s fundamentalist Islamic roots in the oil kingdom and his current adherents. After all, at least nine of the 19 suicide hijackers who crashed their planes into the WorldTradeCenter on September 11 were Saudi nationals.
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Born in Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden was the son of Mohammad bin Laden, one of the country's wealthiest business leaders. Some sources state that he is the seventh son, while others claim that he is the seventeenth of some 50 children born to the construction magnate and his various wives. Young bin Laden led a privileged life, surrounded by pampering servants and residing in air-conditioned houses well insulated from the oppressive desert heat. He may have heard tales of poverty from his father, who started his career as a destitute Yemeni porter. He moved to Saudi Arabia and eventually become the owner of the kingdom's largest construction company.
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Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work in the family construction business after the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, but was expelled in 1991 because of his anti-government activity there. In the early 1990s, he founded a London-based group, the Advisory and Reform Committee that distributed literature against the Saudi regime. Owing to bin Laden’s opposition to the ruling Al Saud family, Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship in 1994 and his family disavowed him, although some of his brothers have reportedly maintained contact with him. Kept under house arrest in Jeddah because of his opposition to the Saudi alliance with the United States, bin Laden fled the country in April 1991, moving first to Afghanistan and later to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. A fundamentalist Islamist regime had come to power in Sudan by then, and was permitting Muslims to enter the country without visas and bin Laden seized the opportunity. Upon relocating himself in Sudan with the approval of National Islamic Front (NIF) leader Hassan al-Turabi, and in concert with various NIF leaders, he built a network of businesses, including an Islamist bank, an import-export firm, as ... firms that exported agricultural products.
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Even with bin Laden at large, the U.S.-led effort to dismantle his global network is yielding some returns. Last week Saudi officials announced the arrest of 13 al-Qaeda operatives believed to be planning attacks on U.S. military installations. American officials acknowledged that Syria has detained Mohammed Heidar Zammar, a German national of Syrian origin believed to be a recruiter for the Hamburg cell that produced Mohamed Atta (see box). But the arrests of low-level operatives won't necessarily lead the U.S. closer to bin Laden. Some counterterrorism officials believe that al-Qaeda has no middle management, which helps ensure that vital information does not flow beyond bin Laden's closest lieutenants. "There may be a command element and the bombers," says a Pentagon official, "and nothing in between."
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In 1996 bin Laden issued the first of several calls for a jihad, or holy war, against the United States and its presence abroad. According to the U.S. State Department, al-Qaeda has stated its goals as driving U.S. forces from the Arabian Peninsula, overthrowing the Saudi government, and supporting Islamic revolutionary groups around the world. Bin Laden denounces U.S. activities in the Middle East—such as its leadership in the Gulf War and its support of Israel—as a continuation of the Crusades. In that series of wars during the Middle Ages, Western Christians sought to capture the Holy Lands from Muslims. United States officials believe that al-Qaeda funds and coordinates terrorist cells (small teams responsible for preparing and executing terrorist acts) in dozens of countries around the world.
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