Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda and directed the attacks of 11 September 2001. Born in Riyadh in 1957, he was one of more than fifty children of Mohammed bin Laden, a Yemeni-born construction magnate whose company built for the Saudi royal family and rebuilt the holy sites. He inherited a substantial fortune and studied economics and management at university in Jeddah. He went to Pakistan in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and spent the 1980s raising money, recruiting Arab volunteers and building roads and camps with his family's engineering equipment. He formed al-Qaeda, the base, around 1988 as a register of those fighters and then as an organisation. He returned to Saudi Arabia a hero. The rupture came in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and he offered his veterans to defend the kingdom; the government accepted American troops instead. The permanent stationing of non-Muslim forces near Mecca and Medina became his central grievance, and he was expelled in 1991. He spent five years in Sudan, then returned to Afghanistan in 1996 under Taliban protection, and issued declarations of war against the United States in 1996 and 1998. Al-Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, killing over two hundred, and the USS Cole in 2000. On 11 September 2001 nineteen hijackers flew aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing 2,977 people and precipitating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001 and lived in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where American special forces killed him on 2 May 2011.
- Lived: 1957 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Saudi
- Roles: founder_and_leader_of_al_qaeda
