This Day In History

10 March: Osama bin Laden born

We trawled his Wikipedia page to filter the facts you oughta know about "UbL"…

• Bin Laden's admirers commonly use several aliases  and nicknames, including the Prince, the Sheikh, Al-Amir, Abu Abdallah, Sheikh Al-Mujahid, the Lion Sheik, the Director.

• Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

AT HOME WITH THE BIN LADENS
• His father Muhammed Awad bin Laden  was a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Saudi royal family.

• Osama's parents divorced soon after he was born; Osama's mother then married Muhammad al-Attas. The couple had four children, and Osama lived in the new household with three half-brothers and one half-sister.

• Bin Laden studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University. No-one knows whether he finished his studies or not, though he was apparently a “hard worker”.

• Predictably, at university, bin Laden's main interest was religion, where he was involved in both "interpreting the Quran and jihad" and charitable work. He also writes poetry.

• Reports suggest he has fathered between 12 and 26 children.

AT THE CHURCH WITH THE BIN LADENS
• Bin Laden believes that the restoration of Sharia law will set things right in the Muslim world, and that all other ideologies – "pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, democracy" – must be opposed.

• Bin Laden has consistently dwelt on the need for violent jihad to right what he believes are injustices against Muslims perpetrated by the United States and sometimes by other non-Muslim states, the need to eliminate the state of Israel, and the necessity of forcing the US to withdraw from the Middle East.

• Probably the most infamous part of Bin Laden's ideology is that civilians, including women and children, are legitimate targets of jihad.

• Shia Muslims have been listed along with "Heretics,... America and Israel," as the four principal "enemies of Islam" at ideology classes of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda  organization.

• In keeping with Wahhabi beliefs, bin Laden opposes music on religious grounds, and his attitude towards technology  is mixed. He is interested in "earth-moving machinery and genetic engineering of plants" on the one hand, but rejects "chilled water" on the other.

IN AFGHANISTAN WITH THE BIN LADENS
• After leaving college in 1979 bin Laden joined Abdullah Azzam to fight the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

• Following the withdrawal of Soviet troups from Afghanistan, bin Laden moved to Peshawar in 1994. It was during his time in Peshawar that he began wearing camouflage-print jackets and carrying a captured Soviet assault rifle, which urban legends claimed he had obtained by killing a Russian soldier with his bare hands.

• Following the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990 as a hero of jihad, who along with his Arab legion, "had brought down the mighty superpower" of the Soviet Union

• After initial denial, in 2004 Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. He later said:

"Allah knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed -- when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women."