Osama bin Laden: 9/11 author who defied Bush

Osama bin Laden

LONDON, (Reuters) – Challenging the might of the  “infidel” United States, Osama bin Laden masterminded the  deadliest militant attacks in history and then built a global  network of allies to wage a “holy war” intended to outlive him.       The man behind the suicide hijack attacks of Sept. 11,  2001, and who U.S. officials said late on Sunday was dead, was  the nemesis of former President George W. Bush, who pledged to  take him “dead or alive” and whose two terms were dominated by  a “war on terror” against his al Qaeda network.
Bin Laden also assailed Bush’s successor, Barack Obama,  dismissing a new beginning with Muslims he offered in a 2009  speech as sowing “seeds for hatred and revenge against  America”.
Widely assumed to be hiding in Pakistan — whether in a  mountain cave or a bustling city — bin Laden was believed to  be largely bereft of operational control, under threat from  U.S. drone strikes and struggling with disenchantment among  former supporters alienated by suicide attacks in Iraq in  2004-06.

Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden

But even as political and security pressures grew on him in  2009-2010, the Saudi-born militant appeared to hit upon a  strategy of smaller, more easily-organised attacks, carried out  by globally-scattered hubs of sympathisers and affiliate  groups.     Al Qaeda sprouted new offshoots in Yemen, Iraq and  North Africa and directed or inspired attacks from Bali to  Britain to the United States, where a Nigerian Islamist made a  botched attempt to down an airliner over Detroit on Dec 25,  2009.     While remaining the potent figurehead of al Qaeda,  bin Laden turned its core leadership from an organisation that  executed complex team-based attacks into a propaganda hub that  cultivated affiliated groups to organise and strike on their  own.     With his long grey beard and wistful expression, bin  Laden became one of the most instantly recognisable people on  the planet, his gaunt face staring out from propaganda videos  and framed on a U.S. website offering a $25 million bounty.
Officials say U.S. authorities have recovered bin Laden’s  body, ending the largest manhunt in history involving thousands  of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and tens of thousands of  Pakistani soldiers in the rugged mountains along the border.
Whether reviled as a terrorist and mass murderer or hailed  as the champion of oppressed Muslims fighting injustice and  humiliation, bin Laden changed the course of history.
ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

The United States and its allies  rewrote their security doctrines, struggling to adjust from  Cold War-style confrontation between states to a new brand of  transnational “asymmetric warfare” against small cells of  Islamist militants.      Al Qaeda’s weapons were not tanks,  submarines and aircraft carriers but the everyday tools of  globalisation and 21st century technology — among them the  Internet, which it eagerly exploited for propaganda, training  and recruitment.
But, by his own account, not even bin Laden anticipated the  full impact of using 19 suicide hijackers to turn passenger  aircraft into guided missiles and slam them into buildings that  symbolised U.S. financial and military power.     Nearly 3,000  people died when two planes struck New York’s World Trade  Center, a third hit the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth  crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers  rushed the hijackers.

“Here is America struck by God  Almighty in one of its vital organs,” bin Laden said in a  statement a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, urging Muslims to  rise up and join a global battle between “the camp of the  faithful and the camp of the infidels”.     In video and audio  messages over the next seven years, the al Qaeda leader goaded  Washington and its allies. His diatribes lurched across a range  of topics, from the war in Iraq to U.S. politics, the subprime  mortgage crisis and even climate change.     A gap of nearly  three years in his output of video messages revived speculation  he might be gravely ill with a kidney problem or even have  died, but bin Laden was back on screen in  September 2007,  telling Americans their country was vulnerable despite its  economic and military power.

MILLIONAIRE FATHER

Born  in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of  millionaire businessman Mohamed bin Laden, he lost his father  while still a boy — killed in a plane crash, apparently due to  an error by his American pilot.     Osama’s first marriage, to  a Syrian cousin, came at the age of 17, and he is reported to  have at least 23 children from at least five wives. Part of a  family that made its fortune in the oil-funded Saudi  construction boom, bin Laden was a shy boy and an average  student, who took a degree in civil engineering.     He went to  Pakistan soon after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,  and raised funds at home before making his way to the Afghan  front lines and developing militant training camps.      According to some accounts, he helped form al Qaeda (“The  Base”) in the dying days of the Soviet occupation. A book by  U.S. writer Steve Coll, “The Bin Ladens”, suggested the death  in 1988 of his extrovert half-brother Salem — again in a plane  crash — was an important factor in Osama’s radicalisation.      Bin Laden condemned the presence in Saudi Arabia of U.S. troops  sent to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait after the 1990 invasion,  and remained convinced that the Muslim world was the victim of  international terrorism engineered by America.     He called  for a jihad against the United States, which had spent billions  of dollars bankrolling the Afghan resistance in which he had  fought.

TRAIL OF ATTACKS     Al Qaeda embarked on a  trail of attacks, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center  bombing that killed six and first raised the spectre of  Islamist extremism spreading to the United States.     Bin  Laden was the prime suspect in bombings of U.S. servicemen in  Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 as well as attacks on U.S.  embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 224.     In  October 2000, suicide bombers rammed into the USS Cole warship  in Yemen, killing 17 sailors, and al Qaeda was blamed.      Disowned by his family and stripped of Saudi citizenship, bin  Laden had moved first to Sudan in 1991 and later resurfaced in  Afghanistan before the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996.     With  his wealth, largesse and shared radical Muslim ideology, bin  Laden soon eased his way into inner Taliban circles as they  imposed their rigid interpretation of Islam.     From  Afghanistan, bin Laden issued religious decrees against U.S.  soldiers and ran training camps where militants were groomed  for a global campaign of violence.     Recruits were drawn from  Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and  even Europe by their common hatred of the United States, Israel  and moderate Muslim governments, as well as a desire for a more  fundamentalist brand of Islam.     After the 1998 attacks on  two of its African embassies, the United States fired dozens of  cruise missiles at Afghanistan, targeting al Qaeda training  camps. Bin Laden escaped unscathed.     The Taliban paid a  heavy price for sheltering bin Laden and his fighters,  suffering a humiliating defeat after a U.S.-led invasion in the  weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.

ESCAPE FROM TORA BORA

Al Qaeda was badly weakened, with many fighters killed or  captured. Bin Laden vanished — some reports say U.S. bombs  narrowly missed him in late 2001 as he and his forces slipped  out of Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains and into Pakistan.      But the start of the Iraq war in 2003 produced a fresh surge of  recruits for al Qaeda due to opposition to the U.S. invasion  within Muslim communities around the world, analysts say.      Apparently protected by the Afghan Taliban in their northwest  Pakistani strongholds, bin Laden also built ties to an array of  south Asian militant groups and backed a bloody revolt by the  Pakistani Taliban against the Islamabad government.     Amid a  reinvigorated al Qaeda propaganda push, operatives or  sympathisers were blamed for attacks from Indonesia and  Pakistan to Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Algeria,  Mauritania, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Spain, Britain and  Somalia.     Tougher security in the West and killings of  middle-rank Qaeda men helped weaken the group, and some  followers noted critically that the last successful al  Qaeda-linked strike in a Western country was the 2005 London  bombings that killed 52.     But Western worries about  radicalisation grew following a string of incidents involving  U.S.-based radicals in 2009-10 including an attempt to bomb New  York’s Times Square.     In a 2006 audio message, bin Laden  alluded to the U.S. hunt for him and stated his determination  to avoid capture: “I swear not to die but a free man.”