My father, Osama

Hamida Ghafour

• Last Updated: November 13. 2009 11:55PM UAE / November 13. 2009 7:55PM GMT

On a spring day in 1999, Osama bin Laden gathered his sons in a circle in a room in Kandahar city, southern Afghanistan. He was in a good mood, which was rare, and had a special request.

“Listen, my sons,” bin Laden said.

“There is a paper on the wall of the mosque. This paper is for men who are good Muslims, men who volunteer to be suicide bombers.”

One of the youngest boys rushed to write his name down, but Omar, 18 and the fourth eldest son, remained where he was, the words shattering any illusion he had left about his father.

“I finally knew exactly where I stood. My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons. That’s the moment that I felt I would be a fool to waste another moment of my life.”

It was then that Omar, now 28, broke all emotional ties with his fugitive father and sought a way to escape from the man who nearly destroyed his life.

The bin Ladens are a complicated clan. There is Osama’s sister-in-law Carmen whose best-selling memoir Inside the Kingdom, published in 2004, was an account of her restricted life in Saudi Arabia. His niece Wafah Dufour – she changed her last name to escape the notoriety – was briefly a reality TV star and posed in provocative clothing for GQ magazine.

But Growing Up Bin Laden, a collaboration between Omar and his mother Najwa, bin Laden’s first wife, is the only insider account of what life is really like with the world’s most wanted terrorist.

The book, published in America and Britain, charts his evolution from piety to fanaticism and is a revealing portrait of a domestic tyrant who terrorised his family while fomenting global jihad.

Najwa, 51, who now lives in her native Syria, fell in love with her shy cousin Osama at the age of 15 and in the course of their marriage followed him from Saudi Arabia to the hardships of exile in Sudan and later Afghanistan while raising their 11 children.

Omar describes a brutal childhood in which beatings were common and toys were banned by a father whose hatred of the West became more important than the well-being of the 20 children he sired with his wives.

Both Omar and Najwa claim they have had no contact with bin Laden since leaving Afghanistan for good shortly before the September 11 attacks, about which they say they had no prior knowledge.

Omar lives in Saudi Arabia and has co-operated with American authorities hunting his father, who is now believed to be hiding in the tribal regions of Pakistan.

Despite everything Najwa has lost – six of her children remain missing – she refuses to criticise her husband.

“For all the horrible events that have occurred since I left Afghanistan, I can only think and feel with my mother’s heart. For every child lost, a mother’s heart harbours the deepest pain.”

But bin Laden was not always fanatical. When he married Najwa in 1974 he was a “serious and conscientious” teenager who courted her by offering her juicy grapes. The couple moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia after their wedding. She was too busy raising their children to notice that her husband was becoming increasingly fanatical in his beliefs, particularly after a trip to Indiana where he met the firebrand cleric Abdullah Azzam.

“Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions,” she writes in the book.

The bin Ladens were wealthy construction magnates but fridges and air conditioning were banned in the house because, as bin Laden said, “Islamic beliefs are corrupted by modernisation.”

Yet Najwa loved her husband, who had a talent for maths, and enjoyed preparing his favourite meal of stuffed courgettes.

“We were blessed. How I wish we could have stayed in that happy place forever,” she writes.

By the time Omar was born in 1981, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan had taken over their lives as bin Laden became obsessed with raising cash and arms for the mujahideen.

She never dared question him. On one occasion bin Laden ordered her to “stop thinking” when she objected to his helicopter flying lessons.

In 1991, bin Laden moved to Sudan after criticising the Saudi royal family for allowing American troops into the country during the First Gulf War.

As his first wife, cousin and mother of bin Laden’s first-born son, Najwa held a special status in the family but she says there was no jealousy between any of the four wives and children who all went to Khartoum.

“Over the years the wives of Osama had become uncommonly dear to one another, considering we were married to the same man.”

He taught his children to grow corn and sunflowers on the farms given to him by the government. They survived an assassination attempt when gunmen opened fire inside the school in which the boys were studying.

Bin Laden launched al Qa’eda’s first training camps in Sudan and prepared his family for life on the run by sending them into the desert for several days with basic provisions. They had to dig a place to sleep and cover themselves with twigs for warmth.

“Challenging trials are coming to us. There will come a day when you will not have a shelter over your head. You will not have a blanket to cover your body. You will become warm under what nature provides,” he told them.

In 1996, the Sudanese regime expelled him from the country after international pressure, and the family sought refuge in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where the quality of their lives worsened as bin Laden descended further into fanaticism.

His children barely saw him and knew little about his violent plans. He surrounded himself with a cadre of battle-hardened fighters who were scared of his temper and would ask, “Dear prince, may I speak?” before talking.

The family were forced to live in a shack in the Tora Bora mountains with no running water and animal skins for doors. Omar suffered from asthma attacks but was not allowed to use an inhaler (another western vice).

Instead he was told to breathe the fumes of boiled onions – which did not work.

“I really could not believe that our lives had come to this,” he writes. “My father was a member of one of the wealthiest families of Saudi Arabia. My cousins were relaxing in fine homes and attending the best schools. Here I was, the son of a wealthy bin Laden, living in a lawless land, wheezing for air in a small Toyota truck.”

Najwa and the other wives lived in seclusion on the mountain. The children were frequently roused from sleep in the middle of the night to practise escaping to Pakistan, a journey of seven to 14 hours on foot.

By this time the Americans were searching for bin Laden following the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 213 people were killed and thousands of others injured.

Omar was a disappointment to his father because he never joined al Qa’eda. His repulsion for the organisation was sealed when he discovered its members were testing chemical weapons on his pet puppies.

“Several of the new soldiers, young men who had been born without sensitivity, enjoyed describing the death throes of those cute little animals. They insisted on telling me of their trembling terror, sitting tied in a cage, suffering throughout the ordeal. The gas was not as fast as one might have imagined.”

In the years before September 2001, Omar heard dark hints that his father was planning something big. After bin Laden asked his sons to sign up as suicide bombers Omar decided to get his mother and siblings out of the country. Bin Laden eventually gave them permission to leave.

Omar’s resentment of the Soviets for taking his father away – he was always “preparing for the next military campaign” – is the major theme in his life. On one occasion Omar and his brothers were beaten with a cane for distracting their father from his maps.

It is ironic, then, that bin Laden’s role in the Afghan jihad is overstated. The Arabs, unfamiliar with the language and terrain, were minor players and often clumsy and ill prepared. The Afghans were at the forefront of the resistance.

Bin Laden’s only moment of glory was repelling the Russians from a bunker he built in 1987.

Omar, however, has finally found peace, having married a British woman.

“I am nothing like my father,” he says in the book.

“While he prays for war, I pray for peace. And now we go our separate ways, each believing that we are right. My father has made his choice, and I have made mine. I am, at last, my own man.”



hghafour@thenational.ae