How many osama bin laden wives

He became a strong, driven, pious figure in his early 20s, she says, while studying economics at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where he was also radicalised. You can call it a cult. They got money for their cause. I would always tell him to stay away from them, and he would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much. In the early s, Osama travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupation.

Even the Saudi government would treat him in a very noble, respectful way. And then came Osama the mujahid. A long uncomfortable silence follows, as Hassan struggles to explain the transformation from zealot to global jihadist. He reached superstardom on a global stage, and it was all for nothing.

Very good at school. He really liked to study. He spent all his money on Afghanistan — he would sneak off under the guise of family business. I did not want any of this to happen. Why would he throw it all away like that? The family say they last saw Osama in Afghanistan in , a year in which they visited him twice at his base just outside Kandahar.

He was showing us around every day we were there. He killed an animal and we had a feast, and he invited everyone. Ghanem begins to relax, and talks about her childhood in the coastal Syrian city of Latakia, where she grew up in a family of Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

Syrian cuisine is superior to Saudi, she says, and so is the weather by the Mediterranean, where the warm, wet summer air was a stark contrast to the acetylene heat of Jeddah in June. Ghanem moved to Saudi Arabia in the mids, and Osama was born in Riyadh in She divorced his father three years later, and married al-Attas, then an administrator in the fledgling Bin Laden empire, in the early s.

Instead, she blames those around him. She only knows the good boy side, the side we all saw. She never got to know the jihadist side. We knew from the beginning [that it was Osama], within the first 48 hours. From the youngest to the eldest, we all felt ashamed of him. We knew all of us were going to face horrible consequences. Our family abroad all came back to Saudi.

They tried as much as they could to maintain control over the family. Osama certainly had a few sympathizers among his many brothers and sisters, but the majority of them abhorred his violence and resented the damage he caused them. His killing , in Pakistan, by U. Navy SEAL s, in May, , relieved the family of any further association with his millenarian terrorism.

The Saudi government temporarily suspended contract awards to the bin Ladens. The eerie coincidence of the date of the accident is one of a number of odd resonances in the bin Laden family history; another is the recurrence of traumatic plane crashes.

In , M. Bakr and two of his brothers, Saad and Saleh, were among the hundreds of wealthy Saudis detained, many of them at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, where they had to answer allegations of financial crimes.

According to the Reuters investigation, the authorities ultimately seized deeds to bin Laden family homes, private jets, luxury cars, cash, and jewelry. The next year, a Saudi-government-owned entity took a Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the company struggled amid the accompanying economic shocks. There were layoffs and missed payrolls ; last year, the firm reportedly hired Houlihan Lokey, the investment bank, to restructure its whopping fifteen-billion-dollar debt load.

His innovations as a terrorist—his adoption of a satellite phone to run cells on several continents, and his use of fax machines and satellite TV networks to defeat the censors of Arab authoritarians—arose from his upbringing in a family that embodied the opportunities and the stresses of modernization in Saudi Arabia.. He was an obscurantist who understood globalization.

Salem and then Bakr bin Laden molded that era among the wider bin Laden clan. In the first weeks of , Osama bin Laden was worried. For five years, he had concealed himself and his extended family—wives, children and grandchildren—in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but now it appeared that his carefully constructed hideaway was coming apart.

His longtime bodyguards were two brothers, members of al Qaeda whose family originated nearby. They did everything for bin Laden, from shopping in the local markets to hand delivering his lengthy memos to other leaders of al Qaeda. Things got so bad that on January 15, he wrote a formal letter to them, despite the fact that they all lived together, acknowledging how angry they were with him and begging them to give him time to find new protectors and a new hideout the compound was registered in the name of one of the brothers.