Alia remembered Osama as “a shy kid, very nice, very considerate. He has been always helpful. I tried to instill in him the fear and love of God, the respect and love for his family, neighbors and teachers.” All the available testimony about Osama’s early childhood emphasizes his shyness and placidity. Each summer, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the early 1970s, Alia and Osama, later accompanied by Osama’s three stepbrothers and stepsister, traveled from Jeddah to Alia’s hometown of Latakia, on the Mediterranean coast, where they stayed with Alia’s family. Relatives there remembered Osama as calm and extremely quiet, to the point of timidity. He preferred to be alone, was not particularly social with his cousins, and had trouble communicating at times. Still, he was not a cause of trouble, and he did not shutter himself inside, by their account; they recalled that he particularly enjoyed swimming, hunting, and horseback riding.2
The Ghanem family could barely make ends meet; this may have been the reason they turned young Alia over to Mohamed Bin Laden in the first place. One section of the family cultivated fruit trees in a nearby village under a grant from the Syrian government. “If there was no agricultural reform,” which provided them with this subsistence orchard, “we wouldn’t have had anything,” Hosam Aldin Ghanem said years later. By comparison, Osama’s stepfather in Jeddah enjoyed a decent salary, and Osama may have received occasional gifts and allowances from Mohamed during his boyhood. Yet he was not so wealthy that his mother could shower her Syrian relatives with money. As the years passed and his own financial circumstances improved, Osama could seem oblivious to the economic differences between himself and his mother’s less prosperous Syrian relations. There was a little island in a small lake near Latakia that Osama used to visit with his cousins. “I used to love it a lot,” one of them, Soliman Ghanem, recalled. “He asked me if he could buy it to live there.”3
Mohamed Bin Laden was a distant figure during Osama’s boyhood but apparently an inspirational one. Most of the reliable evidence about Osama’s relations with his father’s side of the family dates to the period after his father’s death, but the information available suggests that Osama was always a fully recognized member of the brood of sons that Mohamed periodically called together for inspection and religious instruction. Osama himself has spoken of knowing his father as a boy, of reciting poetry to him, of joining his work sites, and of being uplifted by his example. “He considered him as a model,” said Osama’s college-era friend Jamal Khalifa. “He was not with his father much” but he “heard a lot” about him. In particular, Osama absorbed the idea that his father “was not a person who sits down behind the desk and gives orders.” Rather, Mohamed Bin Laden worked with his own hands in the desert, offering direct leadership to his ethnically diverse employees. This, of course, would become Osama’s style of leadership as well.4
There is virtually no specific evidence available about which of Mohamed’s work sites Osama visited as a young boy or what he saw his father doing there, other than Osama’s own occasional oblique references to the Saudi holy cities and his detailed awareness of his father’s work in Jerusalem. Osama would have been between six and ten years of age when Mohamed was engaged in massive demolition and urban clearance work in Mecca, quite near to Jeddah; it seems virtually certain that Osama would have visited the city at this time, during the Hajj and on other occasions. Particularly after 1965, Mohamed’s other major concentration was Asir, to which he flew back and forth almost every week. His company maintained a large work camp just south of Taif, only a few hours’ drive from Jeddah, as well as other camps around Abha that could be reached only by plane. Even if Osama never saw these sites, with their lava boulders and cragged peaks, where new roads were being hewed by his father’s Yemeni and African workers, he would certainly have known of the breadth and importance of his father’s projects along the southern border. And, of course, like everyone else in his family, Osama learned in 1967, when he was about nine years old, that his father had died in a plane crash in Asir—and that he was killed because of an apparent error by his American pilot.[3]
The evidence available about Osama’s primary-school education is also fragmentary. It seems clear that, as with all his half-brothers, his father ensured that he was enrolled in school steadily. His mother’s truncated statements suggest he probably received Koranic instruction of the sort typically given to young boys in Saudi Arabia. Yet like his half-brothers, he seems from the start to have been in schools influenced by Western curricula and culture; there is certainly no evidence that he was ever educated full time in a religious madrassa.
By the time he reached eighth grade, he was a solid if unspectacular student. He seems likely to have received some of his primary schooling in Syria, probably in connection with his mother’s frequent sojourns in Latakia. His mother remembered him as “not an A student. He would pass exams with average grades. But he was loved and respected by his classmates and neighbors.”5
Around age ten—the same age when a number of his half-brothers had been dispatched to boarding schools in Lebanon and Syria—Osama, too, enrolled briefly as a boarder at Brummana, the elite Quaker school north of Beirut. Five former students and administrators at the school, including the head of Brummana’s primary school, recalled in separate interviews that Osama was enrolled there during the mid-1960s but that he withdrew and went home after less than one year. None recalled, or would say, why his short experiment with living away from home had failed, but it was evidently not because of bad behavior or poor grades. Renee Bazz, who was on the school’s administrative staff, recalled that Osama had attended another primary school in Lebanon before his arrival at Brummana.
Emile Sawaya, the head of Brummana’s primary-school section during the 1960s, remembered that Osama was about ten years old when he arrived, and that several of his half-brothers were already boarders. “He was quiet, calm, and very polite,” Sawaya said. “He was obedient. He worked hard.”6
Osama may have been in Lebanon when his father died. Sawaya recalled that Salem arrived to visit not long after Mohamed’s passing. Sawaya asked another school administrator whether Salem was now the boys’ guardian and was told, “No, it was the king…King Faisal, who was their official guardian.” Salem met with his brothers, Sawaya remembered. “The strange thing was that he didn’t know them—we had to introduce them. When he came into the reception room, they kissed his hands.” The housemaster for the primary school “introduced Osama and his brothers.”7
Osama’s stepbrother, Ahmed Mohamed, recalled visiting Beirut with him when Osama was about twelve. “He used to take us to the movies…Cowboy, karate movies.”8 After he became notorious, rumors circulated that Osama had enjoyed Beirut’s sybaritic nightlife as a teenager, but there is no evidence to support this. These rumors may have conflated Osama’s presence in Lebanon as a boy with the lifestyles of some of his older half-brothers during the early 1970s.
After Osama withdrew from Brummana, he seems to have spent some time, immediately following his father’s death, in his mother’s hometown of Latakia. An English teacher there, Suleiman Al-Kateb, recalled that he was “affected by the death of his father; he was very solitary.” By the following September, he had moved back into his mother’s home in Jeddah. After Mohamed’s passing, “She was all that was there,” Khaled Batarfi recalled. “He was so obedient to her.” Batarfi felt that Osama grew close to his mother “maybe because he wasn’t close to his father.”9
3
Five of the hijackers who crashed planes into American targets on September 11, who were recruited by Osama Bin Laden, came from Asir. There is a striking symmetry in these air crashes involving Americans and Asiris, which took place during two Septembers thirty-four years apart.