Osama bin Laden, the most wanted mass murderer on the planet, had eluded capture for so long, he had almost become an afterthought in the minds of most Americans.
Thought to be hiding deep in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan and no longer running the day-to-day operations of al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he founded, bin Laden, 54, had largely been out of sight for several years, purposely isolating himself without phone and Internet to make it harder to be found.
Still, even before his death early this morning at the hands of an elite U.S. special operations unit, the spiritual leader and military mastermind of al Qaeda remained the epicenter of the search for justice for three U.S. presidents.
Bin Laden oversaw a wide network of terrorists that took the lives of thousands of civilians and military in diabolically planned and efficiently executed attacks over more than a decade, including the bombing of American targets in Saudi Arabia, Nairobi, Kenya and Tanzania, the American Navy ship USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and then, on U.S. soil, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Attacks on U.S. forces and others in Iraq since the U.S.-led overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003 also have been linked to al Qaeda. So has terrorism elsewhere, including the suicide bombings that killed 56 people in London in July 2005, and the bombings that killed almost 200 people on commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004. Al Qaeda attacks also have occurred in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Southeast Asia.
Counter-terrorism experts widely believed bin Laden was no longer running the day-to-day operations of al Qaeda. Nonetheless, his death in a sprawling mansion in the suburbs of Islamabad, Pakistan at the hands of an elite U.S. military unit, ends his personal campaign of hatred that was carried out across the globe with bullets, bombs and the suicidal zeal of legions of radical Muslim followers.
One of 50 children and the 17th son of Muhammad bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian construction company owner, Osama bin Laden was born in 1957. He received a degree in civil engineering from King Abdul Aziz University, but shortly after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he left behind a life of privilege to fight the Soviet occupation.
In the mid-1980s, bin Laden had founded a group called the Maktab al Khidmat, or Bureau of Services, a global organization that sought to recruit fighters and raise money for the Afghan resistance against the Soviets. The group established cells in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and even the United States. It built the paramilitary training centers and systems of roads, caves and tunnels in Afghanistan that were used to support bin Laden’s vision of a global Islamic army.
After the withdrawal of the of the Soviets 10 years later, bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia a hero, but was said to have been discouraged by the political corruption in his home country and turned his attention toward the United States and the West.
In an interview with a French journalist years later, bin Laden said he came to believe at around this time that the struggle against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan was only the beginning.
"I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against communism or Western oppression. The urgent thing was communism, but the next target was America. … This is an open war up to the end, until victory," he said.
In 1989, the regime in Sudan, run by an Islamic extremist organization called the National Islamic Front, invited bin Laden to move there from Saudi Arabia, where he had returned to work with the family business. He sent an advance team to Sudan but stayed in Saudi Arabia, where he continued to organize and to support radical Islamic fundamentalist groups.
After listing a series of grievances in a letter to Saudi King Fahd and planning a campaign to drive U.S. forces from military bases in Saudi Arabia, he was expelled from his homeland in 1991 and moved his operation to Sudan.
By 1992, bin Laden was arguing that other extremists, who were focused on local rulers and Israel, had not gone far enough. He called for attacks on "the head of the snake," the United States. Bin Laden believed the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holy cities of Medina and Mecca, defiled Muslim land. He also charged that the United States supported repressive Arab regimes and defended Israel.
Bin Laden used fundraising and his inheritance of $1 million a year to establish businesses and training bases in Sudan. According to a report on bin Laden by the National Commission on Terrorism, bin Laden created an international council in al Qaeda to promote common goals among terrorist groups, including coordinated targeting and asset-sharing.
The commission called this "a new level of collaboration."
A December 1992 bombing at the port city of Aden, Yemen, which was used as a staging area for U.S. troops en route to Somalia, is believed to be the first terrorist attack by bin Laden and al Qaeda, according to U.S. intelligence agents.
The first attack on the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, was the work of terrorists who were later linked to al Qaeda and bin Laden. One of those eventually convicted in the attack was Ramzi Yousef, who according to the 9/11 Commission’s report was "traveling around the world and joining in projects that were supported by or linked to bin Laden."
In his twisted calculus, Sept. 11, 2001, was bin Laden’s finest hour, killing nearly 3,000 Americans in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the hijacked plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
"Its (America’s) greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its east to its west," he gloated in a videotape released less than a month after the attacks.
In December 2001, bin Laden laughingly discussed details of the Sept. 11 attacks with an unnamed Muslim cleric: "The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it," bin Laden boasted in a video tape found in Afghanistan.
"We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower … I was the most optimistic of them all," he said.
Since he became America’s most wanted fugitive shortly after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden taunted the West with a series of video and audio releases designed to show the world that while in hiding he was still an active leader. In 2007, his tape-recorded message warned Iraq’s Sunni Arabs not to join in the fight against al Qaeda and called for renewed attacks on Israel with the threat of "blood for blood, destruction for destruction."
"We intend to liberate Palestine, the whole of Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the sea," he said, adding "we will not recognize even one inch for Jews in the land of Palestine as other Muslim leaders have."
For years, bin Laden portrayed himself as above the laws of any nation, subject only to his own extreme interpretation of the Quran and answerable only to his personal vision of God.
His followers saw him as a brilliant military strategist and a spiritual leader who offered an eternity in paradise in exchange for their ephemeral lives on earth. It was a bargain many accepted with righteous zeal.
In January 2004 bin Laden renewed his call for a jihad against the West and sympathizing Arab nations, urging his supporters to "check the conspiracies that are hatched against the Islamic nation." He also said the U.S. could avoid another major attack if it stopped meddling in the affairs of the Arab world. Earlier that year he offered a truce to European countries that refused to participate in the U.S.-led operations in Muslim countries.
In late 2004, he urged Iraqis to boycott elections and named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his top deputy in Iraq.
Two years later, bin Laden called for renewed attacks and said the United States and Europe were waging "a Zionist crusader war on Islam."
Also in 2006, an audiotape surfaced, released for broadcast on the al Jazeera network, in which bin Laden threatened to attack the United States anew, though he offered a truce on conditions he did not specify. That was the first time the al Qaeda leader had been heard from in more than a year.
As he remained in hiding, bin Laden watched as, one by one, his top al Qaeda operatives were captured or killed in the global manhunt that began in earnest hours after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Still, bin Laden remained defiant in the face of world condemnation and as public enemy No. 1 in the United States, was thought to be often on the move, hidden by followers in various caves and villages in the mountain regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
While the loss of bin Laden is a blow to the international terror network he spent years building, it hardly neutralizes al Qaeda and its loose band of associates stationed around the globe. say counter-terrorism experts.
Some analysts, in fact, have said that at least in the short term, the terror threat will be heightened without bin Laden in control, infusing leaders of al Qaeda "franchises" around the world with ultimate decision-making power.
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