Growing Up bin Laden

by Jean Sasson

  Panic set in. If not Saudi, who were we? I wondered. Our grandparents had originated from Yemen. Did that mean we were now Yemeni? My mother had been born in Syria. Could I possibly be Syrian?

  Our father gathered our family to tell us that from that time on, we were Sudanese! Our father said, “The Sudanese government has graciously bestowed Sudanese citizenship upon us all.”

  I was devastated. While I liked many things about the Sudanese, I was a Saudi and knew it. In my heart, I always remained Saudi Arabian, although official documents said otherwise. Much to my horror, when I studied my Sudanese passport, I saw that my birth name had been changed. I was now Omar Mohammed Awad Aboud! My last name was no longer bin Laden! Even my birth year had been changed from 1981 to 1979, for whatever reason, I have never known.

  Our small world was shrinking day by day. After the assassination attempt, my father grew edgier, behaving as though every government in the world, other than the Sudanese, was his devoted enemy. By now I was fourteen years old, and I was becoming uncomfortably aware that my father was heavily involved with more dangerous political issues than I had ever imagined. How I wished that he would limit his activities to raising the biggest sunflowers the world had known! But I knew that I was dreaming and that he would never change. In fact, his passion for Jihad was expanding.

  There were many troubling signs. My father began to meet more openly with militants he knew from Afghanistan. Some of the groups felt the call to Jihad against various Middle Eastern as well as western governments. My father’s group was al-Qaeda, which at the time was mainly interested in clearing Muslim nations of outside influence.

  There was also the al-Jihad group, headed by Dr. Ayman Muhammad al-Zawahiri, which focused on overthrowing the Egyptian government. I was not often in Dr. Zawahiri’s presence, and for that I was glad. From the first moment I met the man, he left me feeling unsettled, despite the fact my father respected him.

  I do acknowledge that Dr. Zawahiri was a man of high intellect. He was born in Egypt in 1951 into a well-to-do family. His father was a respected professor and pharmacologist, while his mother came from a very wealthy family. My father told me that the young Ayman had a rare gift for learning. As a young man he was a bit of a dreamer, loving poetry and hating fighting and bloodshed. Few would have believed that such a peaceful young student would embrace militant Islam, but he was influenced by an uncle who was a follower of the most radical Islamic beliefs. Cooperating with other students to form underground cells calling for the establishment of an Islamic state, Zawahari found his purpose in life, the struggle against secular authority.

  Egyptian students were in the midst of a restless period, and various forbidden cells merged with others, forming a larger group known as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, or al-Jihad. Zawahari was a member, although his studies continued even as he plotted the overthrow of the Egyptian government. Despite his political activities, he excelled in his lessons, graduating as a medical doctor, specializing in surgery.

  Zawahari married a woman equally pious and supportive of her husband’s ideals. Her name was Azza Nowari.

  Zawahari was so deeply entrenched in the Islamic movement that when President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in October 1981, he was arrested. Tried and convicted, Zawahari was given a prison sentence of three years. After his release in 1984, he traveled to Jeddah, remaining there for a year. Sensing that an important Islamic movement was being established in Pakistan, he traveled on to Peshawar. Using his medical degree, he worked in one of the many Red Crescent medical centers, treating wounded Afghan refugees.

  During this time, he reconnected with other Egyptian Islamic Jihad members, increasing his revolutionary fervor. Soon he was the proclaimed leader. While in Peshawar, he allied with my father’s friend and mentor, the Palestinian activist Abdullah Azzam. Through Abdullah Azzam, he met my father.

  I believe that it was during this time that Zawahari began plotting to tap into my father’s wealth. In fact, I have heard that he became Azzam’s competitor for my father’s financial contributions to the cause of Islam.

  At the end of the war, when my father returned to Saudi Arabia, Zawahari went back to Egypt. However, he was unable to stay out of trouble, almost immediately renewing his efforts to overthrow the Egyptian government led by President Hosni Mubarak. There were several failed attempts by Zawahari’s group against various government officials, but their plans backfired when a number of innocent Egyptian civilians were killed in the assassination attempts. That’s when the Egyptian populace turned against the once popular Islamic radicals.

  No longer welcome in Egypt, Zawahari traveled to the United States, where he became one of the many radical Muslims on a popular speaking circuit, all attempting to raise money for their organizations. Some said that Zawahari falsely claimed that the money raised would go to wounded Afghan children. But there were so many radical Muslims appealing for money that Zawahari did not collect the large sums he had envisioned. That’s when he heard that my father had fled Saudi Arabia, and was living in Sudan, a country with an Islamic government friendly to radical groups.

  I was sorry that Zawahari tracked my father to Sudan, and once again linked himself and his organization to my father and to al-Qaeda. I felt that nothing good could come from the association.

  Lastly, there was the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya group, led by Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric. Since his imprisonment in the United States, his son had become the local organizer in Khartoum. But the old man’s spirit still encouraged his followers.

  I heard all about him. Abdel Rahman was born in 1938 in Egypt. Afflicted with childhood diabetes, he lost his sight when a young child. He was given a Braille version of the Koran and developed a keen interest in Islamic teachings. Despite his blindness, he went on to graduate from the famed al-Azhar University in Cairo, gaining his degree in Koran studies.

  While in university, Abdel Rahman developed an interest in and became a member of the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. He quickly emerged as the leader. Calling for a purely Islamic government, he denounced the Egyptian government. He even issued a fatwa calling for the overthrow of President Anwar Sadat. When Sadat was assassinated, Abdel Rahman was arrested for issuing the fatwa and spent three years in Egyptian prisons awaiting trial, during which time he was tortured. Although he was acquitted, the Egyptian government expelled him. He traveled to Afghanistan, where all the radicals appeared to be gathering. There he met up with his former schoolteacher, Abdullah Azzam. Through Abdullah Azzam, he met my father.

  Abdullah Azzam’s assassination in 1989 was a tragedy, for he often calmed the violence brewing among radical believers.

  After the assassination, the blind Abdel Rahman traveled to New York to establish himself as head of Abdullah Azzam’s organization. Despite the fact Abdel Rahman was listed on the U.S. terrorist list, he was given a visa and allowed to enter the country.

  The blind cleric traveled throughout the United States and Canada, recruiting support for the Islamic cause to overthrow secular governments. He was a brazen speaker, calling for supporters to ignore American laws and to kill American Jews. He aggressively ordered Muslims to attack the West, and to “tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”

  In fact, his followers were behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Abdel Rahman was arrested in June 1993, approximately a year after we arrived in Sudan. That’s why his son was running his organization. But the blind cleric’s incarceration became a rallying cry for Islamic militants worldwide.

  Put simply, all three groups focused on various aspects of restoring Islamic Jihad, although the two Egyptian groups were rabid regarding their goal of overthrowing the Egyptian government so that an Islamic government might be put in place.

  The al-Jihad and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya groups had brought their families to live in Sudan as well. At first our father h
ad kept us isolated from everyone but our own family members, but increasingly he allowed us to mix with the teenage sons of those leaders. There was one particular boy who was my age and enjoyed the same sort of activities. He was the son of Mohammed Sharaf, an important man in the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya group.

  There was a sickening incident when someone targeted my friend, the son of Mohammed Sharaf. That young man was abducted and brutally gang-raped by a group of men. The rapists added insult to injury by snapping photographs of the young man during and after the rape.

  My poor friend managed to escape with his life and returned to his father, Mohammed. Shockingly, those damning photographs ended up in the hands of Dr. Zawahiri, the leader of the al-Jihad group. Zawahiri was incensed, believing that the young teenage boy was somehow at fault. There were pictures to prove it! In our world, sex between men is punishable by death. So a second horror was awaiting my friend. He was arrested by the group leaders, put on trial, and condemned to death.

  My father was uninvolved with anything to do with this incident, although he used the episode to remind us that he had always kept his sons under guard and close at home to ensure that such things could never happen to us. He reminded us that many people would like to harm him through his young sons.

  I was so sad that my father refused to approach Dr. Zawahiri about the incident, and to save my friend’s life, as I believed in those days that my father could accomplish anything he wanted.

  Mohammed Sharaf knew the truth. That good father strongly defended his son, telling Zawahiri that his boy was an innocent victim. But no one wanted to believe they had wrongly condemned an innocent boy. And so it came to be that Zawahiri ordered that my doomed friend be delivered to his offices. My friend was dragged into a room with Zawahiri, who shot him in the head.

  For days I was frozen with shock and grief that an innocent person might be murdered at the hands of those he had believed offered protection. I fretted over the terrors my friend had endured in the last days of his young life—first being brutally gang-raped, then being falsely accused of having illicit sex, then his last image being that of a gun placed to his head before his world turned dark and his life on earth ended.

  Creeping memories reminded me that I, too, could have suffered the same fate. Threats of rape were the preferred method of intimidation by the bullies at my former schools in Jeddah and Medina. I had never told anyone of the threats, for I was ashamed to be so menaced, but now I couldn’t help but wonder that if such a thing had happened, would I have forfeited my life for another’s crime?

  For the first time I also realized that some of the men surrounding my father might be dangerous even to the sons of Osama bin Laden. Such men had danced with brutality since they were young, and now malice ran in their blood. I had always recognized this, yet felt immune to their cruel impulses. But Mohammed Sharaf was one of the most prominent leaders. If his son could be raped and murdered, my brothers and I could be targeted as well. From that time on we were very vigilant about whom we trusted, and for the first time had a glimmer of understanding as to why our father felt that his young sons must be kept secure.

  One question kept troubling me: Why would my highly educated and soft-spoken father hang about with such ruffians, even if they were faithful to his cause? I really could not understand.

  Although most of the veterans who had followed my father from the days of the Afghanistan-Russian war never exhibited criminal conduct, there were a few who bore watching. One of the men had murdered a puppy, while another buried a dog alive. A third slaughtered a beloved pet monkey.

  Because of our Islamic teachings, few Muslims are fond of dogs. Our own Prophet suggested that it was best to avoid dogs. Despite this religious instruction, my father had ordered some German shepherd watchdogs from Germany and he often kept those dogs nearby. My brothers and I made friends out of some of the neighbor’s pets, as well as stray dogs that hung around the al-Riyadh Village, by saving some leftovers and feeding them. In the beginning our acts sprang from boredom, but as time passed, the cuteness of the puppies tugged at our hearts. Each of us soon had our favorites.

  My preference was a dog named Bobby. He was a rich ginger and white color, medium in size, with funny floppy ears. Bobby had a wife named Shami. Those two loved each other and seemed to be sexually faithful. There was another dog we named Lassie and she tried to tempt Bobby, but he was uninterested at first. Since Lassie was more beautiful than Shami, we would try to encourage Bobby and Lassie to mate because we wanted puppies out of those two beauties.

  Eventually this happened and Lassie became the mom of some beautiful pups. Then one day my favorite of the pups began to foam at the mouth. I called one of my father’s war veterans, hoping we could take the pup to the local veterinarian, but that veteran decided on the spot that the pup had rabies. He said he couldn’t shoot it, otherwise the entire neighborhood would be roused, but he would have to kill it. Before I knew what was happening he had dragged in a rope, climbed a tree, tied one end of the rope to a branch and the other around my pup’s neck. He called on my brother Abdul Rahman to hold one end of the rope, ordering him not to let go. Poor Abdul Rahman, not knowing any better, did as he was told. I was just a kid and stood there protesting in vain while my pup hung by the neck until it died.

  A second veteran became so annoyed with the large number of stray dogs hanging around the neighborhood that he dug a hole in the ground and made a trap. When one particular dog fell in the trap, he rushed to beat it over the head with an iron bar, then pulled the dog up and threw it in his car and drove its carcass to the edge of the desert and discarded it there.

  We were sad but didn’t know what to do. We knew our father would take the side of his war veterans. We were helpless witnesses to anything an adult might decide to do.

  Imagine our surprise a few weeks later when our pet came limping up to the mosque door, pitiful, minus an eye and with other visible injuries, but alive. After that close call, we kept feeding her until we left Khartoum.

  Nothing was more bizarre than the fate that befell our beloved pet monkey.

  By this time, our father had acquired much land throughout the country. One of his farms was at Damazin, south of Khartoum, near the Ethiopian border. The cone-shaped huts where we sometimes visited were set close to a jungle with various primates that seemed to enjoy entertaining visitors. There was one particular female monkey who had the cutest baby clinging around her neck. One of the Sudanese workers wanted that baby monkey, so he set a trap, drugging the water and taking the baby boy away from its mother. Everyone loved that little monkey. Even the adults smiled as the children tamed it so we could play with it.

  When we arrived one day, the baby monkey was nowhere to be found. My siblings and I looked everywhere. Then my father’s cook came to me and whispered that the sweet little monkey was dead, that one of my father’s men who had been sent to the farm to work had become enraged by the sight of the pet monkey. He had chased that monkey down and had run it over with a water tanker.

  We were furious, failing to understand how anyone could deliberately harm such a cute little creature who did nothing but bring much needed gaiety into our lives. Imagine our shock when we learned that the ex-warrior gleefully told everyone who would listen that the baby monkey was not a monkey at all, but was a Jewish person turned into a monkey by the hand of God. In his eyes, he had killed a Jew!

  My entire body shook when I heard such ridiculous talk. I was young and admittedly unsophisticated, but I was a rational thinker who knew that monkeys were not Jews and that Jews were not monkeys. One had nothing to do with the other.

  Like many Arab children, I was aware of the enormous dislike, and even hatred in some cases, between Muslims and Jews and between Muslims and Christians. Children are not born with prejudice, however, so although I knew that many Muslims considered Jews their bitter enemies, my thoughts did not go in that direction.

  I was even more astonished when I was later to
ld that it was my father who had convinced the veteran of the ridiculous Jew/monkey theory. I was hurt and angry that my father had caused such a thing to happen.

  The life I was leading was becoming increasingly weird and intolerable, but being a child, I was helpless, carried along by a deluge of hate so strong I was struggling to save myself. To add to my worries, since Abdullah failed to return into the family fold, I noticed that my father’s keen eyes began to fall on me more frequently. Was I the chosen son?

  Soon there was talk that we might not be able to remain in Khartoum, that Saudi Arabia and other regional governments did not want Osama bin Laden in Sudan. We were told that even the U.S. president Bill Clinton and his government wanted us kicked out of the country. Why? I could not guess why the American president was sitting in his Washington office thinking about my father.

  Of course, I had no knowledge of the ongoing schemes being fostered by al-Qaeda, or the other two radical groups so closely aligned to my father’s organization.

  In the beginning, my father was curiously unconcerned about the calls for his expulsion. He was intimately connected with the government, called the National Islamic Front, as well as the president, General Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir. He was even closer to a very powerful man in Sudan, Hassan al-Turabi. My father’s businesses provided such huge financial benefits that he believed that the Sudanese government would never expel him, regardless of what pressure might be applied by Saudi Arabia or Egypt or even by the United States.

  But my father was wrong. There were limits to the pressure that even a legitimate government could withstand. In fact, it was an event that had occurred the previous year that would eventually lead to the end of those previously carefree days in Sudan. On June 26, 1995, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had been in a motorcade en route to an African summit. They were driving from the airport to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa when gunmen blocked the motorcade and opened fire on the Egyptian president’s limousine. Two of Mubarak’s bodyguards were killed, but Mubarak’s driver was so skilled that he was able to spin in a circle and speed to the safety of the airport, saving his most famous passenger.