Jean Sasson - Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World

Growing Up bin Laden

ALSO BY JEAN SASSON

NONFICTION

The Rape of Kuwait

Princess: A True Story of Life Behind
the Veil in Saudi Arabia

Daughters of Arabia

Desert Royal

Mayada, Daughter of Iraq

Love in a Torn Land: Joanna of Kurdistan

HISTORICAL FICTION

Esters Child

For more information on Jean Sasson and
her books, see her Web site at
www.jeansasson.com

Growing Up bin Laden

OSAMAS WIFE AND SON TAKE US
INSIDE THEIR SECRET WORLD

JEAN SASSON
as told to her by
Najwa bin Laden and Omar bin Laden

A Oneworld Book

First published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth by
Oneworld Publications 2009
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications in 2010

Copyright The Sasson Corporation 2009

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available
from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-85168-765-7

Maps and other illustrations by Evan T. White
Cover design by vaguelymemorable.com

Oneworld Publications
UK: 185 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 7AR, England
USA: 38 Greene Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10013, USA
www.oneworld-publications.com

We dedicate this book to every innocent person who has suffered pain or lost their life in terror attacks throughout the world, and the families who continue to suffer and mourn them.

We pray for peace all over the world.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Thank you, Omar, for your sincerity and integrity. Thank you, dear Najwa, for your sweet ways and your oh-so-careful responses to my endlessly intrusive questions at all hours of the day and night. Thank you, Zaina, for your devotion to Omar, and for your encouragement that Omar continue helping to make this book happen.

Thank you, Liza, my indefatigable literary agent, for believing in this project when others who should have believed did not. I am a most fortunate author to have you represent me. And Frank, my literary attorney, I thank you for being a rock throughout my literary career, for sixteen years now. Havis, I thank you for your generous nature and unfailing help. To Chandler, foreign rights connoisseur, I thank you for falling in love with this story and for presenting it to publishers worldwide with that love in your heart.

A special thanks to my editor, Hope. Liza had told me you are one of the great editors, and working with you has proven that to me. Laura, you never let me down and were always there to answer my questions with a friendly word. I thank you and the many people at St. Martins, who, like me, were drawn into this unique story and enjoyed exercising their skills to bring this important project to fruition.

Thank you, my dear Hikmat, for your diligence in translating a seemingly endless stream of pages from English to Arabic and Arabic to English for my critical research. And to you too, Amina, for pitching in when it seemed the translation stream threatened to crest and overflow. Evan, you were a pro from the first moment, and your illustrations add so much value to this work. You have my sincere thanks for never complaining despite the many tweaks on the road to perfection.

Thanks to those who care deeply about this book, and to those who care about the other books I have written or planned projects yet to be written. This includes relatives Aunt Margaret and cousins Bill and Alice. My nephew Greg and his son Alec express sincere care by calling to check on my progress and well-being during the difficult days and nights of writing. Dear friends who graciously support me at every turn cannot go unnamed. I thank Alece, Anita, Danny and Jo, Joanne, Judy and her mom, Eleanor, Lisa, Maria and Bill, Mayada, Peter and Julie, and Vicki and her mom, Jo.

And, of course, once again, to my darling Jack, who gives me unconditional love while securing the perimeters of my life.

J EAN S ASSON

A Note to the Reader

From the moment he came to the worlds attention, Osama bin Laden has meticulously guarded even the most impersonal details about himself and his wives and children. This lack of private information about Osama bin Laden and his immediate family has fed the worlds imagination ever since September 11, 2001.

While there have been many books published about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization, this is the first book written from inside Osama bin Ladens family life, with personal accounts directly from his first wife, Najwa, and their fourth-born son, Omar. I want readers to know that nothing in Growing Up bin Laden has been filtered through the opinions of this writer. Memories of events, stories, and personal thoughts have come straight from Najwa and Omar to me. Although I was startled by certain revelations, I let the truth of the bin Laden family life unfold naturally. Like other members of the vast bin Laden family, Najwa and Omar are not terrorists. Neither has ever harmed anyone, but are in fact two of the kindest individuals it has been my pleasure to know.

It is important to remember that this book is about the private life of Osama bin Laden and his family. Please keep in mind that his son Omar bin Laden was a young boy until he moved to Afghanistan, and that Omars mother, Najwa, lived in isolation during her marriage according to her husbands wishes. This is strictly a personal account of family life because much of Osama bin Ladens political, militant, and Islamic life was hidden from his wife and son, although it permeated their own lives in ways they did not always understand at the time.

During the turbulent years they were living with Osama bin Laden, Omar and Najwa were often occupied with survival rather than with keeping notes or diaries. They acknowledge that the timing and dates of family events may not always be exact, and ask that readers treat the information in this book as essentially an oral history, and therefore subject to the fallibility of memory.

Finally, although this book is the story of Najwa and Omar, and their recollections and views as they recounted them to me, the reader should understand that those clearly identified materials I have added to the narrativethis and other authors notes in the text and the Appendices at the end of the bookreflect solely my views and opinions and not those of Omar or Najwa bin Laden.

When seeking to deepen our knowledge of those who bring great harm to the world, perhaps we should be guided by the words of Sir Winston Churchill at the end of World War II:

People are not born terrorists. Nor do they become terrorists in a single stroke. But step by step, like a farmer preparing a field for planting, their lives unfold in a pattern that leaves them prepared to receive the seed of terrorism.