Osama Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden
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For more than 10 years, Osama bin Laden topped the FBI's list as the world's most wanted man for orchestrating many terrorist attacks around the world. On May 1, 2011, American Special forces ambushed and killed him at his compound in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda, the pan-Islamic militant organization, was Osama's brainchild through which he planned and executed his deadly terror missions. The name Osama is globally infamous and an inspiring figure among terror groups.
Osama was born in wealth and privilege to a millionaire father and was the 17th child among the 52 kids born to Mohammed bin Laden. While his siblings schooled abroad and later worked for their father, Osama stayed closer home, married young, and integrated with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood just like other Saudi male peers. Islam went beyond religion according to Osama that shaped his political ideology and influenced many of the decisions he took. In the late 1970s, while still in college, he religiously followed Abdulla Azzam, a pan-Islamist scholar who believed that every Muslim should participate in the holy war to create a single Islamic State.. This ideology appealed to Osama, who was dissatisfied with the West's rising interference with Middle Eastern life. When the Soviet soldiers raided Afghanistan in 1979, Osama and his mentor Azzam relocated to Peshwar to join the resistance. They did not participate physically in the war, however, they used their financial resources and connections to win the approval of the Afghan rebels. They subsequently formed an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat that acted as a worldwide recruitment network and a vessel through which pan-Islamist ideology would be put to practice.[History.com Editors, “Osama bin Laden,” History, May 13, 2020, /topics/21st-century/osama-bin-laden]
When bin Laden established the new al Qaeda in 1988, his focus was on symbolic terror acts as opposed to military campaigns. When the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in 1989, Osama returned to Saudi Arabia to source more funding for his newfound mission. The Saudi royal family feared for the worst and knew bin Laden was up to no good and tried hard to keep him grounded in the country. His proposal to offer Afghan Arabs to guard the frontiers of Kuwait in 1990 when Iraq invaded them proved futile. However, Saudi sought help from the United States, a country that Osama considered regarded as infidels. Osama’s goal was to prove to the world that it was al Qaeda who were the masters of the world. In early 1990, Osama launched his first terror attack when a bomb explosion in a hotel that housed American soldiers in Yemen occurred. This explosion in Yemen set up the precedent through which the world would witness violent jihad attacks in the late 1990s that culminated in the 9/11 terror attack in America.[History.com Editors, “Osama bin Laden,” History, May 13, 2020, /topics/21st-century/osama-bin-laden]
In 1993, al Qaeda trained and armed Somali radicals who murdered 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu. In 1995, the assignation attempt on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was linked to the group. The same year saw the bombing of a United States National Guard training in Riyadh. In 1996, bin...