student. It was there, when he was 15 years old,
that he experienced a religious and political awak-
ening. The school boasted a Western-style cur-
riculum, but Usama’s conversion occurred in an
after-school study group conducted by a physical
education instructor who was a member of the
Syrian branch of the mUslim brotherhood. Usama
had been raised as a devout Sunni Muslim, but
he now became extremely pious compared to his
friends and other members of his family. He refused
to wear Western dress outside school, began fast-
ing twice a week, prayed frequently, memorized
chapters from the Quran, and grew strict with his
younger brothers and sister. He became more aware
of, and concerned about, the Muslim world, par-
ticularly with regard to the situation in palestine. It
is thought had he had actually been recruited into
the Muslim Brotherhood at this time, and started
the reading the books of sayyid qUtb (d. 1966),
his brother Muhammad Qutb (b. 1915), and the
medieval Hanbali jurist and theologian taqi al-din
ibn taymiyya (d. 1328). Usama graduated from Al-
Thaghr in 1976, then enrolled at King Abd al-Aziz
ibn Saud University in Jeddah, where he majored in
business administration. He also became involved
in the family construction business.
In December 1979, Soviet troops invaded
aFghanistan. Like many other Muslims, bin Ladin
was shocked and angry. An acquaintance of bin
Ladin’s, a Palestinian scholar named Abd Allah
Azzam (1941–1989), moved to Pakistan to join
the Afghan resistance. He made frequent trips to
Peshawar, the headquarters of the resistance. He
also often returned to Jeddah, where he stayed
in bin Ladin’s home and held meetings to recruit
young Saudis to join the Afghans. Bin Ladin soon
started raising funds for the anti-Soviet jihad;
eventually, he went to Afghanistan and became
a mujahid himself. This is when he and Ayman
al-Zawahiri (b. 1951), an infamous Egyptian
jihadist, co-founded the Arab Mujahidin Services
Bureau, the predecessor of al-Qaida.
In 1988, with a group of other Afghanistan
war veterans, bin Ladin founded al-Qaida al-
Askariya (the military base). The goal of the
new organization was to act as a training system
for mujahidin. In 1990, after the Soviets pulled
out of Afghanistan, bin Ladin returned to Saudi
Arabia, where he was seen as a hero of the jihad.
Then, later that same year, iraq invaded Kuwait.
Because he opposed the presence of U.S. troops in
Saudi Arabia, bin Ladin offered the Saudi king his
own figures, trained in Afghanistan, to drive the
Iraqis out of Kuwait. When the king refused his
offer, bin Ladin criticized the Saudi royal family
for their dependence on the U.S. military. In 1992
bin Ladin moved to sUdan, where he set up a new
base for mujahidin operations. His continued criti-
cism of the Saudi king led to his being stripped of
his Saudi passport and citizenship.
On December 29, 1992, a bomb exploded at a
hotel in Aden, Yemen; two people were killed. It
is believed that this was the first bombing attack
in which bin Ladin was involved. Since then, he
has been implicated in funding or mastermind-
ing attacks in Somalia and New York in 1993, in
Saudi Arabia in 1995, in Kenya and Tanzania in
1998, against the USS Cole in 2000, and in the
September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and
Washington, D.C.
In 1996 bin Ladin was expelled from Sudan;
returning to Afghanistan, he became a supporter of
the taliban regime there. After the September 11
attacks, the United States led an international coali-
tion to invade Afghanistan, ousting the Taliban
government; however, bin Ladin was not captured.
He has been indicted in U.S. courts on a number of
charges connected with different attacks, although
he has not been charged in connection with the
September 11 attacks. Many claims have been
made since 2001 about bin Ladin’s whereabouts,
but his location remains unknown.
See also gUlF Wars; oil; salaFism; terrorism;
Wahhabism.
Juan E. Campo and Kate O’HalloranFurther reading: Peter Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden
I Know: An Oral History of al-Qaeda’s Leader (NewK 698 Usama bin Ladin