Interesting piece from Daily Mail about Afghanistan.
Disgusting ideology.Asleep in the guest room at his grandmother's home in Jeddah, a 20-year-old man is woken from a deep sleep by a wailing from another room.
Seconds later, his door is thrown open and his uncle comes rushing in. "Come quickly!" he cries.
"See what your father has done! He has ruined all our lives! He has destroyed us. Not yet fully awake, the young man soon finds himself in front of a television screen where he can scarcely believe the images unfolding before his eyes.
Everyone remembers where they were on September 11, 2001. But for Omar bin Laden, the shock of what he saw was magnified by conflicting emotions.
The fourth son of Osama bin Laden, he had recently fled his father's side in Afghanistan and insists he had no idea his father had been planning the biggest terrorist atrocity the world has known. Indeed, it was only after months of torment that Omar finally accepted that the man who raised him was behind the attack.
"The words and images were too horrific to comprehend," he says. "Although my uncle had expressed his worst fears, none of us could truly believe that someone we knew, someone we had loved, had anything to do with the catastrophic events we were watching.
"It seemed impossible for my father to be the one responsible for the chaos and death going on in America. The attack I was seeing was far too vast, something that only another superpower could organise."
He adds: "I did not want my father to be the one responsible. Only much later, when he took personal credit for the attacks, did I know I must give up the luxury of doubt.
That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged in, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible event.
"After hearing an audiotape of my father's own words taking credit for the attacks, I faced the reality that he was the perpetrator behind the events of September 11, 2001."
Much has been written in the eight years that have passed since 9/11 - but never before has the story been told from the unique perspective of the bin Laden family.
Now Omar and his mother, bin Laden's first wife Najwa, have collaborated on an intriguing new book - Growing Up Bin Laden - which lifts the lid on the secretive life of the world's most wanted man.
While some may question their motives for speaking out, it is certainly fascinating, if deeply unnerving, to read such vivid first-hand accounts about life within Osama bin Laden's family.
Their version of events sheds light on how the son of Saudi millionaires turned his back on a life of fast cars and affluence to become a terrorist mastermind, obsessed with the idea of waging a religious war, Jihad, against the West.
Not only did he amass followers, but bin Laden also purposely sired a vast family by five wives in the hope his sons would join his sick cause.
A harsh disciplinarian, he toughened his boys up with regular beatings and gruelling desert survival trips from a young age, before kitting them out with Kalashnikovs and urging them to sign up as suicide bombers in their teens.
Also revealed for the first time are personal details about bin Laden, which had remained a secret. His son insists, for example, that his father is blind in his right eye as the result of a metal work accident at school and that he suffers from recurring bouts of malaria.
Najwa bin Laden provides a fascinating insight into the control her husband exerted over his family and his followers. She also reveals what it was like raising her 11 children in exile in Sudan, and later in the inhospitable surrounds of the notorious Tora Bora mountain hideout in Afghanistan.
Now 51 and living in Syria with her second eldest son and two youngest daughters, Najwa fled Afghanistan just days before September 11 and has no idea whether the children she was forced to leave behind are alive or dead.
Yet still she refuses to criticise her husband, saying only this: "For all the horrible events that have occurred since I left Afghanistan, I can only think and feel with my mother's heart. A mother's heart feels the pain of every loss, weeping not only for my children, but for the lost children of every mother."
Najwa Ghanem was just 15 when she married her 17-year-old first cousin, Osama. Although the union was arranged between the two families, she insists it was a love match and describes the young Osama as a "soft-spoken, serious boy" whose brown eyes "lit up with pleasure anytime I walked into a room".
"See what your father has done! He has ruined all our lives! He has destroyed us!"
Even so, for a Muslim girl used to a life of relative freedom in the port city of Latakia, Syria, her new role as the veiled wife of a devout Saudi took some adjusting to. Home was a two-storey house in Jeddah, where she was expected to live in seclusion while her young husband finished his studies at a prestigious, boys-only school.
Fluent in English, the young bin Laden juggled his studies with his work for the family's construction empire, the huge Saudi Bin Laden Group. And apart from a penchant for "new cars with big engines", Najwa remembers him as a man of simple tastes who liked to eat stuffed courgette and drive to the desert for long walks.
The couple's first child, a son, was born in 1976 and another boy soon followed. Confined to the domestic world, a teenage mother with two toddlers and another baby soon on the way, Najwa appears not to have noticed a crucial shift in her husband's world view during those early years of marriage.
Indeed, even when her husband announced they were off on a two-week trip to the US in early 1979, she had no idea of the significance. "My husband's business was not my business, I did not ask questions," she says.
In fact, while there, the 22-year-old bin Laden had arranged to meet with Palestinian extremist Abdullah Azzam, widely regarded to be his first ideological mentor, who was recruiting young Muslims to join a new Jihad.
And by the time the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan later that year, bin Laden was heavily involved, at first raising funds and delivering supplies to the Afghan resistance fighters, known as the Mujahideen, and then ultimately joining the fighting himself.
Najwa admits she stood by helplessly for the next decade as the war in Afghanistan took over her husband's life. On the domestic front, she had to accept his decision to take other wives.
In 1991, bin Laden and his growing family were expelled from Saudi Arabia after he criticised the royal family for allowing US troops on to Saudi soil.
With wives and children in tow, bin Laden first lived in exile in Khartoum, Sudan, where Najwa says her husband's greatest delight was growing sunflowers on the many farms he owned.
But while she appears ignorant of her husband's terrorist activities during those years and the growth of his global terror network Al-Qaeda, meaning "the base" or "foundation", she does reveal that the family were regularly challenged to survive in the desert with little food or water.
The routine was always the same. Osama would drive his wives and children to a remote place and leave them there with little food and water, expecting even the babes-in-arms to sleep in dirt holes dug out of the sand by the older children.
"While the wives and daughters watched, Osama directed the strongest boys to use digging tools to excavate hollows large enough for a human to stretch out lengthwise when sleeping," she says.
"We did as we were told, slowly easing our bodies into those dirt holes, waiting for a long night to pass."
Her husband's obsession with waging Jihad ultimately took the bin Ladens to Pakistan and, finally, Afghanistan and the notorious Tora Bora caves, where his wives raised his children surrounded by fighters with only the most basic of facilities.
