From his appearance, bin Laden does not look like a terrorist. He is a polite, soft-spoken man. His hands are soft because he was born rich and was never required to do physical labour.  One still thought his physical participation in the jihad against the Soviet occupation troops and their client Afghan communist regime for about 10 years would have taken its toll and turned him into a tough and rugged man.  The only visible sign that lends ferocity to his otherwise  gentle demeanour is his AK-47 (Kalashnikov) rifle, which he carries all the time.  His men are keen to narrate how bin Laden snatched it from a Soviet soldier in a hand-to-hand combat during the jihad.

            Precise information about bin Laden’s early life is difficult to obtain in the absence of an authentic biography.  But by most accounts he had a religious bent of mind even in his youth and said his prayers regularly as compared to other teenagers. Born in 1957 in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, bin Laden was raised in Madina and Jeddah and studied management and economics in the King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah.

            He was one of 20 children of Mohammad bin Laden, a self-made man of Yemeni origin who founded a construction company and rose to become one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest commoners.  The bin Laden is a respected Saudi firm that carried out construction work in Makkah and Madina, two of the holiest cities for Muslims, that are said to have left a deep impact on the young man.  Bin Laden’s contacts with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic movement that originated in Egypt, also affected his thinking.  One of his teachers was Dr Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-Jordanian who shifted to Peshawar after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and started inviting and organising Arab nationals to take part in the Afghan jihad.  Bin Laden later teamed up with Azzam to set up an office, Maktab Al-Khidmat, in Peshawar to serve Arab volunteers entering and coming out of Afghanistan. He also helped establish a camp in Sadda, in Pakistan’s tribal area, Kurram Agency, to impart military training to Arabs and set up the Ma’sadad Al-Ansar base in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army and Afghan communists.  Bin Laden is said to have fought in the battles for Khost, Jaji and Jalalabad along with his Arab colleagues.

            The Soviet military intervention had the most profound influence on bin Laden, prompting the 22-year-old to head for Afghanistan.  He placed his considerable wealth at the disposal of the Afghan mujahideen, and the Afghan widows and orphans.  In his interviews, bin Laden explained how he transferred heavy construction equipment including bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks, etc from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan for building roads to facilitate the mujahideen, boring tunnels to store arms and ammunition, digging trenches and establishing hospitals.  He spoke about the immense spiritual benefit he derived from his participation in the Afghan jihad and explained how it enabled Muslims to destroy the myth of invincibility surrounding a then superpower (Soviet Union) and prepared them to confront the myth of the remaining one (US).  “Today, the entire Muslim world, by the grace of God, has imbibed the faithful spirit of strength and started to interact in a good manner in order to bring an end to occupation and the western and American influence on our countries,” he said.

            In my December 1998 interview with bin Laden near Kandahar in southwestern Afghanistan, he for the first time came closest to indirectly accepting responsibility for the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  Bin Laden said his International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders (or the US and Israel) had issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling on the Muslim nation to carry on jihad to liberate Islamic holy sites, including Ka’aba in Makkah and Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.  Most probably, he argued, the anti-US bombings took place as a result of the calls and warnings given by his Front.  “If the instigation for jihad against the Americans and Israelis to liberate the Al-Aqsa mosque and Holy Ka’aba is considered a crime, let history be a witness that I am a criminal,” he declared.

            Probably Osama bin Laden would not have landed in trouble, had he not been in the habit of talking big.  By declaring a holy war against the United States and Israel, he ensured that he would be deemed the prime suspect in any act of terrorism targeting the Americans.  This happened in the case of the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, followed by Saudi Arabia later.  And this was the case again on September 11, when the US experienced terrorist attacks in its political capital, Washington, and financial hub, New York.  Even before the collapse of the World Trade Center towers following the attack, accusing fingers were being pointed at bin Laden and his organisation, Al-Qaeda.

            That bin Laden loves to use the media to create an impact is borne out by an incident during my visit to his camp in Afghanistan’s southern Khost province in May 1998.  Smuggled across Pakistan’s mountainous border with Afghanistan by the pro-bin Laden militant Islamic group, Harkatul Ansar, our group of 14 Pakistani journalists was kept waiting for three days after being promised a meeting with bin Laden.  Before our patience ran out, we were packed into the sturdy Toyota pick-up trucks and driven across a harsh terrain on a non-existent road.  Five hours later, we found ourselves in a camp largely made of mudhouses, which I instantly recognised from my earlier visits.  It emerged that this camp was only half an hour’s drive from the place where we had  spent three days and nights waiting for the interview.  But we were made to go through this long, back-breaking journey simply to give us the impression that bin Laden’s camp was located in a remote and distant territory.

            There was more to follow once we arrived at the camp, barricaded by a barbed wire and teeming with armed men.  Bin Laden, his pick-up truck leading a convoy of vehicles, made a grand entry into the camp.  As he disembarked, surrounded by about two dozen hooded bodyguards, the sleepy valley suddenly came alive with gunfire. Gunmen deployed on mountain peaks fired their Russian-made Zikoyak and Dachaka heavy machine-guns and rocket-launchers into the air to light up the dark sky.  The celebratory firing continued for the next 15 minutes or so as bin Laden, visible from afar due to his six feet plus height, slowly walked towards us and into the large room where he was scheduled to hold a press conference.  It was an impressive show of firepower and some of us were overawed by the experience.  However, my language skills soon enabled me to find out from the Pushto-speaking gunmen that they weren’t bin Laden’s men and had been invited to put up this show for the visiting journalists.  Among them were Afghans and Pakistanis receiving military training at the complex of six camps in the area and all were asked to bring their own guns for the purpose.  For the uninitiated in my group, bin Laden emerged as a powerful military commander after stage-managing this fierce public display of firepower.

            Despite his natural shyness, the message that bin Laden sends to the world is that he would be willing to grant media interviews on a daily basis.  But he is forbidden to do so by Taliban supreme leader Mulla Mohammad Omar, who often complains that bin Laden’s criticism of the US, Saudi Arabia and other countries has cost his isolated regime its remaining few friends.  Omar was so angry when bin Laden held the May 1998 news conference without his permission that he warned that Afghanistan could have only one ruler – either him or his Saudi guest.  Bin Laden was later summoned to Kandahar and told by Omar bluntly not to test the limits of Taliban hospitality. Subsequently, bin Laden had to issue a statement declaring his acceptance of Omar as Afghanistan’s Amirul Momineen (Commander of the Faithful) and pledging his unconditional support to Taliban policies.  When I met him for the second time on December 23, 1998 at his makeshift tented camp in a desert near Kandahar, bin Laden lamented that his repeated requests to invite me to interview him were turned down by the Taliban leadership. His lieutenants, speaking through the English-speaking Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, leader of the radical Egyptian Al-Jihad (Islamic Jihad) group, argued that the Taliban should allow bin Laden more opportunities to talk to the press not only to clarify his position now that he is being accused of committing every act of terrorism taking place in the world but also to explain his mission.

            The 44-year-old bin Laden is an intelligent man, given to being witty on occasion.  Some examples are worth recalling.  When I asked him whether it was true that his wealthy Saudi family had disowned him, bin Laden coolly responded that blood was thicker than water.  “How many children do you have?” I asked him once.  There was a burst of laughter, and he replied: “I have lost count!”  Was he still a multimillionaire and how much was his worth?  Before I had finished my question, bin Laden had held his hand to his heart and said: “I am ghani (rich) here.”  And when I asked him how he dared to challenge the world’s only superpower operating out of a poor, war-ravaged country like Afghanistan, bin Laden looked up to the skies, raised his index finger and replied that there was only one real superpower and that was God Almighty.    

            Bin Laden returned to his native Saudi Arabia after the pullout of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989 as the jihad was over and his efforts to reconcile the warring Afghan mujahideen factions had failed.  His ties with the ruling Saudi family soon turned sour and the arrival of the US troops in his homeland during the Gulf War made their differences unbridgeable.  Bitterly opposed to the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden had no hesitation in describing the US troops in his country as an “occupation army.”  He was almost tearful when he mentioned the presence of “infidels” near Makkah and Madina in places where the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) once walked and said it was unacceptable to Muslims the world over.  By 1991, his Saudi citizenship had been revoked and his assets frozen.  He migrated to Sudan but was forced to leave after almost five years when the Saudi and US governments pressurised President Omar Al-Bashir to force him to leave.  On May 18, 1996 bin Laden returned to Afghanistan and took up residence in Jalalabad with a mujahideen commander Engineer Mahmood, whom he had befriended during the jihad.  Subsequently, in September the same year, Osama for the first time encountered the Taliban when they captured Jalalabad and he was allowed to stay as a guest.  It is another matter that the Taliban soon discovered that their guest was abusing their hospitality by issuing political statements critical of the US, Israeli and Saudi governments.  By early 1998, bin Laden was being accused of funding radical Islamic groups that indulged in acts of terrorism.  When the US embassies in Africa were bombed in August that year killing 240 people, bin Laden was the prime suspect.  He survived a US cruise missile attack on his camp in Khost, southern Afghanistan, on August 20, 1998.  The next day, I received a satellite phone call from bin Laden.  On the line was his friend and political adviser, Al-Zawahiri. He said: “Mr bin Laden is sitting beside me.  As he cannot speak English, he asked me to convey to you that we survived the American missile attack.  Tell the Americans that the war has just begun.  They should now wait for the answer.”

            Was the September 11 incident Osama’s answer to the US – or was it a prelude to an even bloodier response?