Omar bin Laden speaks out

[ajpirzada]

It is after midnight when Osama bin Laden’s fourth-born son, Omar, leads me into a nightclub called Les Caves de Boys in the centre of Damascus.
He brushes past the two heavyset Syrian thugs at the door and picks a booth in the back.

A dozen or so wealthy Arab men are drinking whiskey and watching Russian strippers put on a show – tame by Western standards, but as Omar sips a 7 Up, he follows their every move with boyish wonder. Russian women, he tells me, are the most beautiful in the world.
As a teenager in the mountains of Tora Bora, Omar had been his father’s chosen successor, the favoured son meant to lead al-Qaeda and carry on global jihad.
Then, in 2001, a few months before Osama bin Laden was to become the world’s most wanted man, Omar abandoned his father’s compound in Afghanistan. He left behind almost certain death for this: the world, Les Caves de Boys, life.
Past two in the morning, a statuesque dancer emerges for the grand finale. Dressed in a red rhinestone bra and panties, with a black shimmy belt and an ostrich-feather crown, she gyrates her hips as Omar watches, mesmerised.
‘Thank God my father doesn’t run the world,’ Omar grins.
To Omar, Osama bin Laden is neither a jihadist nor a mass murderer – he is a lost man, a fanatical father who withheld his love, beat and betrayed his children, and destroyed his family chasing his fantasy of becoming a latter-day prophet.
‘My father is a strong personality,’ says Omar. ‘Nobody can stop him from getting his dream. Either he gets what he wants, or he dies.’
Omar, 28, is one of bin Laden’s 11 sons but from an early age, he stood out from his brothers for his independence and is now the only bin Laden son publicly to disavow his father’s violence.
In Growing Up bin Laden, co-authored last year with his mother and an American writer named Jean Sasson, Omar provides an intimate portrait of what it is like to be the son of a sociopath.
Omar bears a striking resemblance to his father: he has the long, broad nose, the pronounced brow, the dark, brooding eyes. Sitting in the hotel bistro at the Four Seasons in Damascus the morning after our visit to Les Caves, Omar attracts sly glances from the bellhops and waitresses.
Shorter and more muscular than his father, he wears his jet-black hair rock-star long and pulled back in a ponytail, his goatee neatly trimmed. He is dressed in black – leather jacket, Versace T-shirt, designer jeans – and, in perhaps the final insult to the aesthetics of jihad, shiny silver trainers.
Sitting next to Omar drinking a virgin piña colada is his wife, Zaina, a British grandmother nearly twice his age. Short, light-skinned, with striking blue eyes, she wears an ankle-length black coat that looks like a costume from The Lord of the Rings.
Zaina acts as Omar’s conduit to the Western world, serving as his publicist, dresser and interpreter, hovering over his every word and rushing to deflect anything she considers damaging or inflammatory.
Since they met four years ago, the unlikely couple have become tabloid fodder. ‘We are bigger than Prince Charles and Lady Diana,’ Omar says, shaking his head.
It didn’t help that Zaina struck many in the British press as an attention-hungry harpy, a scheming wannabe who was using Omar and his infamous father as a chance to become rich and famous.
‘To anyone who wants to give me £10 million, I will give my full life story,’ she told one newspaper. No one took up the offer, but the details of her colourful past soon made the papers: her five previous marriages, including one to a Hells Angel, her adoption of the title ‘Lady,’ the spider-web tattoo across her back.
Like his father, Omar is a man in search of a country. A citizen of Saudi Arabia, where he has primarily lived since he left his father, he has been denied a visa by Britain and turned down for political asylum by Egypt and Spain.
After months of back-and-forth negotiations, he finally agreed to meet me in Syria, where he was going to visit his mother, Najwa, Osama bin Laden’s first wife. We would spend four days together, first in Damascus and then on a drive through the Bekaa Valley into Beirut.
When I ask about his father, Omar is defensive and evasive. ‘I love him because he is my father,’ he says. ‘I don’t want him to be caught and put on trial. It would break my heart. I wish he could die before someone gets him. I don’t want to see my father under the rule of somebody else.
'My father is my father, to this day, and until I die. I came from his body. I am part of him.’
How does he feel when he sees him on television? ‘I get worried,’ Omar says. ‘For me, for my father, for the world.’
After a long silence, he turns on his smartphone and shows me the logo for a company he and Zaina are starting called B41. The company’s first project, he says, will be a line of high-fashion clothes. ‘It will be like Armani but with a different style,’ Zaina explains.
This interview, it becomes clear, is part of an overall business strategy: Omar and Zaina hope an investor will read about their venture and put up large sums of money.
Since returning to Saudi Arabia shortly before the attacks of 2001, Omar has struggled to make a living, an injustice that cuts him to the quick. He had assumed that he would slide effortlessly into the life of private jets and luxurious homes enjoyed by his wealthy Saudi relatives, but instead, he was forced to work for the family as an estate agent, on commission.
‘Saudi families are afraid to be around me,’ he says. ‘That was why I couldn’t marry one of my cousins or a Saudi girl from my class. I got refused seven times, from people at the same level as my family.’
He managed to amass several hundred thousand dollars by starting a scrap-metal business, but for a bin Laden accustomed to vast wealth, such a sum was a pittance. Haunted by his father’s misdeeds and unable to make a name for himself, he plunged into a deep depression.
Then, on a horseback-riding tour near the Pyramids in 2006, he met Zaina. ‘I see her blue eyes and the black hair, and in my heart I wanted to marry her,’ he says. 'The second day, we were walking down from the Pyramids, and I told her who I am. A lot of time people run away. She told me she knew who I was.’
When Omar was a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, his father was off in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets. ‘In those days, my father was a great hero to the West, too,’ Omar observes.
But the years of war, and the deprivations he suffered in Afghanistan, had turned Osama’s views bleak and Spartan. ‘Life has to be a burden,’ Osama advised his sons. ‘Life has to be hard. You will be made stronger if you are treated toughly.’
While his cousins enjoyed the luxury and comfort, Omar and his brothers were forced to live as though it were the seventh century: no movies, no television, no indecent music.
His father’s hatred for the ‘evils of modern life’ meant no fizzy drinks, no toys, no inhaler for Omar’s asthma. If Omar needed relief, his father told his desperate son, he could breathe through a honeycomb.
‘We were told that we must not become excited at any situation,’ Omar recalls in his memoir. ‘We were not allowed to tell jokes. We were ordered not to express joy over anything. He did say that he would allow us to smile so long as we did not laugh.
'If we were to lose control of our emotions and bark a laugh, we must be careful not to expose our eyeteeth. I have been in situations where my father actually counted the exposed teeth, reprimanding his sons on the number their merriment had revealed.’
Today, Omar prides himself on his ability to show his teeth when he laughs and hopes to write comedy one day. But the harsh upbringing didn’t destroy Omar’s need for his father’s affection.
‘Of all my children,’ his mother says, ‘Omar felt the keenest longing for a father’s love.’
In 1992, when Omar was 10, Osama moved his family to a jihadist compound in Sudan. Isolated and impoverished, Omar grew desperate to connect with the outside world.
Forbidden to watch movies or television, he improvised. When Omar caught the bus to school in Khartoum, he had one of his friends recite scenes from Rambo line by line while he imagined what the onscreen action might look like.
‘Tell him the story about meeting Sylvester Stallone,’ Zaina says.
‘I met Rambo in Rome,’ Omar says with a smile. He had traveled to the city with Zaina in 2008, to appear on an Italian television show. ‘Until I met him, he was one of my heroes. I thought he would be a friendly man. But he doesn’t care about anyone around.’
‘We were staying at one of the best hotels in Rome,’ Zaina says.
‘The owner asked if I would like to meet him,’ Omar continues. ‘I said sure, just to say hello. But he wouldn’t look at me. The owner of the hotel was embarrassed. Later, in a British newspaper, he said that I was the son of Hitler.’
Events in his childhood were marked by embassy bombings and missile attacks and nights sleeping in the desert to prepare for Armageddon.
He and his brothers were sent to the best school in the country, until a bullet whistled through a window one day and the compound was besieged by gunmen attempting to assassinate his father.
The attack only deepened bin Laden’s commitment to jihad, as well as his paranoia and anger. When Omar’s pet monkey was deliberately run over by one of Osama’s men, Omar discovered his father had convinced the man that the animal was a Jewish human turned into a monkey ‘by the hand of God.’ ‘In the eyes of this stupid man, he had killed a Jew!’ Omar says in amazement.
In 1996, under increasing pressure from America, the Sudanese government ordered bin Laden to leave Khartoum. Omar was the only son Osama took with him when he returned to Afghanistan.
‘No one could control me,’ Omar recalls. ‘That is why my father was always taking me with him. I was his chosen son. I was my father’s favourite. He said that to me. He said he had a lot of hope that I would do something for the world. I didn’t want this. I wanted to be a normal boy.’
In May 1996, after taking a private jet to Jalalabad, father and son were immediately welcomed by tribal leaders, who gave bin Laden a mountain called Tora Bora as a gift.
Taken to the remote redoubt, little more than a collection of abandoned shacks, 15-year-old Omar’s heart sank. He had hoped for a house, electricity, a few creature comforts. At Tora Bora, he became his father’s personal tea boy, bathing Osama’s feet before prayers. His father would listen to the BBC on a transistor radio, shouting into a Dictaphone about the evils of America.
Alone with his son, the elder bin Laden spoke of the pain he suffered when his father beat him – just as he beat Omar and his brothers.
‘I was puzzled,’ Omar says in his memoir. ‘If after so many years he could recall how pained he was when his father struck him or ignored him, I could not understand how he could so easily, even eagerly, beat or ignore his own sons. I never got the courage to ask my father that question, although I am sorry now that my nerve failed me.’
Living in the camp at Tora Bora, Omar grew to admire the veterans of the war against the Soviets. ‘I loved the old guys – the ones who fought the Russians,’ he says. ‘The old people were calm and friendly.
But that same respect didn’t extend to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the al-Qaeda recruits who were flocking to the mountains of Afghanistan. To Omar, the newcomers were ******** and bores.
He dismisses their Afghan pilgrimages as ‘jihad vacation,’ his father’s grand scheme as nothing but a suicide camp for wayward Muslims.
In Omar’s telling, grenade pins were pulled accidentally, explosives were mishandled and jihadists regularly killed each other in friendly-fire incidents. One of the most highly publicised items seized from bin Laden’s hide-out after the US invasion in 2001 was a cache of video tapes that showed puppies being put into pens and slowly, painfully killed to test chemical weapons.
To the world, the tapes proved the diabolical ambitions of bin Laden and his followers. To Omar, it was just another example of a cruel and inconsiderate father. The puppies had been born to Omar’s favourite dog, and he had hoped to raise the entire brood. But Osama’s men kept taking the puppies for their experiments.
In his memoir, Omar says he wept when he learnt that his puppies had been killed. But when I ask him about the incident, he stops short of blaming his father. The Arab stricture against speaking ill of one’s parents is too hard to defy.
In Afghanistan, Omar was taught to fire a Kalashnikov and learnt to drive a Russian tank. But for the most part, he found life in the mountains unbearably tedious. For days on end, he would be stuck in the camp’s mosque listening to speech after speech.
But the day of reckoning with his father’s violent vision was inevitable. Sometime around 1999, after Omar turned 17, Osama arranged for him to go to the front lines for 40 days and 40 nights. Under the protection of his father’s fighters, Omar was taken to the mountains north of Kabul, where Ahmad Shah Massoud was waging a civil war against the Taliban.
What Omar saw at the front lines turned him against the war his father supported. ‘Muslims fighting Muslims? It was crazy,’ he recalls. ‘It changed me. I believe we could sort out our problems without fighting.’
After 35 days, Omar left the front lines and returned to his father’s base. ‘I finish what I needed to see,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t stay more. I couldn’t stand it. I hated it.’
The rift between Omar and his father widened soon after, when Osama tried to recruit him to become a suicide bomber.
One day, around the time that bin Laden was plotting the attacks of 9/11, he tacked a piece of paper to the wall of the mosque to recruit men willing to be suicide bombers. A stir of excitement traveled through the camp as men signed up.
That same day, bin Laden called his sons together and said they should consider joining the other volunteers. ‘If any of you, my children, want to go, he should write his name down,’ their father told them. It was a sly rhetorical turn of phrase, tantamount to inciting his sons to self-annihilation.
He never said anything to his father? ‘A lot of times I said things like that to my father. But not at this moment. He walked away from us. He was smiling, like it was just between him and his God.’
The drive from Damascus to Beirut winds through the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. The car I have booked is a BMW 7 Series sedan, with tinted windows for Omar’s security. Unimpressed, Omar sniffs at the fake-leather interior. Saudis, he says, drive only the finest Mercedes.
I ask Omar what he thinks of Barack Obama. He says the president seems like a very refined man – intelligent, widely read, capable. But he is certain Obama is on the verge of committing a massive error by sending more troops into Afghanistan.
‘Obama should ask for my advice about Afghanistan,’ he says. ‘I could help. But I have to see him personally. I would tell him you can’t solve Afghanistan’s problems with more soldiers. It is like adding water to sand, as we say in the Arab world – it only makes the sand heavier and messier.
'If I was in his position, the first thing I would do is make a truce. Then for six months or one year, no fighting, no soldiers. Afghanistan can never be won. It has nothing to do with my father. It is the Afghan people.’
Omar’s ambivalence towards his father has prompted some counterterrorism experts to question whether he is actually operating as a double agent, dispatched by his father to deploy peacenik rhetoric as a deceptive and sophisticated weapon.
Michael Scheuer, the former head of the bin Laden desk at the CIA, has even written an article about Omar entitled Osama’s Flower-Child Son or al-Qaeda Disinformation Agent? When I contact Scheuer, he says he has just finished reading Omar’s memoir, which he considers an important piece of intelligence.
But it seems to Scheuer that Omar is also pursuing an unspoken agenda, one that serves his father.
‘When it is published in Arabic, it will make his father look like a hero in the Muslim world,’ Scheuer observes. ‘People say Osama didn’t really fight or give up the luxurious lifestyle. But Omar lays out the story in detail about what a tough hombre his father is and how he gave up everything for God.
'The book shows bin Laden to be eloquent, devout, pious, with extraordinary leadership qualities in the Muslim context. He’s Robin Hood eating lousy food in the mountains with his men. That is a much more powerful enemy than a madman.’
Omar made his final break with his father in April 2001, when one of the older fighters took him aside and warned him that ‘a big plan’ was in the works.
The elder bin Laden reluctantly agreed to let Omar go. ‘I don’t agree with you leaving me,’ he told his son. ‘But I can’t stop you.’
‘My father is a wealthy man,’ Omar recalls. ‘He gave me $10,000 in cash. He told me to get a car and go.’ Omar’s eyes well with tears. ‘If he wanted to keep me, he had to follow my way. If I wanted to keep him, I have to follow his way. I had a broken heart as I drove away. We don’t show our feelings. I kissed his hand and said goodbye. This is the last time I saw him.’
He remembers his last glimpse of his father: as Osama bin Laden walked away, he wore the same small, mysterious smile he had when he suggested his sons become suicide bombers.
Omar took a car to the Pakistan border. A few months later, his father destroyed the World Trade Center.
‘My father’s dream was to bring the Americans to Afghanistan. I was surprised the Americans took the bait.’
‘I was still in Afghanistan when Bush was elected,’ he continues. ‘My father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs – one who will attack and spend money and break the country.’
Will there be more attacks? ‘I don’t think so,’ Omar says. ‘He doesn’t need to. As soon as America went to Afghanistan, his plan worked. He has already won.’
On our last day in Beirut, Omar seems to be regretting the interview, the book, the whole idea of opening himself up to the scrutiny of people like me. But he is also impelled forward, trying to find a way to make his own fame and fortune.
He asks me what I think his future might be. Could he be a successful businessman? Could he be an important person? Could he help make peace in the world? Would the United Nations want his help? Would Obama, or Hillary Clinton, want to meet with him?
Omar may have rejected his father’s violence, but he shares the elder bin Laden’s sense of being destined for greatness. Rather than citing the Koran to make sense of his circumstances, he relies on a somewhat different canon.
‘I am like the character of William Wallace in the movie Braveheart,’ he says. ‘Sometimes people say I look a lot like Mel Gibson. It is a strange accident. William Wallace wanted to live his normal life, but they push him and push him to become a warrior. The same for me. I have been pushed to be political. I have been given no good life, no good business.
'It is impossible for me to live a normal life. I tried hard for years. In Islam, what is happening to me is not allowed – the sins of the father going to the son.
'I am like Tom Cruise in the movie The Last Samurai. He turned around to fight his own people. This is like me.’His father, he says, rejected money and power to go to the mountains of Afghanistan and fight for what he believed. In the same way, Omar adds, he himself has rejected jihad to return to the ‘real’ world and live according to his beliefs.
‘Always the son tries to be better than his father,’ he says. ‘I try my best to be *better – in a good way. I think a lot of people should thank God I chose the peaceful way. If I chose war, I would be unbelievable at it. A lot of people should pray to their god to thank him that I did not do that.’

Omar bin Laden speaks out - Telegraph