Osama bin Laden, born in 1957 to one 15-year-old Allia Ghanem, was one of the 54 children of his father. Osama was his mother’s only child and was only three years when his parents separated. His father had more than twenty women, contrary to what Muslims practice. He would marry them and divorce as he wishes. On the other hand, Osama bin Laden had only three wives and was living together with all of them in Afghanistan around the time he initiated the 2001 11th September attacks. His first wife, Khairiah Sabar, the 52-year-old then, was a child psychologist who decided to quit his job to marry Osama. At the same time, his second wife, Siham al-Sharif 44, was a poet with a Ph.D. in koranic grammar who edited all of Osama’s speeches. Osama’s third wife, Amal el-Sadah, was only 17 then, a naïve girl from Yemen.
This attack took the lives of 2977 people in the US, scattering Osama’s family in the air. Osama, on the other hand, feeling the heat of the aftermath, ran to the Afghan mountains and to conceal and later sought refuge in northern Pakistan so he could evade his arrest. However, in 2004, he felt that the attack’s heat was slowly evaporating, so he thought it wise to bring his family back together. In a bid to achieve this, Osama commanded Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed Abd al-Hamid, his bodyguard, to get him a piece of land in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and build a big enough house that can comfortably accommodate his family. The bodyguard was, however, not supposed to use Osama’s name on the property. So, he used his names in all the purchases but built the house according to the boss’s specifications. Come 2005, they all moved into this property. No one was ever seen leaving the property except for Amal, who assumed a false identity in a local hospital to put to bed. And so she could avoid questioning, she also faked deafness.
They couldn’t hide forever, though. Come 2010, one of the CIA informants saw Ibrahim, the bodyguard. This was when the CIA got a clue of this long-term pending case. The bodyguard’s white jeep took the CIA straight to Osama’s property, an 18-feet high fully secured with barbed wires. They started spying on this property, hoping to see Osama someday. It was the unusual features of this house that made it even more suspicious. For instance, being that Ibrahim, the owner, was so wealthy, his property didn’t have either internet or telephone lines. These are some of the necessities he could afford. Also, the main house, however big it was, didn’t have enough windows as a regular main house should, and the balcony on the top floor had high walls surrounding it on its sides, probably to conceal the identity of whoever sat there. The CIA then decided to move into a small house near this mysterious property to spy on whoever lived there. Even more and more unusual behaviors emerged. Instead of them putting their garbage out for pickups as their neighbors, they burnt all of it. But, what gave the Osama family away was the clotheslines. They were full of women’s clothing, special Pakistani men’s garments, diapers, and children’s clothing. They were so many that only the bodyguard’s family couldn’t wear. This means that Osama bin Laden’s hiding days were over. Though they never saw him physically or had evidence that he was living there, the then US president, Barrack Obama, was convinced. So he ordered the US navy to begin the operation to catch him, which happened on 1st May 2011.
