There is a picture of Osama bin Laden as a year-old teenager sitting on the boot of a car alongside more than 20 of his half-brothers and sisters. The photo was taken during a family holiday to Sweden in and shows how the man who went on to found al-Qa'ida spent at least some of his teens as a lanky, awkward-looking adolescent in brown flares surrounded by an enormous extended family.
Click HERE to view graphic 92k jpg. As the West's public enemy No 1 for nearly a decade, the Osama bin Laden most of us have come to know was an uncompromising, merciless blood-letter. A man whose hatred of the kuffar unbelievers was so intense that he could justify killing thousands of non-combatants and many more adherents of his own faith in pursuit of his political goals. But Bin Laden was also a family man. To those who knew him he was the Saudi millionaire turned warrior ascetic, who loved poetry and bracing walks in the mountains; who rarely ate meat and was staunchly committed to his kith and kin β even when they publicly denounced him or abandoned his jihad.
Analysts have expressed little surprise that the compound where Bin Laden was eventually tracked down was also home to his youngest wife and six children. Despite waging his own war for the best part of 30 years β 15 of them spent largely on the run in Afghanistan β Bin Laden had always managed to keep his loved ones nearby.
In the summer of , weeks after his fifth marriage to year-old Yemeni Amal al-Sadah, Bin Laden gave an interview to a jihadist publication in which he talked about the importance of keeping his family close despite the risks to them. As US Navy Seals rappelled on to the roof of the al-Qa'ida founder's compound in the early hours of Monday, at least two family members were still very much part of that struggle.
Far from being used as an involuntary human shield, as initial reports suggested, Amal al-Sadah appears to have tried to protect her husband by rushing the Seal team as they stormed into his room. She was shot in the leg and remains under guard in a Pakistani military hospital as the US fights to try to access her. Bin Laden's son Hamza, 20, was thought to be one of the four other people killed in the raid. Press reports swiftly labelled Amal al-Sadah as Bin Laden's "youngest and favourite" wife, but the truth is that by the time of his death the al- Qa'ida leader had no other wives left.
