Jan. 23, 2020
Nelly Lahoud discusses Bin Laden's family contribution, including some of its female members, to his public statements in an article in The London Review of Books.
(London Review of Books) - US special forces recovered thousands of messages exchanged between members of al-Qaida during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011; many ended: ‘destroy after reading.’ There was also a 220-page handwritten document inaccurately described by the CIA as bin Laden’s ‘journal’: for the most part, it is a transcription of family discussions during the last two months of bin Laden’s life. It gives us a lot of information about the contribution of bin Laden’s family – especially some of its female members – to his public statements. The most closely involved were his third wife, Siham, and their daughters, Mariam and Sumayya. He asked them, for example, to ‘start thinking about the public statement’ he wanted to release in response to the Arab Spring, and ‘to put together the ideas’ that should be included. Sumayya pushes her father to think whether the Arab Spring might undermine the need for jihad. A couple of pages later, we read what seem likely to be the thoughts of Mariam, who probably transcribed the document, on the ‘new vision’ of al-Qaida that her father was planning to announce on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Bin Laden had four wives: Najwa, Khairiah, Siham and Amal (he was divorced from a fifth). Najwa left Afghanistan days before the 9/11 attacks to go to Syria, but the other wives were with him when he was killed. His second wife, Khairiah Sabar, who had a PhD and taught deaf-mute children before her marriage in 1985, also fled Afghanistan in 2001, taking her son Hamza along with six of bin Laden and Najwa’s children to Iran, where they were arrested and detained. In 2010 Khairiah and Hamza were freed and ushered towards Waziristan. Al-Qaida operated in the area, but there was heavy surveillance by US drones, and it took a while to organise safe passage – for Khairiah, first of all – to bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.