"Many al-Qaida members had witnessed the screaming rows Osama had with Omar, the teenage son he had been training as his heir, who bore a striking resemblance to his father. Omar had never shared his father’s obsession with war, and after he learned of his father’s coming Planes Operation, he became determined to leave. He had gone to his mother, Najwa, pleading with her to come with him. But she had never disobeyed her husband, so Omar had slipped away alone. “[My father’s] violent path had separated us for ever,” he later recalled.
But by the end of August 2001, Najwa had a change of heart. With Omar’s words playing on her mind, she asked to return to her parents in Syria – an unexpected act of rebellion from a woman who had stuck by her husband’s side for 26 years and given him 11 children.
Najwa had never intended to be a jihadi bride. Glamorous and beautiful, she was a Ghanem, from an old, cultured Syrian family, and had grown up in the cosmopolitan seaside resort of Latakia, where women wore bikinis. She had married Osama in 1974, when she had just turned 16 and he was still forging a reputation as a demon soccer player at his university, and for driving fast cars recklessly...
Mahfouz debated with his colleagues for days what to do with Osama’s family. CIA agents were closing in everywhere. US helicopters flew along the Pakistan border. He needed to escort his charges to somewhere that was completely off limits to America. They were among the world’s most wanted, and relatively easy to spot: tall, fine-boned Arabs, several of whom closely resembled Osama, and who spoke no local languages.
In the end, they reached an unlikely conclusion: send the wives and children of Osama bin Laden, leader of an outlawed Sunni militia, to seek asylum in Iran, the centre of Shia power...
By 2007, Osama’s family in Iran had expanded, with the birth of several grandchildren, and they had been relocated to another building in the complex, this one called Block 300. Tensions with their hosts, terrible food and unsanitary conditions had taken their toll. Saad, 28, was by now the father of three children, a boy named Osama and two little girls. A few months earlier his wife, Wafa, had had another son who died because the Iranians had refused a hospital visit. Another shura member’s wife had also died for want of medical treatment; Khairiah suffered excruciating dental problems and walked with a cane.
As tensions reached breaking point, Mahfouz, who lived with the family, fought for concessions.
Family
groups were taken out on day trips by Iranian escorts to visit famous landmarks in Tehran, where they mingled with American tourists. Once or twice Osama’s sons and the shura members were taken to a sports complex in Elahieh. Saif al-Adel, who had a $5m bounty on his head in the west, swam lanes alongside foreign diplomats."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/06/osama-bin-laden-family-on-the-run-after-9-11
This is a group of people I never think about, who were at the center of these incredibly important world events for a decade
There's also this weird thing I realized while reading, that the mid-2000s smell like dry dirt and heat to me, because I spent so much of that time reading the news and imagining "what it was like". That smell came back to me while I was reading this
FB: "
At the end of the first month, some of Osama’s sons were offered their first phone calls. Whisked to the Afghan border and given a Thuraya satellite phone – a location and device that were intended to confuse American eavesdroppers – they were ordered to say nothing about their precise location. They reached Omar bin Laden, Osama’s son who had left Afghanistan before 9/11 and was now living in Qatar with his British wife Zaina. Over the years, Omar and his mother, Najwa, had written to the International Red Cross and the United Nations in search of their family. Now, stunned, they got a call from the desert. Omar promised to help."
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