Osama bin laden biography summary organizers

Militant leader (1957–2011)

"ObL" redirects here.

Osama bin laden biography summary organizers

For other uses, see OBL (disambiguation).

See also: Bin Laden (disambiguation)

Osama bin Laden^[a] (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was a Saudi Arabian–born Islamist dissident and militant leader who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda.

Ideologically a pan-Islamist, Bin Laden participated in the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union, and supported the Bosnian mujahideen during the Yugoslav Wars. Opposed to the United States' foreign policy in the Middle East, Bin Laden declared war on the U.S.

in 1996 and advocated attacks targeting US assets in various countries, and supervised the execution of September 11 attacks inside the U.S. in 2001.

Bin Laden was born in Riyadh to the aristocratic bin Laden family. He studied at Saudi and foreign universities until 1979, when he joined the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In 1984, he co-founded Mak