Born: 10 March 1957; alt. 30 July 1957; alt. 1958;

Place of Birth: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; alt. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; alt. Yemen;

Died: 2 May 2011 (in Abbottabad, Pakistan);

Full name: Usama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, which means “Osama, son of Mohammed, son of Awad, son of Laden”;

Religion: Islam (Wahhabism/Salafism);

Allegiance:
1. Maktab al-Khidamat (1984–1988);
2. Al-Qaeda (1988–2011);

Rank: General Emir of the Al-Qaeda;

Known also as: Usama Bin Laden; Osama Bin Ladin; Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad Bin Ladin; Usama Bin Ladin.

Activities:

Bin Laden was born to the family of billionaire Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden in Saudi Arabia. He studied at university in the country until 1979, when he joined Mujahideen forces in Pakistan fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He helped to fund the Mujahideen by funneling arms, money and fighters from the Arab world into Afghanistan, and gained popularity among many Arabs.

He was banished from Saudi Arabia in 1992, and shifted his base to Sudan, until U.S. pressure forced him to leave Sudan in 1996. After establishing a new base in Afghanistan, he declared a war against the United States, initiating a series of bombings and related attacks.

On 7 August 1998, there were a series of attacks that occurred on U.S. Embassies. With these bombings hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the major East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the United States public for the first time.

Osama was the founder of al-Qaeda in 1988. This organization claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the United States. He is responsible for numerous other mass-casualty attacks worldwide.

The 9/11 attacks involved the hijacking of four commercial passenger aircraft, flying two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the third into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, destroying the former, and severely damaging the latter, while the fourth (either intended to target the United States Capitol or the White House in Washington, D.C.), crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, with no survivors. This attack resulted with the deaths of 2,996 people.