Growing up bin Laden

"Osama bin Laden does not come out as “Dad of the Year”. Najwa bin Laden, Bin Laden’s first wife who bore him 11 kids, married him when he was 17 and she was 15. When she married him she was a young Syrian girl with no education and certainly had no understanding of her husband’s militant activities. Omar bin Laden, the son, seems to be animated with quite a lot of anger about the way his father treated him and his siblings. I wish I had had that book when I was writing The Osama bin Laden I Know because there are so many interesting first-person anecdotes – I’ll give you one example. Omar bin Laden complains about his dad taking him on 12-hour hikes through the mountains of Tora Bora, which his dad loved doing and the kid dreaded doing. That’s one of the reasons, I believe, Bin Laden was able to escape the battle of Tora Bora because he was instilling toughness in his kids by forcing them to do these practice hikes. Then another anecdote from his wife: He, the son of a billionaire, moved his whole family into Tora Bora, where they lived like medieval peasants, in a place with no electricity. They probably remain the most important construction company in the Middle East and they continue to be the most important construction company in Saudi Arabia. The family is doing pretty well and in fact the United States government, when it was rebuilding a US base in Saudi Arabia, relied on the Bin Laden group. Neither was in the best position to do that. Omar was too young and Najwa was completely excluded from his militant activities."