How old is osama bin ladens wife

In the first weeks of , Osama bin Laden was worried. For five years, he had concealed himself and his extended family—wives, children and grandchildren—in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but now it appeared that his carefully constructed hideaway was coming apart. His longtime bodyguards were two brothers, members of al Qaeda whose family originated nearby.

They did everything for bin Laden, from shopping in the local markets to hand delivering his lengthy memos to other leaders of al Qaeda. Things got so bad that on January 15, he wrote a formal letter to them, despite the fact that they all lived together, acknowledging how angry they were with him and begging them to give him time to find new protectors and a new hideout the compound was registered in the name of one of the brothers.

But Osama disapproved of how his own father, the wealthy Yemeni builder Mohammed bin Laden, went about the Islamic sanctioned practice of polygamy that allows a man to legally take up to four wives.

One of 54 children, Osama was born in to year-old Allia Ghanem, one of at least 20 women whom Mohammed, nearly 40 years her senior, had married and divorced during his lifetime. Osama, their only child, was 3 years old when Mohammed cast his mother aside. Rather than renounce polygamy, though, Osama bin Laden decided that his father had merely been doing it wrong. By the time he instigated the September 11 attacks in , bin Laden, then 44, was living in Afghanistan with three wives.

The older two — Khairiah Sabar, 52, a devout child psychologist who had abandoned an established career to marry him, and Siham al-Sharif, 44, a poet who held a Ph. Meanwhile, his third wife, Amal el-Sadah, a naive year-old from rural Yemen, brought out his vanity. Meanwhile, the jihadist who founded al Qaeda to wage holy war on the West concealed himself in the Afghan mountains and in northern Pakistan to evade justice.

But by , as the United States bogged itself down in nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, bin Laden felt the heat of the chase dissipate. The three-story main house had four bedrooms on the first floor and four more on the second, each with its own bathroom. In , family members began moving in. You must have JavaScript enabled in your browser to utilize the functionality of this website. Even so, they have been woven into a fascinating narrative by an American writer, Jean Sasson".

Oneworld Publications. Search: Search. Pages: Imprint: Oneworld. Granting extraordinary access to their private world, Osama's wife and son reveal the frightening transformation of a loving husband into a hardened terrorist.

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