One day in early November 2001, on a hillside south of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden bade farewell to three of his young sons. In the shade of an olive tree, he handed each boy a misbaha—a set of prayer beads symbolizing the 99 names of God in classical Arabic—and instructed them to keep the faith. The scene was an emotional one. “It was as if we pulled out our livers and left them there,” one of the boys would later recall in a letter to his father. Having taken his leave, bin Laden disappeared into the mountains, bound for a familiar redoubt known as the Black Cave, or Tora Bora in the local Pashto dialect.
The three boys who received the prayer beads that day would face three very different destinies. One, Bakr (also known as Ladin), would distance himself from al-Qaeda, both geographically and ideologically. Another, Khalid, would die protecting his father at their compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. The third, Hamza, would vanish for years before reemerging in 2015 as the most likely candidate to reunite a fractured jihadi movement and lead al-Qaeda to a future still more violent than its past.
Groomed to Lead
Despite al-Qaeda’s generally dim view of women, it appears that Osama bin Laden respected and valued each of his wives. But he was surely familiar with the Qur’an’s warning that, “Try as you may, you cannot treat all your wives impartially.” It was well known that bin Laden had a favorite. This was Hamza bin Laden’s mother, Khairia Sabar, a child psychologist from the respected al-Hindi family of Saudi Arabia.
The pair had been introduced when Saad, one of bin Laden’s sons by his first wife, Najwa al-Ghanem, had attended Khairia’s clinic to receive therapy for a mental disorder. Khairia was single, in her mid-30s, and in fragile health—an unpropitious situation for a woman in a conservative kingdom where teenage brides are far from uncommon.
Bin Laden, by contrast, was seven years younger, the son of a billionaire, and already making a name for himself as a fundraiser for the mujahideen struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Moreover, by this time, bin Laden already had two wives. But Najwa, the first of them, encouraged him to pursue Khairia, believing that having someone with her training permanently on hand would help her son Saad and his brothers and sisters, some of whom also suffered from developmental disorders.
Not surprisingly given Khairia’s age and state of health, she and bin Laden struggled to conceive. Over the first three years of their marriage, as bin Laden moved back and forth between Saudi Arabia and the theater of war in Afghanistan, she endured miscarriage after miscarriage. During this time, bin Laden added a fourth wife to the family—another highly educated Saudi woman, Siham Sabar.
Then, in 1989, both Siham and Khairia bore him sons. Siham’s was called Khalid, a name that in Arabic means “eternal.” Khairia’s boy was named Hamza, meaning “steadfast.” Thenceforward, in accordance with ancient Arab custom, Khairia became known by the honorific Umm Hamza, the Mother of Hamza. The boy would remain her only child by bin Laden, but that fact has by no means diminished either Hamza’s importance or Khairia’s.
In 1991, reeling from a series of bloody embarrassments in Afghanistan and dismayed by the Saudi government’s increasing hostility toward him, bin Laden moved al-Qaeda’s base of operations to Sudan, just across the Red Sea from his home city of Jeddah. Among bin Laden’s inner circle of top lieutenants and their families, Umm Hamza soon developed a reputation for level-headedness and wise counsel.
As bin Laden’s longtime bodyguard Abu Jandal put it, she was “respected by absolutely everyone.” In Sudan, Khairia set up an informal school to teach the wives and children of al-Qaeda members about Islamic theology, gave advice on religious matters, and from time to time even offered marriage counseling. At a time when al-Qaeda could easily have disintegrated under the weight of its forced exile and bin Laden’s growing fear of arrest or assassination, Khairia’s calm and optimistic influence played an important role in holding the organization together.
Hamza was seven years old when the regime of Omar Bashir finally caved to international pressure and expelled al-Qaeda from Sudan. bin Laden and his entourage decamped to Afghanistan, where they were offered safe haven first by local warlords and subsequently by the Taliban movement, which overran most of the country within a few months of bin Laden’s arrival.
Al-Qaeda’s new hosts gave bin Laden the choice of several desirable residences, including a former royal palace. Characteristically, however, he chose instead a base in the mountains near Jalalabad consisting of concrete huts lacking power, water, and in many cases even doors. bin Laden eventually moved to Tarnak Farms, a camp complex outside Kandahar with almost as little in the way of creature comforts.
Not everyone relishes this kind of austerity; while bin Laden was still in Sudan, his second wife, Khadija Sharif, had divorced him, citing the hardships of life in a militant camp. His first wife, Najwa, would finally leave him on the eve of 9/11. But Khairia and Siham—the mothers of Hamza and Khalid, respectively—were ready to go through significant privations for their husband, and both would be with him at the very end.
The Tehran Years
In Afghanistan, Hamza emerged as one of bin Laden’s favorite sons. Still not yet a teenager, he appeared in propaganda videos alongside his father, underwent assault training with al-Qaeda fighters, and preached fiery sermons in a young boy’s helium voice. In December 2000, aged 11, Hamza was chosen to recite a poem at the wedding of his 15-year-old brother, Mohammed. His assured performance transfixed the other guests; bin Laden family members would talk about it, and even have dreams about it, for years to come.
But already, Hamza’s time with his father was drawing to a close. On September 10, 2001, anticipating the backlash that would follow his latest and most outrageous assault on the United States, bin Laden ordered his wives and their younger children out of his Kandahar compound—a conspicuous target and one that had been bombed before—to seek shelter in Jalalabad, 350 miles northeast. There, al-Qaeda’s propagandists shot one last video featuring Hamza, in which the boy can be seen reciting a poem praising the bravery of Kabul’s Taliban defenders and handling wreckage claimed to be from a downed U.S. helicopter.
The video was, of course, a travesty. The Taliban, far from mounting a stalwart defense, were already being routed up and down the country, and the helicopter wreck, certainly not American, was most likely that of a Soviet gunship shot down before Hamza was born, probably with surface-to-air missiles supplied by the United States. As bin Laden made ready to ride south for his last stand at Tora Bora, he ordered his family east, over the border into Pakistan. This decision made sense. Al-Qaeda had found shelter there during and immediately after the war against the Soviets, and operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had long lived with impunity in Pakistani mega-cities like Karachi.
But 9/11 had changed this picture along with everything else. General Pervez Musharraf responded to the attacks by turning Pakistan into an enthusiastic supporter of the United States’ efforts against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Faced with a rapidly narrowing range of risky options, al-Qaeda decided that its people, including bin Laden’s family, should leave Pakistan and seek refuge in the neighboring country of Iran.
The world’s foremost Shi`a stronghold may seem an odd destination for an organization populated by Sunni extremists, men who pepper their public utterances with slurs against Shi`a Muslims, calling them “rejectionists” and “apostates.” But in the fall of 2001, with support for the United States at an all-time high, Iran suddenly became the one place in the Muslim world where America’s writ could be counted upon not to run.
Inside Iran, Saif al-`Adl, a wily Egyptian ex-soldier who had been a pivotal figure in al-Qaeda since its inception, oversaw a secret network of safe houses. In the beginning, it seemed as if al-Qaeda had found at least temporary sanctuary. But Hamza nevertheless chafed against the constraints of this life in the shadows. In July 2002, he wrote a poem to his father, bemoaning the “spheres of danger everywhere I look” and asking, “What has happened for us to be chased by danger?”
In his response, bin Laden did not sugar-coat matters for his 12-year-old son. “I can see only a very steep path ahead,” he wrote. “A decade has gone by in vagrancy and travel, and here we are in our tragedy… for how long will real men be in short supply?”
Further hardship lurked just over the horizon. For if Hamza and his family thought they had evaded detection, they were wrong. In fact, it seems that Iranian intelligence knew of al-Qaeda’s presence on the Islamic Republic’s soil right from the start. Around April 2003, the al-Qaeda members in Iran realized they were being watched and began to take steps to thwart Tehran’s monitoring. Fearing that al-Qaeda might slip through their fingers, the authorities initiated a dragnet that pulled in practically every al-Qaeda operative and family member in the country.
For the next few years, Hamza and his mother were held at a succession of military facilities in the Tehran area, some cramped and dingy, others spacious and relatively comfortable, but always separated from the outside world by high walls, razor wire, and surveillance cameras. Despite their tribulations, Khairia remained adamant that her son should receive the best possible education under the circumstances.
Her own pedagogic efforts continued, and to supplement these, she solicited a group of bin Laden’s top lieutenants being held in the same facility, including al-`Adl, to educate Hamza in Qur’anic study, Islamic jurisprudence, and the hadith (alleged deeds and sayings of the prophet). Hamza is said to have become learned in each of these subjects.
Hamza matured in other ways, too. While still in captivity, he married the daughter of one of his teachers, the longtime al-Qaeda military commander Abu Mohammed al-Masri. Hamza’s new wife soon gave birth to a son and a daughter, whom they named respectively Usama and Khairia. Hamza told the elder bin Laden that “God created [my children] to serve you.” And he longed to rejoin his father. “How many times, from the depths of my heart, I wished to be beside you,” Hamza wrote in 2009. “I remember every smile that you smiled at me, every word that you spoke to me, every look that you gave me.”
Neither captivity nor fatherhood could dim the desire to follow in his father’s footsteps, which Hamza had shown from a precociously early age. On the contrary, as time went on, he grew ever more desperate to re-enter the fray. His greatest frustration, he told his father in a letter smuggled out to Abbottabad, was that “the mujahidin legions have marched and I have not joined them.” But bin Laden was determined to ensure a different destiny for his favourite son.