Waziristan
With so many senior al-Qaeda members in custody, Iran possessed huge leverage over bin Laden’s organization. By 2010, however, al-Qaeda had acquired a bargaining chip of its own in the shape of a captive Iranian diplomat sold to them as a hostage by Pakistani tribal elements. With the Haqqani Network acting as go-between, a prisoner swap was arranged.
In August 2010, at the beginning of Ramadan, Hamza was released along with his mother, wife, and children. Two of his older brothers, Uthman and Mohammed, soon followed along with their own families. All those released made their way to Waziristan, where a sizable al-Qaeda contingent lived under the protection of various Pakistani militant groups.
The bin Laden family was spread across several countries. Abdullah, Usama’s eldest son, was living a “quiet life” as a businessman in Saudi Arabia. Another son, Ladin, previously imprisoned in Iran, had gone to stay with his grandmother’s side of family in Syria. Another, Omar, lived in Qatar for a time before moving to Saudi Arabia. bin Laden therefore had a number of possible places to send family members freed from Iran. He wanted his sons Uthman and Mohammed to stay in Pakistan, provided a “safe place” could be found for them. His initial plan on hearing of Hamza’s release was to try to have him sent to Qatar.
Given that Hamza had been imprisoned in Iran from around the age of 14, it would be “difficult [for the United States or other countries] to indict him and to ask Qatar to extradite him.” Moreover, in Qatar, the home of Al-Jazeera, Hamza would enjoy relative freedom of speech, which he could exploit in order to act as a spokesperson for bin Laden’s brand of Islam, to “spread the jihadi doctrine and refute the wrong and the suspicions raised around jihad.”
But Mahmud, bin Laden’s Libyan chief of staff—also known as Atiyya Abdul Rahman—balked at the idea of Qatar as a destination, on the basis that the small Gulf state, a U.S. ally, would hand Hamza over to the Americans. Ultimately, as will be seen, bin Laden followed Mahmud’s advice; but the suggestion that Hamza should act as a mouthpiece for jihadi dogma indicates that, despite their long separation, the father had more than an inkling of his son’s rhetorical abilities.
In Abbottabad, five hundred miles northeast of al-Qaeda’s Waziristan powerbase, bin Laden already had one grown son with him—Khalid, the son of his fourth wife, Siham, born in the same year as Hamza. Khalid served as the compound’s resident handyman and plumber. He also kept a cow he had bought from a local farmer and, like all of the men around bin Laden, was prepared to defend his father with deadly force.
Khalid was useful to have around, to be sure, but hardly suited for leadership. Now, however, three more adult sons hid in Waziristan, awaiting their father’s call: Uthman, aged 27, Mohammed, 25, and Hamza, just 21. bin Laden made his choice. He ordered Uthman and Mohammed to go to Peshawar, 100 miles from their father. Khalid was to do the same, having been betrothed to a girl whose family lived there. But Hamza was to come to Abbottabad as soon as he could safely do so. As Khairia told him in a letter, “The father … asks God that he will benefit from you … He has prepared a lot of work for you.”
For a while, the portents seemed encouraging. Siham, Khalid’s mother, told Hamza of a “very good” dream in which “you were conducting Adhan [the Muslim call to prayer] from atop a very high building, in the same voice in which you said, ‘Stay strong my father, for heaven awaits us and victory is ours if God permits.’” This was a reference to the poem that Hamza had recited at his brother Mohammed’s wedding more than a decade previously.
As ever, security was the overriding factor, and bin Laden had already lost one son in Waziristan. Saad, a decade older than Hamza, had been imprisoned in Iran alongside his brothers, but by mid-August 2008, he had been set free (or had escaped, depending on which account one believes). Like Hamza, he made his way to Waziristan.
Saad, characteristically, grew restless, perhaps as a result of the mental problems treated by Khairia back in Jeddah. Whatever the cause, Saad apparently behaved recklessly, showed his face once too often in public, and sometime in the first half of 2009, was killed by a U.S. missile. Mahmud, bin Laden’s chief of staff, told his commander in a letter that “Saad died—peace be upon him—because he was impatient.”
“We pray to God to have mercy on Saad,” bin Laden wrote. “And may He reward us with a substitute.”
For Hamza, Mahmud had nothing but praise. “He is very sweet and good,” he told bin Laden. “I see in him wisdom and politeness. He does not want to be treated with favoritism because he is the son of ‘someone.’”
Eager as he was for Hamza to join him, bin Laden was not going to allow the younger son to meet the same fate as the elder. He therefore issued operatives in Waziristan with strict instructions to keep Hamza indoors unless absolutely necessary and insisted on personally vetting the man assigned to guard his son. Under these strictures, which Mahmud likened to a “prison,” Hamza—usually as patient and level-headed as his mother—began to exhibit some of Saad’s petulance. Bin Laden relented a little, allowing Hamza to undergo shooting practice.
Bin Laden agonized over the decision to bring his son to his side. On the one hand, Hamza was the heir presumptive—the son of his favorite wife, charismatic and well-liked. He could be a great help to the organization. On the other hand, bin Laden’s own security situation, already precarious to begin with, had recently become yet more delicate, for the two Pakistani brothers who protected him and his family were dangerously close to burning out from stress.
One of them, Ahmed, had contracted a serious illness that bin Laden feared might relapse at any time. They could hold out, bin Laden estimated, at most another few months. bin Laden needed to find replacements for the brothers as soon as possible, but his requirements were exacting. In order to blend in, the new protectors would need to be Pakistanis, fluent in local dialects. To avoid raising suspicions about the unusual size of the compound, they would need to have large families. And, of course, they would need to be absolutely trustworthy and relentlessly committed to the cause.
Mahmud would have his work cut out fulfilling such a tall order. In the meantime, however, bin Laden finally decided, despite the obvious danger, to have Hamza join him. By early April 2011, Mahmud had hatched a plan to make it happen. Hamza, with his wife and children, traveled south, through the badlands of Baluchistan. This was a roundabout route, to be sure, but it was safer than heading directly toward Abbottabad over the Khyber mountain passes.
Once in Baluchistan, the plan was for Hamza’s party to rendezvous with Azmarai, one of al-Qaeda’s most seasoned and trusted fixers. Azmarai would arrange forward passage through Karachi and then by air or train to Peshawar. There, Hamza would meet another al-Qaeda operative who would send him on to Abbottabad when the time was right. To ease his brother through the inevitable checkpoints along the way, Khalid lent Hamza his fake ID and driver’s license. By late April 2011, plans were afoot, and Hamza waited only for a cloudy sky to speed him on his way. But it was not to be. Within a few weeks, his father was dead.
Heir Apparent
Hamza may have avoided death or capture in Abbottabad by weeks or even days. His brother Khalid was not so lucky; he died wielding an assault weapon in a futile attempt to defend his father against the superior numbers, tactics, and technology of the U.S. Navy SEALs. Hamza’s mother, Khairia, was taken into Pakistani custody in the early hours of May 2, 2011.
Around a year later, she, Umm Khalid, and a dozen other bin Laden family members were deported to Saudi Arabia, where they live to this day in a compound outside Jeddah under what their lawyer describes as “very tight restrictions and security arrangements made by the Kingdom’s authorities,” including a ban on speaking publicly about their time in Pakistan.
Over the next four years, while Ayman al-Zawahiri took over as permanent emir of al-Qaeda, Syria and Iraq descended into barbarism, and the Islamic State spun out of al-Qaeda’s orbit, Hamza bin Laden remained silent. Then, out of the blue, in an audio message released in August 2015, al-Zawahiri introduced “a lion from the den of al-Qaeda”—a play on the name Usama, which means “lion” in Arabic.

,