Bin Laden, 54 years old when he was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan on Sunday, became a pariah in his home country after forging al-Qaida in the crucible of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. When he died in a firefight in a Pakistani compound, his role as operational head of al-Qaida was years behind him and his quest to restore the Islamic Caliphate lay in tatters.

    Yet by successfully striking out at “the far enemy,” bin Laden succeeded in defining a decade of U.S. foreign policy.

    Although al-Qaida’s bombs killed Muslims and non-Muslims alike, bin Laden conceived of terror as an act of faith.

    “Hostility toward America is a religious duty,” he told Time magazine in 1999, taking credit for instigating the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. “I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.”

    Decades before the 9/11 attacks, the man born Osama bin Awad bin Laden was steeped in anti-Western ideology that might seem surprising in one so blessed by material wealth.

    Born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, bin Laden grew up in a wealthy, cosmopolitan atmosphere where an afternoon’s recreation might include riding at his stables, and in the evenings his mother dressed in Chanel. His father, Mohammed bin Laden, born in Yemen, moved to Saudi Arabia and became wealthy building palaces and military installations for Saudi royalty. The Saudi Binladen Group is today a large multinational company.

    Mohammed bin Laden also refurbished mosques at Mecca and Medina and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. He had a dozen wives and more than 50 children, of whom Osama was said to be the 17th. The father was killed in an air crash when Osama was 10, leaving his son a reported US$80 million.

    Bin Laden’s mother, Alia Ghanem, was a Syrian who ranked low in the hierarchy of Mohammed bin Laden’s wives. His parents were divorced not long after bin Laden was born. His mother remarried and Osama grew up in her home, along with four children she bore in a second marriage.

    Bin Laden attended the most prestigious private school in Jeddah. The curriculum was demanding, including instruction in English and mathematics, as well as religion.

    Married at 17 to a cousin, he attended King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, studying civil engineering and apparently intending to join his father’s company. But he fell under the spell of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian member of the Muslim Brotherhood, who believed that devout Muslims should strive to reunite all lands that had been under Islamic rule — essentially the restoration of the seventh-century Caliphate. This would become bin Laden’s, and al-Qaida’s, guiding passion.

    The radicalized young Saudi, a mediocre engineering student with plenty of money, reached adulthood when the Islamic world was in political ferment. In Iran, a revolution had deposed the Shah and put religion at the center of national life. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had invaded and occupied Afghanistan, energizing many young Sunni Muslims. Azzam urged his protege to join the jihad to resist the invasion. “I was enraged and went there at once,” bin Laden later told an Arabic-language newspaper.

    At first, he played a supporting role. He raised money and contributed his own to recruit and financially support the mujahedeen, the holy warriors who fought the Soviets.

    In 1988, as the Soviets began withdrawing from what had become an Afghan quagmire, bin Laden and Ayman el-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor and the head of a radical jihadist group, joined to create al-Qaida, dedicated to a more expansive view of holy war.

    Al-Qaida roared into action after the U.S. military rushed to protect Saudi Arabia in the wake of the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Saudi Arabia had rejected bin Laden’s offer of mujahedeen help and subsequently kicked him out of the country for his radical views.

    The presence of U.S. troops in the land of Islam’s holiest shrines infuriated bin Laden and led him to start plotting attacks. Among al-Qaida’s first efforts was the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

    Al-Qaida declared war on the United States in 1996. Bin Laden wrote: “The people of Islam awakened and realized that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance.” In a fatwa, or religious decree, bin Laden and Zawahiri called for Americans to be attacked as “an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”

    A series of attacks ensued against the United States, both domestically and abroad. Most dramatic was the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, events that speedily made bin Laden the literal poster child of terror around the world. His Wanted poster would eventually come with a reward of US$25 million.

    Six weeks later, bin Laden was running for cover. He and about 1,000 followers headed for Tora Bora, a complex of caves about 9.6 kilometers long carved into the mountains of southwestern Afghanistan a decade earlier with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bin Laden and about 300 followers made their escape, presumably following old smuggling trails out of the mountains and across the Pakistani border.

    Bin Laden suspected Tora Bora might be his grave. On Dec. 14, 2001, he composed his will. “Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every sword in my heart,” he wrote.

    That escape, from under the noses of U.S. Special Forces troops and Afghan allies, haunted U.S. policy makers. His whereabouts were a mystery for the next nine years, despite the bounty on his head. For years, terrorism experts believed bin Laden was hiding in the lawless territory of northwest Pakistan.

    In the wake of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and his flight, bin Laden’s personal oversight of al-Qaida became less important. The group’s affiliates and offshoots — first in North Africa, then Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan — took up the torch of jihad and operated largely on their own. Bin Laden emerged from time to time in video and audiotape messages to Arab new media outlets, but his messages grew increasingly scattershot.

    In early 2003, he urged Muslims to repel the imminent invasion of Iraq. In 2004, he offered a truce to European nations if they withdrew from Muslim lands. In 2005, he condemned coming elections in Iraq. In 2009, he said the financial crisis showed America’s decline. In 2010, he called for action on climate change.

    In a 2002 interview in Britain’s Guardian with one of bin Laden’s wives in Afghanistan, identified only as “AS,” she revealed that in the late 1990s he had lived abstemiously, eating bread, yogurt, honey and dates but rarely meat.

    She said bin Laden was still involved in the construction business and with Afghan charities. When the Taliban government banned secular schools, she added, bin Laden hired tutors to teach them English, Arabic, math and science.

    Bin Laden was said to have married four times, the last time to a young Yemeni girl, and he had perhaps a dozen children.  (SD-Agencies)