As in the case of Iraq’s public enemy number one, the Jordanian-born Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi who got smashed up by two 225-kg American bombs in his hideout north of Baghdad last June, his body had to be "autopsied", identified and catalogued before the world accepted that the terrorist was really dead.
After all, Zarqawi, who dispatched suicide bombers to blow up targets ruthlessly in Iraq and his native Jordan, revelled in putting sequences of victims being beheaded on television and on the website, and staged Houdini-type escapes from his angry US pursuers despite a $25 million bounty on his head, had become the stuff of legend. A US warplane, finally, dumped those two bombs down his throat when intelligence located his "safe house" and pulverized it completely.
American President George W. Bush was meeting with aides in the Oval Office in Washington DC that Wednesday when US National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley pulled him aside for a private update. Bush returned to the meeting, sounding a little stunned (reports later said) and announced: "I think we got Zarqawi." True enough, it was soon established that al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq was dead.
This time, there’s no such flap over an Osama death – from such a prosaic cause as typhoid. In any event, unless a corpus delicti is produced, Osama will live on – and beyond him the legend he created about himself.
Even if he were someday to really die, there are so many look-alikes in the world that he could go on creating unease ad nauseam, long after El Cid led a Christian army to victory over the Moros in Spain, strapped post-mortem in full armor on his battle-stallion.
In years past, Mao Zedong of China, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, and many others were reported dying many years before they finally succumbed of natural causes.
Osama bin Laden – and, for that matter, his Egyptian-born deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri – simply disappeared following the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, and continue to evade detection or capture. For years, tales circulated that Osama was seriously wounded in the bombing of his cave redoubt in Tora Bora, or ill, or actually dead.
From his jihadi days in Peshawar (Pakistan) and Afghanistan – beginning in 1996 – bin Laden was reported "sickly". Jonathan Randal, who was a correspondent for TIME, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, says in his biography, "OSAMA: The Making of a Terrorist" (2005) that "a senior British official dealing with security in 2000 told me that Osama would be dead of natural causes in a few years."
Alas, the Brit’s prediction has not yet come true. Osama lived on to plan and implement the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
In any event, Osama has been surmised to have contracted malaria during his anti-Soviet jihad (even been gassed, his admirers claim, by the Russians on the battlefield). He has been attributed as suffering from major ailments like serious kidney disease, "Marfan’s syndrome", a kind of cardiovascular and optical degeneration" – and now typhoid. Oh well. Most military men believe that only "lead poisoning" or a lucky missile, or a bomb will do the trick.
Unless – as the Bolivian military did when they shot Ernesto "Che" Guevara (the Argentinian-born Communist who was Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s fellow revolucionario in the Sierra Maestra and later one of the berdugos of his Cabinet) – Osama’s pursuers can produce his corpse, duly-certified and fingerprinted. The Bolivian Special Forces propped up Che as he lay in rigor mortis on a bed in the village near the place where he was captured for a photograph, then took his hands as proof of his identity.
By golly, even Jesus had to prove Himself to his skeptical Apostles, the most prominent of the skeptics being the one known to Church history as "Doubting Thomas." The Apostle Thomas simply could not believe the Lord had come back from the dead – so Jesus finally had to appear to him and offer to have Thomas feel the wounds in his hands and side.
Until they see and feel his body, and pronounce him truly gone, old Osama can’t be counted down and out.
Incidentally, unless I’m mistaken, the Apostle Thomas brought Christianity to India particularly to Kerala which has for years been a Communist-ruled state.
Indeed, Osama was not a favored son. His mother, Syrian-born Alia Ghanem (who hails from Latikia, a coastal resort) was divorced from Mohammed after Osama’s birth and remarried Mohammed al Attas from Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) with whom she had three sons and a daughter.
Many of Osama’s half-brothers indeed studied in the United States, either in Harvard or the University of Miami. In fact, one of Mohammed’s youngest sons, ten years younger than Osama earned (like his older brother Bakr bin Laden) a Law degree from Harvard. Abdullah bin Laden was, as a matter of fact, living in Boston at the time the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked on September 11, 2001.
Daddy Mohammed (whose family name is sometimes spelled in Roman letters, "bin Ladin") actually came from the village of Rubat, Hadramaut, a southeastern province of Yemen.
He emigrated to Saudi Arabia in 1930 and worked as a porter for pilgrims heading for Makka (Mecca) from Jeddah. He developed his construction firm, the Saudi Binladen Group (SBG) into one of the leading companies in the country. In 1951, having attracted the favor of the ruling family, he secured the contract for the highway running from the port city of Jeddah to the second holy city of Medina. He also built the road from Jeddah to Taif, the summer "capital" of King Abdel Aziz.
By that time, oil had transformed Saudi Arabia from a nation of sheepherders and camel drivers into one of the richest countries in the Gulf, flush with thousands of rich royals with fancy cars like Ferraris, Lamborginis, Mercedes’s, and Cadillacs but no places to race them. Bin Laden provided the motorways, highways and speedways for them. At last, he got the most dazzling contract in the Kingdom – the contract to restore and rebuild the holy shrines at Makka (Mecca) and Medina.
Sadly, before he realized that dream-contract which would have enriched beyond the fabled wealth of Ali Baba – not to mention his forty thieves – Mohammed bin Laden died in a plane crash in the summer of 1967, at the age of 59.
Osama was given a share of his dad’s immense fortune, of course, but it seems he never got along with his half-brothers. He was never accorded by them any significant role in the family business. Journalist Terry McDermott says that after Osama graduated from economics and engineering at university, he "was marginalized by other brothers, either because he lacked business skills, as one source contends, or because he tried to mount an unsuccessful takeover from his elder brothers."
Gee whiz. If the Western world knew what it knows now, some of the biggest corporations would have given Osama a major post, awarding him a job big enough to keep him busy, happy and satisfied with . . . uh, "material" profit and luxury.
As it happened, Osama was in search of a meaningful role when the call was raised for Muslims from all over the world to rush to Afghanistan to expel the Soviet occupiers who had taken over Kabul in 1979. Up to then, intimates reveal, Osama had never even heard of "Afghanistan" (one source of this is Jamal Khalifa). It was at this stage that he encountered the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam. Lawrence Wright notes in his volume "The Looming Tower" (now, I think, Number 6 in The New York Times’ non-fiction bestseller list) that Azzam convinced bin Laden in Jeddah to go over to Afghanistan.
Born in Jenin in 1941, Azzam had fled to Jordan after the Israeli Defense Forces captured the West Bank in the Six Day War of 1967. He subsequently studied in the famed al-Azhar University in Cairo, earning a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence in 1973. He was expelled from the faculty of the University of Jordan for his Palestinian activism and ended up leading prayers in the school Mosque of the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.
Azzam combined "piety and learning," but above that he was a sort of warrior-priest preaching "jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, no dialogues."
Tall, with an impressive black beard and dark eyes that radiated conviction, Azzam mesmerized his Muslim listeners with the message that Islam would dominate the world through force of arms.
Determined to participate in the nascent Afghan resistance, he acquired a position teaching the Qu’ran and Arabic language at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan, and moved there in November 1981.
It was in Peshawar that Azzam acquired his most militant converts – among the most promising of whom was the Saudi, Osama bin Laden.
The Soviets abandoned Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, having lost 15,000 men and suffered over 30,000 casualties. Osama and his fellow mujahideen – with no Russians left to fight – had by then decided to take on the "infidel" world. The rest we all know.
The denouement of this jihad? It is still to come.
The Prophet Muhammad was quoted as once saying, "The ink of the scholar is worth more than the blood of a martyr."
This is not Osama’s reading of Islam. Blood is thicker than ink in his vocabulary. This is why we must continue to beware of him.