Western intelligence officials estimate that all the relatives of the family may number as many as 600. In 1994, the bin Laden family disowned
Osama bin Laden, and the Saudi government revoked his passport. The Saudi government also stripped Osama of his
citizenship who was of Syrian origin, making Osama a member of the Syrian group.
First generation •
Muhammed bin Awad bin Laden (1908–1967) was the family patriarch and founder; before World War I, Muhammed, originally poor and uneducated, emigrated from
Hadhramaut, on the south coast of Yemen, to the
Red Sea port of
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he began to work as a porter. Starting his own business in 1930, Muhammed built his fortune as a building contractor for the Saudi royal family during the 1950s. Married 22 times, with 54 children, his 17th child was
Osama bin Laden, who was the son of Hamida al-Attas (born in Syria), Muhammed’s tenth wife. The couple divorced soon after Osama was born, and Hamida was given in marriage to one of the executives of Muhammed's company around 1958. He also had over 60 children and was married 6 times.
Second generation •
Salem bin Laden (1946–1988) attended
Millfield, the English boarding school. He took over the family empire in 1967 upon the death of his father; also an amateur rock guitarist in the 1970s. He married an English art student, Caroline Carey, whose half-brother, Ambrose, is the son of the
Marquess of Queensberry. Salem died outside
San Antonio, Texas in 1988, when an experimental
ultralight plane that he was flying got tangled in power lines. •
Tarek bin Laden (born 1947); once called "the personification of the dichotomy (conservatism and change) of Saudi Arabia". •
Bakr bin Laden (born 1946) succeeded Salem as the chairman of the
Saudi Binladin Group; major power broker in
Jeddah. • Hassan bin Laden, senior vice president of the SBG. • Yehia bin Laden, also active in the SBG; in 2001, owned 16 percent of
Cambridge, MA-based
Aceragen Inc.. • Mahrous bin Laden, implicated in the
Grand Mosque Seizure carried out by dissidents against the Saudi ruling family at the
Masjid al-Haram in
Makkah on November 20, 1979. This event shook the Muslim world with the ensuing violence and the killing of hundreds at the holiest of Islamic sites. Trucks owned by the family were reported to have been used to smuggle arms into the tightly controlled city. The bin Laden connection was through the son of a Sultan of Yemen who had been radicalized by Syrian members of the
Muslim Brotherhood. Mahrous was arrested for a time, but was not beheaded by the Saudi government alongside 63 others who were, with their public executions broadcast live on Saudi television. Later exonerated, he joined the family business and became manager of the
Medina branch of the bin Laden enterprises and a member of the board. •
Osama bin Laden (born 1957 in Saudi Arabia,
died May 2, 2011, in Pakistan) who co-founded the Islamic Military group
Al-Qaeda, which
CIA and
FBI claim that was responsible for the attacks such as the
1998 United States embassy bombings, the
2002 Bali bombings, and most infamously, the
September 11 attacks. His death was announced on May 2, 2011. He was one of the
FBI's
Most Wanted Terrorists. •
Najwa Ghanem (born 1958), became the first wife of Osama in 1974. A first cousin, she was his mother's niece. She co-authored
Growing Up bin Laden with her son Omar. •
Yeslam bin Ladin (born 1950) studied in the 1970s at the
University of Southern California, in Los Angeles; settled in
Switzerland; became a Swiss citizen in 2001;
Geneva-based head of the family's European holding company, the
Saudi Investment Company; was scrutinized by Swiss and American investigators because of a financial stake he has in a Swiss aviation firm; he has claimed to not have had contact with Osama since 1981 • Abdullah bin Laden (born 1965); a graduate of
Harvard Law School, Abdullah lived in
Cambridge, Massachusetts on 9/11, and was the only bin Laden relative to remain in the United States, staying in Boston for almost a month following the attacks. • Shafig bin Laden, the half-brother of Osama, was a guest of honour at the
Carlyle Group's Washington conference at the
Ritz-Carlton Hotel on September 11, 2001, and was among the 13 members of the family to leave the United States on September 19, 2001, aboard flight N521DB.
Third generation •
Wafah Dufour (born 1975), daughter of
Yeslam bin Laden, is an American model and aspiring singer-songwriter. She spent the early part of her life in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Dufour, her little sisters Najia (1981) and Noor (1987), her mother (1955) and her father (1950) then moved to
Geneva, Switzerland. In 1988, her parents separated. She earned a law diploma at Geneva Law School (Switzerland) and later a master's degree from
Columbia Law School in the United States. She lived in
Manhattan until around the time of the September 11, 2001 attacks, but was staying in Geneva for a summer holiday at the time of the attacks. •
Abdullah Osama bin Laden (born 1976), son of Osama and Najwa. Although, as the eldest son his father originally showed him some favor, taking him into Afghanistan in 1984 when he was only eight, Abdullah later became disgusted with life in Sudan, moved back to Jiddah to marry his first cousin, refused to rejoin his father in Sudan, except for a brief, unpleasant visit, and never saw or communicated with his father again after 1995. Abdullah resides in Jiddah, where he runs his own firm, called Fame Advertising; • Abdul Rahman bin Laden (born 1979), the second son of Osama and Najwa. As a child he was born with
hydrocephalus, and his father took him to the
United Kingdom for medical treatment. However, he refused to allow British surgeons to operate on the boy and tried to treat him himself using a folk remedy of
honey. He ended up having an
intellectual disability and
autism. As an adult he moved to Syria with his mother in 2011. With all of Osama's other children, Saad accompanied Osama on his exile to Sudan from 1991 to 1996, and then to Afghanistan. In Sudan in 1998, he married Wafa', a Sudanese woman born of Yemeni parents. In September 2001, Saad was sent away by his father with his father's other three wives and the younger children. In March 2002, they made their way into Iran at Zabol. As stated by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, “As the oldest son present, Saad was nominally head of the bin Laden family party, but given his mental issues his aunt, Osama’s wife Khairiah, took charge.” Saad was erroneously blamed for the bombing of a
Tunisian synagogue on April 11, 2002 and then implicated in the May 12, 2003, suicide bombing in
Riyadh, and the
Morocco bombing four days later, all of which was impossible as he was neither personally able to order or command anything, and he was also held in Iran, mostly in prison-like conditions, for almost six and a half years, from March 2002 to August 2008. Saad escaped and fled to Pakistan, Saad was later killed incidentally, without being specifically targeted, in a U.S. drone strike in North Waziristan on 17 July 2009. Al-Qaeda leader
Ayman al-Zawahiri confirmed Saad's death in a videotape three years later. •
Omar bin Laden (born 1981) son of Osama and Najwa; Omar accompanied Osama on his exile to Sudan from 1991 to 1996, and then to Afghanistan. He returned to Saudi Arabia after an apparent falling-out with his father over Omar's disagreement with violence. For a while, Omar ran his own company in Jeddah as a contractor. Omar has one son, Ahmed, by his ex-wife, whom he had divorced 3 times by 2006. In September 2006, he married Zaina and they are now said to be living in a secret location in Qatar. He is now reported to be living in Normandie, France, with his wife. • Mohammad bin Osama bin Laden (born 1983), the son of Osama and Najwa, married the daughter of al-Qaeda leader
Mohammed Atef in January 2001, at
Kandahar, Afghanistan, with footage broadcast by
Al-Jazeera, where three of Osama's step-siblings and Osama's mother were in attendance. •
Hamza bin Laden (1989–2017/2019), also the son of Osama, was groomed to be Osama's heir following Saad's death. On July 31, 2019, it was reported that Hamza bin Laden was believed to have been killed in the first two years of the
first Trump administration, which began on January 20, 2017. On September 14, 2019, U.S.
President Donald Trump confirmed that Hamza bin Laden was killed in a U.S. counter-terrorism operation in the
Afghanistan/
Pakistan region. Other details were not disclosed. • Khaled bin Laden, son of Osama, was killed along with his father at
Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 2, 2011. • Abdul Aziz bin Laden, manages the SBG's Egyptian operations; ranked Number 2 in the 2006 UAE National Superstock Bike Championship. == Muhammad bin Ladin's children ==