Osama Bin Laden's Influence On Terrorism

Osama Bin Laden is a name known to millions as a malicious terrorist who killed thousands of people during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Before he became a terrorist, bin Laden had a history and a family. Bin Laden started life as the seventeenth out of fifty children on March 10th of 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His father was a wealthy construction manager who had close ties to the royal family, giving bin Laden a privileged early life. Later, many of his siblings went to the west for an education, while he stayed close to home. After studying economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University marrying five or six wives, and having over twenty children, he joined the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. This eventually led him to his radical ideology. …show more content…
He began to follow the teachings of pan-Islamist Abdullah Azzam, who believed all Muslims should wage a holy war, or Jihad, on the entire world to create one Islamic state. Because he saw the Western world influencing the Middle East, the idea appealed to him. At this point, Osama bin Laden became significant. He built the terrorist group al-Qaida from the ground up. The terrorist group was dedicated to symbolic acts instead of a military campaign. In 1998, al-Qaida bombed United States embassies. Then, they bombed the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors. This all led up to the largest attack yet, the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. This spurred the War on Terror, and bin Laden rose to be on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Nearly ten years after 9/11, bin Laden was killed on May first in