Who is Bin Laden?

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was a member of the wealthy Saudi bin Laden family and the founder of the jihadist organization al-Qaeda. Bin Laden was responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets around the world. Because Bin Laden was an advocate of violent extremist jihad, Osama bin Laden lost his Saudi citizenship and was disowned by his billionaire family.

His Beliefs

Osama Bin Laden beliefs were extremist and were based on distorted interpretations of Islamic texts.

• Osama believed that the restoration of Sharia law - the code of conduct or religious law of Islam - will set things right in the Muslim world.
• All other ideologies such as pan-Arabism, socialism, communism, democracy must be opposed. 
• He believed Afghanistan under the rule of Mullah Omar's Taliban was "the only Islamic country" in the Muslim world. 
• Osama consistently dwelt on the need for violent jihad to right what he believes are injustices against Muslims perpetrated by the United States and sometimes by other non-Muslim states.
• The need to eliminate the state of Israel, and the necessity of forcing the US to withdraw from the Middle East was one of his goals. 
• He also called on Americans to "reject the immoral acts of fornication (and) homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury," in an October 2002 letter.
• Probably the most infamous part of Osama's ideology was that civilians, including women and children, are legitimate targets of jihad.

These beliefs, along with violent expansive jihad, have sometimes been called Qutbism (the ideology of Sayyid Qutb)

The death of Bin Laden

Bin Laden was on the American Federal Bureau of Investigation's lists of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives and Most Wanted Terrorists due to his involvement in the 1998 US embassy bombings. Since 2001, Osama bin Laden and his organization had been major targets of the U.S. War on Terror. Bin Laden and fellow al-Qaeda leaders were believed to be hiding near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
On May 1, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced on national television that bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan by American military forces and the Central Intelligence Agency and that his body was in U.S. custody