thanks to TheReligionofPeace.com this finding this latest "gem", LOL!!
Tasked with finding Osama Bin Laden’s fifth bride in Yemen
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6999835.ece
When Osama Bin Laden decided to marry for the fifth time, he turned to his most trusted advisers to find him a bride.
He wanted a Yemeni girl, he told them. The marriage would cement his relationship with Yemen, his billionaire father’s homeland. Sheikh Rashad Mohammed Saeed Ismael, a Yemeni aide, took up the challenge.
“She had to be religious, obedient, generous, well brought-up, quiet, calm and young enough not to feel jealous of the sheikh’s [Bin Laden’s] other wives,” he giggled.
“Multiple wives tend to vie for attention out of jealousy and end up in catfights, and Bin Laden did not want his new wife to get engrossed in such issues.”
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The aide, also called Abu al-Fida, knew just the girl in his home town of Ibb, a leafy city in the southwest of his country. He believed Amal al-Sadah, a civil servant’s daughter, aged 18, would make the perfect wife for the Al-Qaeda leader, who was 43.
“She was right in every way,” Fida said, describing his matchmaking in 2000 for the first time in an interview that provided remarkable insights into the Al-Qaeda leader’s personal life. He says the bride he chose is still at Bin Laden’s side today.
“Even at her young age she was religious and spiritual enough and believed in the things that Bin Laden — a very religious, pious and spiritual man — believed in,” he said.
“Coming from a modest Yemeni family, she could live with him the tough life in mountain caves and be someone he could mould. She was also someone who did not mind marrying a man as old as her father, and truly believed that being a dutiful and obedient wife to her husband would grant her a place in heaven.”
It was a year before the September 11 attacks on America when Fida approached the girl’s family.
“I told them that Osama Bin Laden was looking for a wife,” he said, “that he was famous and known for his piousness, humbleness, religion, strong belief, generosity and goodness. I told them that he would be a good husband for your daughter.”
As a warrior preacher who had travelled to Afghanistan to fight at the age of 15 and had risen through the ranks of AlQaeda, he commanded the family’s respect and trust.
A meeting with Amal followed: he wanted to be sure of her consent.
“I told her: you know of Bin Laden, who gave away his palaces and fortune to wage jihad on behalf of Muslims. He lives in Afghanistan, sometimes in fear for his life, sometimes secured; sometimes in a city and a house, at other times in a mountain and a cave on the run.” He wanted her to understand everything, he said.
When she agreed to the marriage, her father gave Fida permission to take her to Afghanistan. The preparations took two weeks and were carried out in accordance with the instructions of Bin Laden, who sent $5,000 (about £3,100 today) — a huge sum in Yemen — with which to buy her gold jewellery and clothes.
A “generous” sum was given to Amal’s family to ensure they were comfortable. After a farewell party for the bride and her parents, three sisters and four brothers, Amal was ready.
Escorted by Fida, his wife Nabila and their three children, Amal set off from Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, to Karachi, Pakistan. After a few days’ rest in a guesthouse, they drove to Quetta, near the Afghan border. Bin Laden himself had arranged their journey onward to Kandahar, where he was waiting.
The wedding ceremony in the grounds of a compound was conducted by Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, Al-Qaeda’s then chief financial officer, better known as Sheikh Saeed al-Masri.
In line with strict Sunni Islamic traditions, it was a men-only affair. The bride was deemed to have consented to the marriage by travelling to Afghanistan, so her presence was not required.
The men celebrated with recitals of poetry and song, freshly slaughtered lambs and large dishes of rice. The women, including Amal, held their own more modest party in a house nearby.
Fida stayed in Afghanistan until one week before the 9/11 attacks. “We knew that certain targets were going to be attacked but we didn’t know what, when or where. The sheikh had spoken of it.”
Amal, by now heavily pregnant, remained behind in Kandahar, where Bin Laden wanted her to have the baby at home. The child, a girl, was born within days of the attacks on New York and Washington.
“About a week after my arrival in Yemen we got news that Amal had delivered a baby girl whom they called Safiyah,” Fida said. “My sister, who was there at the time, attended the birth.”
It was the culmination of a long association between Fida, 36, and Bin Laden, now 52, which began in the 1990s.
The Yemeni sheikh saw nothing unusual in his decision to fight in Afghanistan while still in his mid-teens: it was his “Islamic obligation”, he said, and many young Yemenis were following a similar path.
He first met Bin Laden during one of the Al-Qaeda leader’s visits to the fighters’ camps, and they became close after Fida exchanged frontline action for logistical work, supporting the growing number of Arabs drawn to Afghanistan by the prospect of jihad.
Fida was appointed to head Bin Laden’s office in Kabul, then lived, travelled and ate with him for a year from 2000 to 2001.
After 9/11, he was arrested in Yemen and detained for two years. His brother Sadeq, 25, was seized in Pakistan and sent to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. A brother-in-law and a cousin remain there to this day.
Fida blames a recent resurgence of the group called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on the Yemeni government’s failure to help former fighters returning from Afghanistan.
“Some of these men got frustrated and disillusioned and decided to head back to the mountains and regroup,” he said.
He confirmed that the group had organised the failed attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who had studied in London, to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day with explosives sewn into his underpants after training in Yemen.
Fida now acts as an adviser to the Yemeni government, pressing it to provide money and jobs for rehabilitated radicals, and has offered to mediate between officials and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
He said a London conference to be convened this week by Gordon Brown must address economic problems rather than just focusing on security.
Bin Laden, he insists, has survived the years since 9/11, despite frequent speculation that he is in ill health or that he may have died.
“Bin Laden is alive and well,” he said. “He is a man who doesn’t take chemicals in the form of pills and medication. He uses herbs and natural resources, and he eats healthy food and is very careful about his health.”
Most of his wives and his estimated 23 children are reported to have scattered. One moved to Syria, one is in Iran and two others — including one he divorced — are in his native Saudi Arabia.
As for Amal, his youngest and, apparently, favourite wife, Fida said that contrary to some reports, she had never returned to Yemen.
“I am her family’s spiritual guardian and know every detail of their lives, and I can assure you she has not been back,” he said. He is convinced that she is with Bin Laden, or is visited by him, and says they have probably had more children.
For her family, however, there is no news and the strain is hard to bear.
“After 9/11 she was able to contact her mother and family occasionally but since 2003 there have been no further communications,” he said. He believes Amal has probably been advised never to use telephones for fear of being found by security services hunting Bin Laden and his family.
Bin Laden’s mother-in-law feels the absence of her daughter keenly, he says.
“Every week when I visit the family, and despite all the laughs we have, I have to calm her as the tears roll down her face at the mention of Amal. She misses her enormously.”
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