Original subtitles

Man: [over radio] American 11 ident please or acknowledge.

American 20 will not respond to me now.

[explosion]

[muffled screams]

Narrator: 9/11 still haunts us all.

The events of that day have defined

much of the world ever since.

The hunt for bin Laden

drove the West to invade Afghanistan.

Now they've left, a new reign of terror begins.

How much do we really know about the man Osama bin Laden?

He may be dead but his legacy continues to impact us all.

- Growing up, I worshipped everything about bin Laden.

He was a hero.

He was an icon verging on mythical levels.

That's how hip he was for us.

- You can't tell your heart who to like,

and my heart at that time told me to love him.

Narrator: We know bin Laden as the terrorist,

the world's most evil man.

For those once closest to him, his story is more complex.

Now, some are ready to speak for the first time.

- I felt that he was the reassuring

older brotherly figure.

His charisma was what really kept us all together as a glue.

Narrator: They tell us about the man they knew,

the choices he made, the points of no return.

People change, and war change people.

That what happened to Osama.

- I was appalled by what happened.

It filled my heart with horror.

I did not sign up for this.

We are going into the path of endless, perpetual bloodshed.

- I prayed secretly that he would die.

I mourned the person I knew and loved,

but I didn't mourn the monster he turned out to be.

[screaming, crying]

[call to prayer]

Khaled: I grew up in middle class suburbs of Jeddah City.

It happened that my neighbour was Osama bin Laden.

We were in our teenage years.

Osama was really a shy boy, but he has charisma, somehow.

Even in his voice you could see his smile.

Their house, it's like any middle-class house,

where we have parties, we have fun,

we listen to music, watch TV.

We all love cowboy movies.

Obviously, we were on the side of the good guys.

Of course, with the cowboys, because they had the guns.

Osama loved football, but he wasn't a good player.

I remember Osama being attacked by one of the opposite team.

You know, I came in and pushed the guy away,

but he wasn't happy about it, and he said,

"If you gave me just a few minutes, Khaled,

"I would have resolved this issue peacefully."

I'm saying a lot of good things about him.

Now that's... [laughs]

..will put me in trouble.

But I have to be honest. He was good.

I don't know what happened to him.

Narrator: Mohammed bin Laden was a devout Muslim,

responsible for building much of modern Saudi Arabia.

Osama was the 17th of his 54 children.

- Bin Laden's family was the elitest

you could get after royalty.

Growing up there, his name was plastered in our heads.

Narrator: A'alia, bin Laden's mother, came from Syria.

Her family were Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam,

often vilified by conservatives as an unorthodox cult,

incorporating Christian and Pagan elements.

- His Syrian side was important,

because he lived with one parent, his mother.

Narrator: A'alia was 14 when she married.

Mohammed divorced her within a year.

Khaled: They were very close.

She was trying to compensate for not having a father around,

so she was both parents to him.

I loved his mother because she was a mother to us too.

Narrator: Bin Laden's childhood, like many across the Arab world,

was overshadowed by two seismic events.

[bomb exploding]

The Israeli defeat of Arab armies in 1967,

and its occupation of Palestine.

- It was a sickening feeling that we were not able

to do anything to help our brothers and sisters.

[chanting]

Osama would cry when he saw footage

of Israeli soldiers hitting women and children in Palestine.

He would swear that one day we will have revenge.

[call to prayer]

Khaled: In high school, his emotions were exploited

by Islamist teachers.

He stopped watching movies and TV shows completely.

He moved away from us, his childhood friends.

One day I was wearing shorts going to a football game.

That was wrong in Islam.

He just looked at my legs

and then look at my eyes and say..."Bye."

[foreign dialogue]

I could see in his eyes he was thinking that was wrong.

His mother noticed that her son

was doing his prayers, was not going with the bad guys

who would drink alcohol or go with girls, and that was OK.

It was good for her.

But she didn't expect that he would go all the way.

- I decided to drop out of school

to achieve my goals and dreams.

I was surprised at the major opposition to this idea,

especially from my mother,

who cried and begged me to change my mind.

In the end, there was no way out.

I couldn't resist my mother's tears.

I had to go back and finish my education.

- I met Osama bin Laden in the 1990s

when I became, you know, a bomb maker for Al-Qaeda.

I grew up in Saudi Arabia in the '80s,

where the call for the jihad was in every mosque I attended.

Osama bin Laden lost his father at young age,

and was looking for a place for himself in the world.

And then you have that, you know,

amazing figure of Abdullah Azzam,

who is not an empty suit

teaching and preaching in a university.

No, he practices what he teaches,

devoting his time and his effort to the cause.

- Osama wasn't smart.

He was repeating whatever people who believed in told him.

So, that's his weakness.

And Abdullah Azzam was the one he trusted most.

He became more and more Islamist in his views,

and more and more intent in changing the world

and making a difference.

But he went down a road that only lead to hell.

Jihad is to fight against your own wrong desires.

And it's also Jihad to defend your country if it's attacked.

Narrator: In 1979, when bin Laden was 21,

the Communist Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,

a Muslim country.

Jimmy Carter: It is a deliberate effort

of a powerful, atheistic government,

to subjugate an independent Islamic people.

Reporter: Addressing a large number of Afghan refugees

near Peshawar this morning, the Saudi Crown Prince

said the entire Islamic world fully supports

the greatest struggle and supreme sacrifice

of the people of Afghanistan

for the protection of their faith and religion.

- I was enraged and went there at once.

I arrived within days before the end of 1979.

- Osama, like many Saudi volunteers,

went with the help and support of the Saudi government.

He promised his mother that he would go

only in humanitarian missions to deliver help to refugees,

Afghanis in Peshawar.

Even that wasn't to her happiness, but she agreed.

Osama stuck to Azzam like a shadow.

- I had a fear of getting involved physically in the war.

People close to me talked me out of it,

and seemed to have good reasons.

I later felt deeply remorseful about that.

Narrator: Instead of going to the front line,

bin Laden helped Azzam set up an organisation,

to recruit, fund and train foreign fighters.

They called it the Service Bureau.

Reporter: Peshawar, in the north-west frontier,

the operations base for the mujahideen,

the freedom fighters of Afghanistan.

From here, teams are constantly sent across the border.

- Every time he travelled,

he make it a law in his life to call his mother every day,

to tell her, "I'm fine, I'm OK," and to ask about her news.

And he promised not to go to the front line.

[prayer chant]

- Allahu Akbar!

Narrator: Four years after arriving in Peshawar,

bin Laden finally crossed into Afghanistan, to the front line.

He was 26.

- I was surprised by the state of the equipment

and everything else - weapons, roads and trenches.

I asked forgiveness from God Almighty,

feeling that I had sinned because I listened

to those who advised me not to go.

I felt that this four-year delay

could not be pardoned unless I become a martyr.

Narrator: But if bin Laden was going to get into battle,

he needed someone to train him to fight.

[singing]

Khaled: People don't understand.

They think people once started good

they had to be good all their life,

or born criminal or born saints.

It's not.

People change, and war change people.

That's what happened to Osama.

[muttering in Russian]

Narrator: For a year, bin Laden

had been fighting the Soviets with the Afghan mujahideen,

led by Commander Wahidyar, AKA Fearless.

[foreign dialogue]

[explosions]

- I saw with my own eyes the remains of a Russian.

He came to tear apart the mujahideen,

but God tore him apart in the worst way.

All we found of him were three fingers

and his cheek with an ear and hair.

The Afghans came and took his picture

as if he was a skimmed ram.

[chanting in foreign language]

- I saw him when he was back from one of his trips

and he still has the same quality of voice

and reasoning, but he went into war, he killed people.

When his mother found out

that he was going to the front lines,

she was like any mother - heartbroken and worried

and couldn't sleep at night.

When he finally called to tell her, "I'm fine,"

she would cry and ask him to come back,

but he was adamant about it.

Narrator: Throughout the conflict,

the Americans supported and armed for Afghan resistance

in their fight against the Soviet Union.

How honoured I am by these visitors that we have with us,

six of the Afghanistan freedom fighters.

- I'm the grandson of one of the leaders

of the mujahideen against the Soviets, Hekmatyar.

Osama bin Laden was one of his closest friends.

Bin Laden's money was very vital,

supporting Azzam and his movement.

- The Afghans treated the Arabs as glorified guests,

not as real mujahideen.

We should take responsibility for ourselves,

I know we can provide more rigorous training.

Narrator: Bin Laden had the money and power

to build his own base to train Arab fighters.

He chose the mountains of Jaji,

a few kilometres from enemy lines.

He called it al-Masada - the lion's den.

- When I joined the fight, we visited the place.

This was the place where, you know, you go,

this is like the museum of jihad,

if you can call it this way.

This is where all, you know, the famous battles are fought.

You know, the myth was created.

The mountains of Jaji represented

an impregnable mountain fortress,

as well as a supply line

from Pakistan to the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

It needed to be smashed.

[foreign dialogue]

- I was only 30 metres from the Russians

and they were trying to capture me.

I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful

in my heart that I fell asleep.

[playful laughter]

[gunshot]

Aimen: After Jaji, Osama bin Laden became mythologised.

That simple young man from Saudi Arabia

without any military training,

who stood along the other mujahideen factions

in Afghanistan

against the might of the Soviet Union and they won.

The videos that were being sent to us

inside Arabia to watch

shifted from Abdullah Azzam to Osama bin Laden.

When we were growing up in Saudi Arabia

we never had superheroes on TV, we had early Muslim warriors,

you know, the knights in the shining armour

as you have in the West.

You know, it's similar to that.

The Battle of Jaji was the watershed moment

when suddenly somehow Osama bin Laden

turned into a living Muslim warrior.

He was a hero.

We heard stories of how young Afghan boys

with stones will throw it, you know, at a battalion

of Soviet tanks and they will explode in balls of fire.

All of this was nonsense, but nonetheless

it was such believable nonsense

that there was an explosion in the number of people

who would travel from Saudi Arabia, from Kuwait, from Yemen,

from Algeria, from Egypt, from everywhere

around the Muslim world,

to go and join the Afghan jihad with Osama bin Laden.

[foreign dialogue plays on TV]

You have that moment shaping the world view

of Osama bin Laden for years to come,

because he started to be seduced by this myth,

the invincible Osama bin Laden, who would become the symbol

of enduring jihad against mighty empires in the future.

Narrator: Until the Soviet withdrawal,

bin Laden had fought

under the spiritual leadership of Abdullah Azzam.

But once the infidels had left, a different philosophy emerged.

We are here. We are here. We are here!

The real Islamic front

against Zionism, communism and imperialism.

Narrator: For men like the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri,

jihad was far from done.

They wanted to take their struggle

to the rest of the world.

- Osama believes in Azzam's idea of the defensive jihad,

of dispelling the infidels from occupying Islamic land,

until he ends up rubbing shoulders

with Ayman al-Zawahiri, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

And they are a group of people that have been prosecuted

by the Egyptian government, tortured for years.

So, they have a lot of hate.

We believe in our religion,

both as an ideology and practice and, hence,

we tried our best to establish

this Islamic state and Islamic society.

[men shout]

Khaled: I believe this is the turning point in his life.

He wasn't a scholar, he wasn't smart,

he has the charisma, he has the face, he has the myth.

And that was used by people like Zawahiri and the rest of them.

- There's an interesting change in character

where he goes from being the disciple of Abdullah Azzam

to being this person who aligns with Zawahiri in his thinking.

Narrator: In May 1988, bin Laden and other extremists

began to sketch out a new organisation.

Its world view was radically different

to that of its old mentor Azzam's.

- That's when it turned from an Arab movement

that was fighting the Soviets within Afghanistan

into an international organisation

that was going to serve

as the base for jihad around the world.

Narrator: A few days after the founding of Al-Qaeda,

the Arab jihadis, backed by the Saudi government,

voted to oust Azzam and install bin Laden

as their overall leader, emir, in Afghanistan.

- Most of the donations were coming from Saudi Arabia

and they wanted to have Saudi control over it

and they thought Osama bin Laden was our man.

- I started to feel sad because that wasn't him.

That wasn't my childhood friend,

the peaceful boy who I grew up with.

I felt I lost him.

He went down that dark valley.

Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.tv