CBC News Indepth: Khadr

INDEPTH: KHADR
Al-Qaeda Family: At home with Osama bin Laden
CBC News Online | March 3, 2004

Ahmed Said Khadr

Shortly after Ahmed Said Khadr was released from the Pakistan prison in 1996, he took his family to a large compound of houses near Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

It was in Jalalabad that young Abdurahman Khadr met Osama bin Laden for the first time. He recognized him from a picture he had seen in an American magazine.

"In a magazine – and I had seen this person that was America's Most Wanted and then the next thing I know he's in front of me, you know, so I'm amazed, I'm like wow, this person who's big, you know. But I would say he's a normal human being," Abdurahman says. "He has issues with his wife and he has issues with his kids. Financial issues, you know. The kids aren't listening, the kids aren't doing this and that. So it really comes down to it – he's a father and he's a person."

Osama bin Laden

"It was very important for him [bin Laden] to sit with his kids every day at least for two hours in the morning after their Islamic prayer," Maha says. "They sit and read a book. It didn't have to be something religious. He loved poetry very much. So he tried to encourage them to read, memorize and write poetry. So every once in a while it would be a different book, sometimes poetry, sometimes for history or sometimes it's about grammar, language, sometimes a religious book.

Zaynab

"Yeah he loved playing volleyball and loved horse riding," Zaynab says, "And he'd do it. I mean amongst people he was not Osama bin Laden. He was just Osama, just - and kids played around him. Kids would go shake his hand. He played volleyball with them or just horse raced with them. He was just a person. And [when] they'd go shooting he'd go with them. If he missed his [shot], they'd laugh at him and stuff like that."

"Osama has three wives," Abdurahman says. "I think he had four but I don't know so much about the fourth wife and then I know that he has three wives. From one wife, the first one, he has mostly all of his children which I think are seven or eight. And then the second wife there is, like, two or three and the third wife there's two or three from her, too. They lived all in the same house, his family. But in different, like, a big house but in different, you know, inside houses."

Women and men were generally kept separately in the bin Laden compound and Osama imposed strict controls on the women in his family.

"I remember that I met them, and actually it's not that they're not social people, they're very social," Zaynab says. "But they have lots of restrictions, where they go, when they go, where they come, when they come, who visits to them and how long you can stay in their house and all that. So you can't really have an intimate relationship with them. And you can't be really going and coming because they have to watch many things."

Intelligence reports in Canada suggest that Osama bin Laden's relationship to the Khadr family was somewhat closer. Not only did some of Khadrs attend the 2001 wedding of Osama's son, Muhammed, but bin Laden attended Zaynab's wedding on Sept. 9, 1999.

Jalalabad

Osama bin Laden lived with his numerous wives and children and the families of his close friends and admirers, including the Khadr family, in a compound near Jalalabad, now severely damaged by American bombing.

During the years of the Afghanistan war against the Russians in the 1980s, Osama bin Laden learned how to live simply, in caves, without any modern conveniences. Later, in the 1990s, as he transferred his hatred from the Russians to the Americans, he banned all American products in his presence.

Abdurahman

"He was against any American products and I can tell you this. He was against using ice and he actually forbade it on the people that lived around him." Abdurahman says. "Anyhow the people smuggled it in but he had forbade it. He had forbade electricity even [though] he knew that they needed it, but he didn't want them in any way to be spoiled because with something that's how it starts, he says."

"He is against drinking cold water. Probably because he didn't believe in using modern [conveniences] because he wanted them to be prepared that one day there's no cold water, they'd be able to survive and it wouldn't be so difficult for them," Zaynab says.

Maha

"He did not like soft drinks," Maha says.

"He didn't like to buy American, but his kids sometimes would buy them," Zaynab says. "He liked them to live more natural."

"His idea is, I can live anywhere. I'll live anywhere," Abdurahman says.

"The important thing is my cause, it's not me or where I live and that's why he lived in a mud hut. I can tell you that. He lived in a mud house, he and his family. You know."

"For me, I used to admire them because I know they were very, very rich family and they live in a very, very, very simple - I mean I was like a queen compared to them because I was living in a house with electricity and water. They did not have this in their compound." Maha says.

"He never jokes, very quiet person, very polite. Can be a saint, something like a saint. I see him as a very peaceful man," Abdullah says.

Abdurahman says that in the beginning, his relationship with the bin Laden family centered on horses. He loved horses and so did the bin Laden children.

"Their father had promised them that he would get them a horse if they memorized the Qur'an. So they were so anxious to finish memorizing it so they could get a horse, which shows you that they're normal children, too, you know," Abdurahman says. "So yeah, and me, too, you know. I had insisted that [my father] get me a horse, too, so he got me a horse, too. So, you know, our friendship between me and his kids was mostly the horses."

"They loved horses and cattle and they had them even in their compound," Zaynab recalls. But one of his kids loved cars, so whatever, his father, he got enough money to buy himself a car."

"Another one just bought horses," Zaynab says, "Whenever he got money he'd buy a horse. Whenever he had money he'd buy horse or cattle and bought a car."

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