9/11 mastermind defied 2 U.S. presidents

LONDON -- Challenging the might of the "infidel" United States, Osama bin Laden led the deadliest militant attacks in history and then built a global network of allies to wage a "holy war" intended to outlive him.

The man behind the suicide hijack attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and who U.S. officials said late Sunday was dead, was the nemesis of former President George W. Bush, who pledged to take him "dead or alive" and whose two terms were dominated by a "war on terror" against his al-Qaida network.

Bin Laden also assailed President Barack Obama, dismissing a new beginning with Muslims he offered in a 2009 speech as sowing "seeds for hatred and revenge against America."

But even as political and security pressures grew on him in 2009-2011, bin Laden appeared to hit upon a strategy of smaller, more easily-organised attacks, carried out by globally-scattered hubs of sympathizers and affiliate groups.

Al-Qaida sprouted new offshoots in Yemen, Iraq and North Africa and directed or inspired attacks from Bali to Britain to the United States, where a Nigerian Islamist made a botched attempt to down an airliner over Detroit on Dec 25, 2009.

While remaining the potent figurehead of al-Qaida, bin Laden turned its core leadership from an organization that executed complex team-based attacks into a propaganda hub that cultivated affiliated groups to organize and strike on their own.

Bin Laden became one of the most instantly recognizable people on the planet, his gaunt face staring out from propaganda videos and framed on a U.S. website offering a $25 million bounty. Officials say U.S. authorities have recovered bin Laden's body, ending the largest manhunt in history involving thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers along the border.

Late Sunday, Bush called bin Laden's death a "momentous achievement."

Whether reviled as a terrorist and mass murderer or hailed as the champion of oppressed Muslims fighting injustice and humiliation, bin Laden changed the course of history.

His early days

Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire businessman Mohamed bin Laden, he lost his father while still a boy -- killed in a plane crash, apparently due to an error by his American pilot.

According to some accounts, he helped form al-Qaida ("The Base") in the dying days of the Soviet occupation.

Bin Laden condemned the presence in Saudi Arabia of U.S. troops sent to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait after the 1990 invasion, and remained convinced that the Muslim world was the victim of international terrorism engineered by America.

He called for a jihad against the United States, which had spent billions of dollars bankrolling the Afghan resistance.

Trail of attacks

Al-Qaida embarked on a trail of attacks, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six and first raised the specter of Islamist extremism spreading to the U.S.

Bin Laden was the prime suspect in bombings of U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 as well as attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 224. In October 2000, suicide bombers rammed into the USS Cole warship in Yemen, killing 17 sailors, and al-Qaida was blamed.

Disowned by his family and stripped of Saudi citizenship, bin Laden had moved first to Sudan in 1991 and later resurfaced in Afghanistan before the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996.

With his wealth, largesse and shared radical Muslim ideology, bin Laden soon eased his way into inner Taliban circles. From Afghanistan, he issued religious decrees against U.S. soldiers and ran training camps where militants were groomed for a global campaign of violence.

The manhunt

Some reports say U.S. bombs narrowly missed him in late 2001 as he and his forces slipped out of Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains and into Pakistan.

But the start of the Iraq War in 2003 produced a fresh surge of recruits for al-Qaida due to opposition to the U.S. invasion within Muslim communities around the world, analysts say.

Apparently protected by the Afghan Taliban in their northwest Pakistani strongholds, bin Laden also built ties to an array of South Asian militant groups.