Growing Up Bin Laden-by Jean Sasson

I’ve finished reading the book ‘Growing Up Bin Laden’. For the past few days I’ve been thinking about him. Where could he be? What happen to his children? Is he still alive? How old is Bakr now? Is he still alive?

Bakr is one of his son who was crying hard longing for his mother to take him with her, when she left Afghanistan, where she had been living with her husband and her husband’s 2 other wives and their children, around the Al-Qaeda fighters, without electricity, without proper water and drainage system, in a hole of a mountain, in the middle of no where in Afghanistan.

I am talking about Osama. This book tells his life from ‘Hero’ to ‘Zero’. His blue-eye-boy, Omar, his 4th son from the 1st wife could not agree to his father’s ‘Jihad’ stand, thinking that fighting in the name of religion, but killing civilians are not the way he wants to be. He decided to leave the mountain, where all his 16 siblings from 1 mother and 2 step-moms have been hiding themselves to Osama’s order.

To his surprise, his father allowed him to take his mother back to her country, Syria, but sad that for he was not allowed to take his other siblings with them, except his youngest baby sister and a toddler sister, leaving the rest to stand still and said their last good bye on the day they were leaving, while his 7 years old brother, Bakr, was screaming like hell, wanted to follow him.

Jean Sasson convinced me as if I was there, living in the desert mountain with them, living in a dangerous life every day and night, cloaking in a veil and long black gown, no where to go, not enough food to feed myself and the children. I felt helpless being dominated by man of my life, away from my parents and relative.

I am suffocating.