Hamida al-Attas

Hamida al-Attas, born A'alia Ghanem, is the mother of Osama bin Laden. She came from a Syrian family of citrus farmers, with two brothers and another sister, living in two small coastal villages, Omraneya and Babryon, outside the port of Latakia. She grew up in a family of Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam. At age 22, she married Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden in Latakia in 1956 and moved to Saudi Arabia with her husband. She was the eleventh wife of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. Her husband had many wives and he divorced most of them, as having only four wives at once was in accordance with Muslim law. It has been reported that she was a concubine rather than wife of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. She was more cosmopolitan than Mohammed's first three Wahhabi Saudi wives.