Quanto a Alia Ghanem, só para dizer que toda ela e todo o ddécorque a rodeia são uma graça. Quanto ao reso, mãe é mãe.

A maquilhagem garrida, o colorida da farpela, os naperons, o que Alia diz -- tudo aquilo parece coisa de outro tempo, de outro espaço, de uma outra dimensão. 

Para nós, Osama foi aquela criatura que endoidou, extremou, divergiu, desaderiu. Aquele que fez virar a história com a evidência de que o terrorismo existia e era para levar a sério. Atacou o ocidente, ali onde o ocidente era mais ocidente, no coração do mundo moderno.

Para Alia, Osama era apenas o seu menino. Bom aluno, brilhante, um líder natural. Apenas mal rodeado. Más influências. Mas o que se pode esperar de uma mãe? Que renegue o seu menino?

Osama bin Laden (second from right) on a visit to Falun, Sweden, in 1971.
Photograph: Camera Press

Sitting between Osama’s half-brothers, Ghanem recalls her firstborn as a shy boy who was academically capable. He became a strong, driven, pious figure in his early 20s, she says, while studying economics at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where he was also radicalised. “The people at university changed him,” Ghanem says. “He became a different man.” One of the men he met there was Abdullah Azzam, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was later exiled from Saudi Arabia and became Osama’s spiritual adviser. “He was a very good child until he met some people who pretty much brainwashed him in his early 20s. You can call it a cult. They got money for their cause. I would always tell him to stay away from them, and he would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much.” (...)

“He was very straight. Very good at school. He really liked to study. He spent all his money on Afghanistan – he would sneak off under the guise of family business.” Did she ever suspect he might become a jihadist? “It never crossed my mind.” How did it feel when she realised he had? “We were extremely upset. I did not want any of this to happen. Why would he throw it all away like that?”(...)

Ghanem moved to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1950s, and Osama was born in Riyadh in 1957. She divorced his father three years later, and married al-Attas, then an administrator in the fledgling Bin Laden empire, in the early 1960s. Osama’s father went on to have 54 children with at least 11 wives. (...)

O artigo My son, Osama: the al-Qaida leader’s mother speaks for the first time de Martin Chulov, publicado no The Guardian, é muito interessante. Compreender o lado humano dos assassinos e daqueles que os rodeiam pode ajudar a melhor compreender as situações. Porque, se não as compreendermos, como pretender tentar controlá-las e debelar o mal?

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E muito obrigada, Paulo. As músicas que enviou são muito do meu agrado. E as suas palavras dão-me a conhecer um mundo que me é totalmente desconhecido. Agradeço-lhe.

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