Matchmaking

How bin Laden Met His Wife

“I want to be martyred with you.”

Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada took a bullet for her husband, Osama bin Laden, on May 1. Was it true love? “I want to be martyred with you,” the Associated Press says al-Sada once told her husband. Through interviews with her family, the AP pieces together a sense of what her life was like with the world’s most-wanted terrorist. She had always told friends and family that she “wanted to go down in history,” though the family says it was unaware what she was getting into when an uncle came to them in 1999 to say a Saudi man named Osama bin Laden was looking for a wife. She accepted the engagement without meeting him and flew to Afghanistan to meet him. Her family only saw her once after that, visiting her in Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks. When bin Laden gave her the option to leave with her family, she said “ I won't leave as long as you're alive.”