One of Osama bin Laden’s sons in Normandy to practice painting
A traumatic youth and an artistic fascination
for the Wild West. Omar bin Laden, fourth son of former al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden, in an interview with the magazine Vice early March. The man returns in particular about his childhood and his relationship with his father, and his passion for painting, which helped him get out of it. We also learn that it is in Normandy that he devotes himself to this activity, where he is installed with his wife.
In this interview to Vice, marked by Point,
tells of living in Orne in Normandy, accompanied by his wife Zaina
Mohamed Al-Sabah and horses. It was in the French countryside that bin
Laden’s son found refuge and can be expressed in the art that has always fascinated him: painting.
The 39-year-old man confides in particular having painted a dozen
works, mainly landscapes, during confinement. “This year, I sat in my
art studio and painted with all my heart,” he said.
“Some of my mother’s family are very artistic,” he explains. “My mom loves to paint, as does one of my sisters.
My uncle was also a very good artist. So the need to draw and paint
runs in my blood. “The magazine explains this art as an escape:” This is
the dual function of Omar’s art: a way for him to crystallize the serenity of his childhood in Saudi Arabia and his new life in France, while also grappling with the trauma of everything that happened in between. “
A bad father-son relationship
On his relationship with his father, Osama bin Laden, Omar admits that they were never very close. Vice reports
an austere relationship. Osama “deprived his children of toys, beat
them regularly and tried to volunteer them on suicide missions.” Now 39
years old, he still fights for bipolar disorder and psychological scarring of his childhood, but he claims “to have finally achieved a semblance of peace in himself”.
It was in his teens that Omar decided to no longer support his father.
“He remembers a turning point during the civil war, when he was pinned
down by sniper fire on a mountain trail in Afghanistan. (…) It is there,
on this trail. mountain, with the sniper bullets hitting the hillside
around him, that Omar realized the madness of war“, relates the magazine.
If one of his brothers Hamza Bin Laden,
favorite son of the now deceased former terrorist leader, had been
radicalized, this is not the case for Omar, who has repeatedly condemned
the attacks of 11 September 2001. It was also a few months before that
that Omar saw his father for the last time, in his complex in
Afghanistan.
