Qualla: Osama bin Laden's house in Khartoum

Osama bin Laden's house in Khartoum: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The neighbors on Al-Mashtal Street remember the trenches. When Osama bin Laden moved into the pink and beige three-story house in the Al-Riyadh quarter in 1991, he was a Saudi businessman who had fallen out with his royal patrons over their willingness to let American troops defend Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. He was not yet the architect of 9/11. He was, in the phrase a Sudanese acquaintance later used, a walking bank. After someone tried to assassinate him at the house, he dug trenches in front and back and posted more guards, and his neighbors started to wish, politely, that he would take his businesses elsewhere.

Osama bin Laden's house in Khartoum: The Neighborhood

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Al-Riyadh is an affluent district in southeastern Khartoum, a place of walled compounds and leafy streets, what Richard Miniter called the Sudanese version of Bel Air. The families who lived there were mostly Sudanese professionals: doctors, engineers, businessmen, government off...

Osama bin Laden's house in Khartoum: The Deal With Turabi

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hassan al-Turabi, the Sudanese Islamist who effectively ran Sudan's foreign policy in the 1990s under Omar al-Bashir, had agreed to let bin Laden settle in Sudan on condition that he invest in the country. Bin Laden complied. He put an estimated 50 million U.S. dollars into Sudan...

Osama bin Laden's house in Khartoum: The Sudanese Who Lived Around Him

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The people most affected by bin Laden's Khartoum years were his immediate neighbors and his Sudanese employees. The neighbors complained, quietly, about the security posture. The Takfiri assassination attempt at the house in the mid-1990s left bullet holes in the compound wall fo...

Osama bin Laden's house in Khartoum: Expulsion and Aftermath

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In May 1996, under heavy U.S. pressure and Saudi pressure after bin Laden was connected to anti-American militancy, Turabi and Bashir expelled him from Sudan. He flew to Jalalabad in Afghanistan and began building al-Qaeda into what it would be on September 11, 2001. He left behi...

Osama bin Laden's house in Khartoum: What the Street Remembers

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The people of Al-Riyadh who lived through the bin Laden years are now, many of them, displaced or dead. The Sudanese civil war that began in 2023 tore through Khartoum including its affluent suburbs. Al-Mashtal Street was in the conflict zone. Some of the families who raised thei...