The U.S. has slapped a million-dollar bounty “for information leading to the identification or location in any country” of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza.
(State Department)
The State Department designated and sanctioned bin Laden’s 11th son as a global terrorist in the last days of the Obama administration. Al-Qaeda senior leader Ayman al-Zawahiri announced on Aug. 14, 2015, that Hamza was an official member of the terror group.
Hamza has been rallying millennials to jihad in audio messages over the past few years and becoming a greater PR voice for the terror group.
In an audio message released by al-Qaeda’s as-Sahab Media in September 2017, Hamza promoted and encouraged support for the work of jihadists in Syria, while emphasizing that “all Muslims” must step up to support jihad and “be proud of the West’s profiling of us as ‘terrorists.'”
In November 2017, he called for retaliation against the specific Navy SEALs who raided the Abbottabad compound and killed his father, and urged young Muslims to revolt with a new, Shariah-based Arab Spring.
Last April, Hamza said in a video that in the goal to “revive the jihad for the sake of Allah” al-Qaeda would “redistribute the riches of the country among the poor and the needy and the deserving, so that the sons of the country can live honorably and in strength in the shade of the shariah of the lords of the worlds.”
Hamza bin Laden is believed to have been born in 1989 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His mother is bin Laden’s third wife, Khayriya Saber, who raised the boy in Iran after the 9/11 attacks per agreement between al-Qaeda and the regime in Tehran. Hamza would later receive some of his training from the Taliban.
He married the daughter of lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta.
Since the inception of the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program in 1984, the program has paid more than $150 million to more than 100 individuals who provided actionable information that helped nab terrorists or prevent acts of terrorism.
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