Osama bin Laden's son paints Americana, loves Westerns, listens to country and condemns 9/11

The fourth-eldest son of al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden has father’s powerful nose and fierce eyes. But he says he gets his artistic side from his mother, who he fled with to Syria at the age of 18.

39-year-old Omar bin Laden said in an interview with Vice News that painting, which he rediscovered during pandemic lockdowns, is helping him come to terms with his father’s violent legacy by transporting him to the innocence of his childhood and the wide American plains he has long dreamed of.

“I like old Western films,” he told Vice. Although he has never been to the U.S., he discovered country and western music playing on the radio as a teenager in Afghanistan.

“I respect cowboys. I love cowboy dignity,” he explained.

Omar currently lives in Normandy, France, with his wife and a small team of horses. He draws inspiration from his surroundings and his idyllic, creative childhood – before his father founded Al-Qaeda.

“I am sad at the way the world has changed since I was a child; I see the sadness in the eyes of others; I feel the pain that they feel… I see the loneliness and distress caused by famine and war; I see and feel the hurt caused by violence,” he said.

Osama was a strict, traditional father who beat his sons – just as he had been by his own father – and once attempted to recruit them as suicide bombers. Omar abandoned al-Qaeda’s mission and fled to Syria after spending his teenage years fighting in the Afghan civil war. A couple years later, two Boeing airliners hit the World Trade Center.

He has repeatedly condemned the September 11 attacks and publicly rejected al-Qaeda’s violent ideology and his father’s “big mistake.”

“A lot of people think Arabs—especially the bin Ladens, especially the sons of Osama—are all terrorists,” Omar told the Associated Press in 2008.

“This is not the truth.”

Despite the weight of his father’s bloody legacy, Omar believes he has finally achieved some semblance of peace with himself.

“I want the world to learn that I have grown; that I am comfortable within myself for the first time in my life; that the past is the past and one must learn to live with what has gone by,” he says of his new creative pursuit.

“One must forgive if not forget, so that one may be at peace with one’s emotions.”

Omar has painted over a dozen original works over the past year, using the informal art naif style to render landscapes with a childlike simplicity. His favorite depicts the Arizona desert at night, with a cabin and a field of cacti gathered peacefully under a full moon.