<i>Bin Laden's young Yemeni bride </i>

Amal al-Sadah

When 18-year-old Amal al-Sadah became the fifth wife of 43-year-old Osama bin Laden in 2000, she was "a quiet, polite, easygoing and confident teenager" who came from a big, conservative family in Yemen, a relative told CNN in an exclusive interview.
The relative, Ahmed, who knew al-Sadah growing up, said she came from a traditional family in Ibb, Yemen -- established and respectable but certainly with no militant views prior to the arranged marriage paralleling the al-Qaeda leader's terrorism.
The Yemeni government is apparently pressuring the family not to speak publicly about their notorious in-law, bin Laden, Ahmed said.
An al-Qaeda figure in Yemen named Sheikh Rashed Mohammed Saeed Ismail told the Yemen Post in 2008 that he was "the matchmaker" and that al-Sadah was one of his students, describing her as "religious and pious enough."
Ismail accompanied the young bride-to-be to Afghanistan in July 2000, where she and bin Laden were married after he gave her family a $5,000 dowry.
The marriage was apparently a political alliance to shore up bin Laden's support in the land of his ancestors.
Back in Yemen, al-Sadah was barely spoken of again, Ahmed told CNN.
The marriage was immediately fruitful, and al-Sadah and bin Laden gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Safiyah, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the weeks after 9/11.
After 9/11, bin Laden told Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir that he had plans for his youngest daughter, Safiyah who probably saw her father shot dead.
"I became a father of a girl after September 11," he said. "I named her after Safiyah who killed a Jewish spy at the time of the Prophet. (My daughter) will kill enemies of Islam like Safiyah."
Al-Sadah, now 29 and the youngest of the five wives, has told interrogators that for five years she didn't venture outside the walled compound, according to a Pakistani military spokesman.