Osama bin Laden’s Son Is a Painter


Over the past 12 months he has painted more than a dozen original works, all of them completed in the style of art naif, with vibrant colours and flat, expressionistic brushstrokes. In one painting, he recreates the spiny mountains of Tora Bora, where his father went to hide in the wake of September 11, 2001. The peaks are jagged, like the teeth of a saw, and rendered in shades of furious red. In another, Omar’s favourite painting, he depicts the Arizona desert—some seven and a half thousand miles from his father’s mountaintop hideout—where a rustic cottage and stands of pale green cactus gather under a star-pinned sky.