Patience was the number one quality bin Laden wanted in his fifth wife

Among the stranger postscripts to Osama bin Laden's death has been the gradual emergence of details about his personal life in the Abbottabad compound — details that paint a picture simultaneously mundane and bizarre.

According to the Yemeni matchmaker who arranged the marriage — as he told The Guardian days after the raid — bin Laden had clear preferences when it came to choosing his fifth wife, the young Yemeni woman Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, whom he married in 2000 when she was approximately 17 years old. She was to be pious, dutiful, and young, the matchmaker said — but above all patient, a virtue essential for any woman sharing his life as a fugitive.

The account was offered almost admiringly, as if the capacity to endure hardship made a woman more suitable for the exceptional circumstances bin Laden inhabited. What it illuminates is the degree to which his personal world, however extreme the ideology surrounding it, operated according to thoroughly conventional patriarchal logic. Wives were to be patient. Wives were to be young. Wives were to adapt to circumstances they had no role in creating.

Amal al-Sadah was wounded in the raid that killed bin Laden and was later taken into Pakistani custody along with several other surviving family members. She is believed to be the wife who attempted to rush the SEAL team during the operation, sustaining a gunshot wound to the leg.

Her story, and those of bin Laden's other wives and children who survived, remains largely untold — a reminder that the story of a man who shaped a decade of world history also includes the lives of people who had little say in how that story was written.