Al-Riyadh is an affluent district in southeastern Khartoum, a place of walled compounds and leafy streets, what Richard Miniter called the Sudanese version of Bel Air. The families who lived there were mostly Sudanese professionals: doctors, engineers, businessmen, government officials. The streets were well-maintained. The gardens were tended. Children rode bicycles in the afternoons. When bin Laden moved in with his four wives, four sons, one daughter, and a security detail, Al-Riyadh acquired a neighbor nobody had asked for and a problem nobody wanted to name out loud. The compound wall was pink, faded to a kind of institutional filth, with a walkway shaded by wooden slats running from the driveway to the front door. Air conditioners hummed. By most accounts the house was vaguely Art Deco, three stories with a ridge running up its face, more comfortable than the caves and concrete blocks he would later inhabit in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Hassan al-Turabi, the Sudanese Islamist who effectively ran Sudan's foreign policy in the 1990s under Omar al-Bashir, had agreed to let bin Laden settle in Sudan on condition that he invest in the country. Bin Laden complied. He put an estimated 50 million U.S. dollars into Sudanese businesses: a bank, a trading firm called Wadi al Aqiq, a construction company that built roads across northern Sudan, and the Al-Damazin Farms near the Ethiopian border, which employed 4,000 people. He ran these enterprises from a nine-room office manned by veteran Saudi and Egyptian businessmen, supported by 400 Sudanese employees on salaries of about 200 dollars a month. To many Sudanese who encountered him during these years, he was a philanthropist and a curiosity more than a terrorist.

The people most affected by bin Laden's Khartoum years were his immediate neighbors and his Sudanese employees. The neighbors complained, quietly, about the security posture. The Takfiri assassination attempt at the house in the mid-1990s left bullet holes in the compound wall for a while and convinced the rest of Al-Riyadh that they lived too close to someone who collected enemies. Bin Laden's employees, the 400 Sudanese workers who drove trucks on his road-construction projects, farmed at Al-Damazin, or answered phones in his nine-room office, were mostly ordinary Sudanese men looking for steady work in a country whose economy had been broken by the long civil war. None of them had anything to do with what their employer would eventually become famous for.

In May 1996, under heavy U.S. pressure and Saudi pressure after bin Laden was connected to anti-American militancy, Turabi and Bashir expelled him from Sudan. He flew to Jalalabad in Afghanistan and began building al-Qaeda into what it would be on September 11, 2001. He left behind the house, the Al-Damazin Farms, the road-construction company, and all the investments he had made. The Sudanese government claimed most of them. The house in Al-Riyadh was briefly, it was reported, used as a residence by the Chinese embassy. Then, as the al-Shifa cruise missile strike in August 1998 destroyed the Khartoum pharmaceutical factory, the house's value as rental property dropped to zero. Tenants feared the Americans might bomb it next. By 2011, when bin Laden himself was killed in Abbottabad, the house's gate was padlocked, the garden overgrown, wild tree branches growing over the compound wall, conspicuous in the otherwise well-maintained neighborhood.

The people of Al-Riyadh who lived through the bin Laden years are now, many of them, displaced or dead. The Sudanese civil war that began in 2023 tore through Khartoum including its affluent suburbs. Al-Mashtal Street was in the conflict zone. Some of the families who raised their children next to bin Laden's compound are now refugees in Egypt or Chad. The house itself, if it still stands, has been emptied and looted like so much of Khartoum. But the story of bin Laden's years in Sudan is a Sudanese story, and the people who lived around him, worked for him, wished he would leave, then watched him leave, and then watched their country pay for having hosted him, are still owed the dignity of being counted in that history. Bin Laden was a fanatic and a mass murderer. His Sudanese neighbors were his neighbors, not his followers, and they lived on Al-Mashtal Street because they were Sudanese, not because of him.