TERRORIST mastermind Osama bin Laden decided to attack America in revenge for the US breaking up his family, a new documentary has claimed.

The former head of al-Qaeda was angry with the US for forcing him out of Sudan and in to Afghanistan where — living in poverty — he was deserted by his second wife, Khadijah Sharif and his eldest son, who returned to their native Saudi Arabia.

Ms Sharif, a university lecturer, left because she did not want to live in hardship, according to the History Channel documentary, Road to 9/11 .

Another wife also left him. The 9/11 mastermind felt that by pushing him out of Sudan the US had “turned upside down” his life and made the pursuit of him “personal”.

The three-part documentary reveals how the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks began at least a decade earlier.

In the mid-90s Bin Laden was living a comfortable life in Sudan when the US government put pressure on the Sudanese to kick him out.

With few options about where else to move Bin Laden took his family to Afghanistan, a country that barely had electricity at the time and was still reeling from a decade-long war with the then-Soviet Union.

Consumed with rage Bin Laden wrote a 12-page declaration of war against America.

“He blamed the US not only for all these sins of history and these manipulations of the Islamic world, but now it was personal,” author Steve Coll told the documentary makers.

“His own life had been turned upside down by American pursuit of him, American pressure that had forced him out of Sudan and to this broken country again.

‘They sent him to Afghanistan thinking surely he will fade from the world scene but the first thing he did after he arrived was to climb up on a mountaintop and write a declaration of war on the United States.”