A contest of power
A crackdown on Islamists in Saudi Arabia is being matched by a crackdown on their reform-minded critics, writes John R Bradley from Jeddah
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An e-mail purportedly from terror network Al-Qa'eda threatened the Saudi royal family with revenge attacks over reports that police killed two radical clerics during a round-up of militants connected with the 12 May suicide attacks on Western targets.
More than 21 Al-Qa'eda suspects have been rounded up in the last week alone, mostly in the holy city of Madina. They include the alleged mastermind of the Riyadh attacks, Ali Abdul-Rahman Al-Ghamdi.
Two Saudi security men and a suspected terrorist wanted by the authorities were also killed on Saturday night in a shoot-out in the northern region of Hail. Another gunman was arrested and two more security men were injured in the clash, the Interior Ministry said. The two suspects had sped away in their car to escape an identity check by the security forces. They hurled a grenade at security men chasing them, killing two and wounding two others. The security men caught up with the suspects, killing one and arresting the other.
The dead man was identified as Youssef Saleh Fahd Al-Ayeeri, one of 19 men Saudi authorities have been hunting since 6 May, when they uncovered a cell belonging to the Al-Qa'eda terror network. At least 11 of those arrested in the past week are said by the authorities to have been part of this cell.
Less than a week after evading the initial attempt to arrest them, several of the gang blew up three Western apartment blocks in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, killing 25 persons.
"Sheikh Osama [Bin Laden] and the leaders of Al- Qa'eda in Afghanistan are closely following reports of the deaths of sheikhs Ali Al-Khodeir and Ahmed Al- Khaledi," said the e-mail message, reported by the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. "If it was especially confirmed that Sheikh Ali Al-Khodeir was martyred, then our response against the Al-Saud family ... will be as great as the sheikh is to us."
The Saudis say sheikhs Al-Khodeir and Al-Khaledi and another cleric, Nasser Al-Fahd, were arrested during the round-up of militants in the holy city of Medina. The three had urged Saudis to help foil the manhunt for the 19 militants on the run since the 6 May shoot-out with police.
A London-based Saudi opposition group, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, said Al-Khodeir and Al-Khaledi were killed in a shoot-out with police. However, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdul-Aziz denied the report, saying that all three were in custody.
"I want to clarify; none of them have been killed. They are all alive," Prince Nayef told the Arab News daily.
Young Saudis generally distrust official statements from government-controlled newspapers, preferring to get their information from Islamist Web sites. If reports that the two clerics died continue to surface and the Saudi government provides no evidence to the contrary, analysts here worry that the clerics' diehard supporters will begin attacking Saudi princes and princesses.
Until recently, Al-Qa'eda terrorists inside Saudi Arabia had heeded a decree issued by Bin Laden in the mid-1990s stating that attacks on Saudi soil should be avoided for fear of undermining an oil industry needed to sustain an Islamic state after a revolution.
However, the bombings earlier this month increasingly appear to have marked round one in a looming confrontation between Al-Qa'eda and the House of Saud. The Saudi government has denied for years that extremists, let alone Al-Qa'eda cells, existed in Saudi Arabia, even as radical Muslim clerics preached war against the West in mosques throughout the kingdom.
And in a sign of a growing power struggle between reformists and Islamists in the wake of the 12 May attacks, the Interior Ministry last week fired the editor- in-chief of a leading reformist newspaper after an influential cleric issued a religious edict calling for a mass boycott of the daily.
This followed a campaign launched by the Arabic- language Al-Watan daily against the powerful religious leaders, and was seen by many journalists as an indication of a power struggle between the strict Muslim establishment and reform-minded officials.
Editor-in-chief Jamal Khashoggi was sacked on Monday evening, hours after Sheikh Abdullah Bin Abdul-Rahman Al-Jibrin, a member of Saudi Arabia's religious edicts body, issued his edict saying the paper had ridiculed "virtuous" people. Al-Watan has recently published a series of damning articles against the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the so-called religious police in Saudi Arabia, which enforces the kingdom's austere brand of Islam.
Khashoggi, who was appointed to Al-Watan two months before being fired, is seen as a leading reformist voice in Saudi Arabia. He wrote several editorials condemning religious extremism after the Riyadh suicide bombings.
Last year, Saudi authorities fired three editors of local newspapers, including one from Al-Watan, for allegedly printing articles deemed as harmful to the kingdom.
