Changing winds
Saudi Arabia's hardline approach to terrorism is raising new concerns for the House of Al-Saud, John R Bradley reports
A radical Saudi Islamist group affiliated with, or at least heavily inspired by, Al-Qa'eda claimed responsibility for blowing up a car last month in Riyadh belonging to Lieutenant Colonel Ibrahim Al-Dhaleh, a senior Saudi security officer. He escaped by the skin of his teeth. The group, the Brigade of the Two Holy Mosques, also said it was behind an attempt to kill Major General Abdel-Aziz Al-Huweirini, the number-three official in the Saudi Interior Ministry, who was shot in the capital at the beginning of December.
The latest statement from the Brigade of the Two Holy Mosques warned Dhaleh "and those like him" against pursuing their war against Islamists in Saudi Arabia. "In the framework of our plan to assassinate the infidel imams and the soldiers of tyranny, we announce that we are responsible for the explosion, after we verified the crimes committed by this apostate against the mujahideen," it added.
It should not come as a surprise that members of the state security apparatus, whose job now ostensibly amounts to keeping the Al-Sauds in power in the face of growing domestic opposition, find themselves directly in the radicals' firing line. They have been at the forefront of the recent crackdown on Islamists in Saudi Arabia, earning the wrath of both Al-Qa'eda sympathisers within their ranks -- possibly implicated in the Riyadh terror attacks of 12 May and 8 November, 2003 -- and those who have independently taken up arms.
The royals they guard are also now squarely in the Islamists' sights. Gone are the days when the Al-Sauds looked the other way when faced with homegrown international terrorism, on the condition it was not re-imported into the kingdom.
The Riyadh bombings changed all that. Since then, even senior princes who were once close to the Islamists -- Defense Minister Prince Sultan and Interior Minister Prince Nayef, for instance, both full brothers of ailing King Fahd -- have found themselves at the top of the list of those the radicals have selected for assassination.
Both princes have held their government posts for decades, are reviled by reformers as arch-conservatives and are proudly aligned with the powerful mainstream Wahhabi religious establishment. But Islamist revolutionaries, according to popular radical Web sites and Saudi security sources, now hold them in contempt, although for quite different reasons.
Prince Sultan is viewed as a traitor for having allowed the US-led war on Iraq to be coordinated from the air base near Riyadh named after him, and a hypocrite for having publicly denied that fact in the name of Islam.
Prince Nayef, who notoriously refused to admit for six months after the 11 September attacks that any Saudis were involved, has, remarkably, been relentless in ordering his security forces to crack down on the radicals since the 12 May bombings in Riyadh, albeit in a manner defined by lack of accountability.
Shortly before the 12 May bombings, when 19 suspects escaped a raid on their hideout, Saudi security sources confirmed that Osama Bin Laden had named the two princes as the cell's targets. And, according to senior Saudi security sources, both were again the main targets of an Islamist cell subsequently broken up in Al-Qasim, a region to the north of Riyadh known as the heartland of Wahhabism. Some 20 tonnes of explosives stockpiled underground were discovered at the time.
An e-mail, purportedly from Al-Qa'eda, also threatened revenge against the Saudi royal family over reports that police killed two clerics during a roundup of militants in May connected with the earlier 12 May attacks.
"Sheikh Osama [Bin Laden] and the leaders of Al-Qa'eda in Afghanistan are closely following reports of the deaths of Sheikh Ali Al-Khodeir and Sheikh Ahmed Al-Khalidi," said the message, reported by the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. "If it was especially confirmed that Sheikh Ali Al-Khodeir was martyred, then our response against the Al-Saud family would be as great as the sheikh is to us," the e-mail added.
A clearly shaken Prince Nayef gave a public assurance the same day that the three had been captured, but not killed, adding they were being held unharmed and had even been visited by their relatives. There were other indications that the prince was taking the threats to his life personally.
Dozens of Asian immigrants erected a four-metre-high reinforced concrete wall the following week around his already heavily fortified Interior Ministry building in Jeddah, much to the amusement of local residents.
Sheikhs Khodeir and Khalidi and another cleric, Nasser Al-Fahd, were arrested during a roundup of militants in the holy city of Medina. They enjoy a massive following among Saudi Arabia's radicalised youth, and had urged Saudis to help foil a manhunt for the 19 militants who had escaped the May shoot-out with police. However, during Saudi prime-time television interviews they subsequently rescinded the contents of fatwas posted on Web sites while they were on the run, and which called for attacks against security personnel in a language closely echoing the latest statements from the Brigade of the Two Holy Mosques.
The government-controlled Saudi media made much of their repentance, and the Western media talked of a defining moment in the Saudi "war on terror".
However, the two subsequent assassination attempts on security officials were proof that, for the radicals, a retraction made from the suspect environment of a Saudi prison cell was not worth the television set it was broadcast on.
News that the security forces on Sunday defused a bomb placed in a telephone booth in Riyadh, and another at a power distribution station in a city suburb, if confirmed, again underlined that the militants' zeal has been little dented.
According to self-appointed Al-Qa'eda spokesmen regularly interviewed on radical Web sites, the organisation is holding off a full-scale assault against the Al-Sauds because their "separate fingers will become an iron fist" if their rule is directly threatened. Better, they say, to let the members of the royal family squabble among themselves over reforms, as popular resentment grows over increasingly difficult economic circumstances.
Thus, an increasingly unstable Saudi Arabia would remain fertile recruiting ground for arms, money and, most importantly, volunteers.
However, those killing members of the security forces evidently do not buy into that logic, seeing instead a need to move away from targeting civilians to killing security officers and members of the royal family. This appears to be mainly due to the revulsion the 8 November Riyadh attack provoked among ordinary Saudis.
