CHAPTER 26
May 12, 2003, was a hot night in Riyadh, and the capital’s smokers were out puffing on their hubbly-bubbly pipes, lounging on the raised sofas of the open-air cafés near the camel markets. There seemed nothing unusual about the four vehicles—two cars, a pickup truck, and an SUV—that drove out of town through the warm darkness toward the residential area of Al-Hamra: their drivers were ordinary-looking, bearded young Saudis. But the young men were armed, and their vehicles were packed with weapons and explosives. Their targets were three of the many compounds in the city that housed Westerners—and Americans in particular.
Sometime before midnight one of the cars attempted to gain entry to the back gate area of the Jadawel compound. As the compound’s security guards approached to inspect the vehicle, the terrorists suddenly opened fire, killing one policeman and an unarmed Saudi civilian. The attackers sprayed gunfire wildly as they assaulted the inner gate.
“You infidels!” they screamed. “We’ve come to kill you!”
As they were attempting to fight their way inside the compound, the attackers’ massive explosive charge detonated, killing all of them.
A few miles away at the Oasis Village and the Vinnell Corporation compounds, the terrorist assault teams similarly shot down the security guards from outside the barriers, then opened the gates to admit a second group. As they fired wildly, the gunmen called out to God, then detonated both their bombs, bringing the death toll that night to twelve terrorists and twenty-seven foreigners—nine of them Americans. Later that year eighteen more would be killed when the bombers targeted a compound for expatriates who were largely from Arab countries. The following May terrorists in Yanbu murdered five petrochemical workers, tying their victims’ bodies to the backs of their pickup trucks and dragging them triumphantly through the streets. Foreigners got in the habit of looking under their cars every morning for bombs and checking their license plates for chalk markings—signs that they had been identified and targeted.
The attacks were the work of Saudi jihadis who had been driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S.-UK invasion in the months following 9 /11. The demolition of their Afghan training camps forced several hundred extremists back to the Kingdom, where they regrouped in safe houses as “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” taking orders via coded phone messages from their leaders, who had gone into hiding in the tribal territories along the Afghani border. Osama Bin Laden may have retreated, but he saw the enforced return home of his Saudi followers as a blessed opportunity. He ordered them to take the battle to the Al-Saud on their home territory, and the young zealots went out in the desert to continue their target practice. It was easy for them to find local weaponry, much of it from Yemen and some of it left over from the 1991 Gulf War. After Saddam’s retreat from Kuwait, the local bedouin had wasted no time looting the Kalashnikovs from the corpses of the Iraqi dead and bumping them in for sale on the Riyadh black market. Thus equipped, a mini-army of young extremists had stormed the Oasis Compound in the Eastern Province, killing no less than twenty-two, mainly expatriate, workers.
In June 2004 the BBC’s Arabic-speaking terrorism specialist, Frank Gardner, flew in to cover this dramatic escalation. Sitting on the plane beside his Irish cameraman, Simon Cumbers, Gardner leafed through his research notes on Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin, the thirty-two-year-old leader of the Al-Qaeda campaign on the ground, who had left school at seventeen to fight in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, and Somalia. Captured and extradited to Riyadh, this hardened jihadi had been jailed for four years, but had taken advantage of the Saudi prison regulation that enables prisoners to halve their sentence by memorizing the Koran.
“Crikey,” thought Gardner, reading of Al-Muqrin’s bloodthirsty exploits as his plane came in to land, “I hope I don’t come across him! ”
A few days later Gardner was finishing a piece-to-camera at the edge of Al-Suwaydi, the fundamentalist Riyadh neighborhood where Mansour Al-Nogaidan had plotted firebomb attacks in his Salafi days. The journalist knew he was close to dangerous territory. As he strolled across a dusty piece of waste ground, he was pointing out the spot where police and militants had traded fire a few months earlier. His Saudi minders from the ministry had authorized the location and were supposed to be protecting him, but they vanished within seconds of what happened next. A car pulled up and a young Saudi got out.
“Assalaamu alaykum [Peace be upon you],” said the young man with a smile, then without warning and with no haste, he reached into the pocket of his white thobe and drew out a gun.
“No! Don’t do this!” shouted Gardner in Arabic, as he turned and sprinted away down the street. He felt a shot sting his shoulder, but he kept on running, and was just thinking that he had outpaced his attacker when he heard a loud bang and fell down on the tarmac, felled by a bullet in his leg. His escape route had been blocked by a minivan whose side door slid open to reveal a group of mean-eyed, wispy-bearded gunmen, each with a pistol in his hand. The BBC’s terrorism correspondent had come face-to-face with his subject—their thin, pale features consumed, he would never forget, “by pure hatred and fanaticism.”
Frank Gardner and Simon Cumbers had had the misfortune to be spotted by Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin himself as he was driving past in a convoy with half a dozen followers. Seeing the camera on its tripod, the Al-Qaeda leader had halted immediately and given orders for a two-winged attack. By the time Gardner was cornered, Cumbers, the cameraman, had already been shot dead.
Gardner pleaded for his life as his assailants in the van chattered briefly about what to do with him. Then they cut short his pleas with a fusillade of shots into his body.
“Bloody hell,” thought Gardner as he lay on the ground, feeling the bullets thump into his abdomen, “I’m really being shot. I’m taking a lot of rounds here.”
In fact, the Saudi shooting was so erratic that only six bullets actually lodged in him. But they smashed bones and cut nerves so severely that the BBC man was left with eleven major wounds that would paralyze his lower body for the rest of his life. It was a miracle—and something of a mystery—why Al-Muqrin’s team did not kill Gardner outright. One more bullet to the head would have finished him. But as the journalist lay on the ground, he heard the firing stop and footsteps approaching. One of the terrorists had stepped down from the van to rummage in the back pockets of his trousers, discovering a radio microphone in one, and a miniature Koran in the other. Gardner had a stock of these small Korans, inscribed with intricate calligraphy, that he gave away as presents.
Did that little Koran save his life? In their last attack Al-Qaeda had hitched their victim’s body to the back of their vehicle. A week later Al-Muqrin would personally behead Paul Johnson, an American helicopter technician, filming his execution and placing his head in the family freezer as a trophy. As it was, the helpless Gardner heard the attackers revving their engine and driving away.
Just over a year later, after months of agonizing and highly skilled surgical repair and reconstruction in Britain, Gardner was invited to New Scotland Yard to meet a group of senior Saudi Mabahith officers who had flown to London to present him with their evidence. They had one of the attackers in custody, they reported; he had been wounded in a recent gun battle, and they believed he was Simon Cumbers’s assassin. As for the other five, they handed Gardner a set of gruesome, almost life-size prints of bloodstained faces, bruised and puffed-up, their eyes closed in death. DNA tests, said the detectives, had confirmed the identity of all the corpses, including that of Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin, killed in a shootout just a week or so after he drove through Al-Suwaydi and happened on his two infidel victims in the street.
It was small consolation to Frank Gardner—and still less to Louise Cumbers, the widow of Simon—but the Saudis were very proud of their roundup rate. Early in the troubles, in December 2003, they had published the names of the twenty-six most-wanted terrorists, and within a year they had killed or captured twenty-three of them.
Intelligence later revealed that Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin and the other leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had not wanted to attack Riyadh in May 2003. Their local cells were not ready, they had argued in their intercepted phone calls back to headquarters: their men were not sufficiently trained, nor were they sufficiently numerous. But from his refuge in Waziristan, Osama had insisted.
It was a grievous mistake, for the attacks of May 2003 turned a complacent giant into an implacable enemy. Girding his loins for a modern Sibillah, Crown Prince Abdullah angrily swore that every single “monster” would be brought to justice. Any that resisted would be killed out of hand. Prince Nayef may have blamed 9 /11 on the Zionists, but now his Ministry of the Interior went for the terrorists with ruthless efficiency. Following the inroads they had made in their most-wanted list, they rounded up another six hundred or so terrorist suspects, along with their bomb-making equipment, bomb belts, and thousands of weapons that had been stockpiled for a major campaign around the Kingdom.
The same went for the general population. Until May 2003, the bearded, short-thobed young men who turned up and prayed so zealously in the local mosque had been viewed with benevolence and even approval by their neighbors. Their jihad in Afghanistan was generally supported. But their bombings on home territory changed all that. May 2003 was the Kingdom’s 9 /11. Ordinary Saudis looked at their salaries, their housing, and their children at school, and had no difficulty deciding on which side their interests lay. Feelings intensified after the attacks of November 2003, in which many of the victims were Arabs. Images of Muslim blood soaking black abayas were the final nails in the coffin of Al-Qaeda’s Arabian campaign.
“That was when the Saudis really ‘got religion,’ ” says the U.S. diplomat David Rundell.
Until the attacks inside the Kingdom, the attitude of the general population toward Al-Qaeda had been that of the Americans who let the IRA raise funds in Boston—“It’s not really our problem.”
“They were not strongly in favor of what Al-Qaeda was doing in the wider world,” says Rundell, “but if three young guys with long beards moved in down the street, coming and going at odd times, no one thought to tell the police. That changed overnight. You had fathers taking their sons in to see trusted princes if they thought that the boy was going off the rails. This was partly to help the boy and partly to protect the family’s reputation. Family reputation counts for a lot here. Launching attacks inside the Kingdom—that was Bin Laden’s ‘own goal.’ ”
The attacks also emboldened the government’s attitude toward the fundamentalists. So this was the worst they could do? There was a new toughness in official pronouncements. Appeasement was over—and that gave strength to those who would modernize. People were no longer so scared to be secular and started to hit back at those who had sought to bully them.
“Get lost, you terrorists!” indignant women were heard to shout at religious policemen who ventured to correct their style of dress.
Up in Buraydah, Mohammed Al-Harbi, the short-bearded chemistry teacher, felt encouraged to speak out again. When school convened on the Saturday following the first Al-Hamra bombing in Riyadh, he took the microphone at morning assembly to read out a government statement. Three of the bombers had already been identified, according to the Ministry of the Interior: they were connected to Osama Bin Laden, a force for evil whose followers were cancer cells in the body politic.
The next day another teacher, long-bearded and short-thobed, took the microphone to address the assembled students. They should not waste their time listening to the news these days, was his message—nor should they listen to those who might offer their opinions on the news. People who presumed to judge and brand others as “evil” should be considered evil themselves. There was a certain hypocrisy in this, coming from an adherent of the fierce takfeer (excommunication) school, but the other long-bearded teachers all nodded in sage approval.
In the days that followed, the Ministry of Education sent a circular to all schools. It was important to teach pupils about the dangers of extremism, it stated: pupils must understand the need for tolerance and the acceptance of others. So in the spirit of the circular, Mohammed posted an article on the school notice board—“The People of the Caves Are Going to Hell” by the liberal columnist Hamad Al-Salmi. By “People of the Caves” Al-Salmi meant the members of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan who were now sending gullible young followers to their deaths inside the Kingdom.
But next day Mohammed found the article torn into pieces on the floor, and he was confronted aggressively by the teacher who had done it. The writer of the article, Al-Salmi, was a “secular,” said the teacher—no one but God was entitled to sentence anyone to hell. When Mohammed’s mobile started ringing day and night with threatening messages, he thought it was so much bluster—until he came into school one morning and found a neat bullet hole drilled through the window of his office.
This was the point at which the young teacher decided to go to his headmaster and ask permission to bring in the police. But he discovered that his conservative opponents had already acted: they had framed charges that accused him of “mocking religion,” the first step toward an indictment for apostasy—for which the sentence was death.
There were more than a dozen accusations that had clearly been gathered by his enemies on the teaching staff. He was accused of consuming alcohol in his chemistry laboratory and also of taking drugs. He was said to have talked positively about infidels and disrespectfully about religion. He had closed the classroom windows during a prayer call; he had refused to allow his pupils to leave the class to perform their preprayer ablutions; he had told them to shave their beards.
“How could I do that?” Mohammed protested at his trial in the local shariah court. “I’ve got a beard myself.”
“You call that a beard?” scoffed the hairy qadi, looking at the teacher’s neatly clipped goatee with scorn.
Mohammed had not helped his cause by ridiculing the revered Abdul Aziz Bin Baz. “How does he know the earth’s flat if he’s blind and can’t see anything?” he was accused of saying, and he did not deny that he had said it. Nor did he deny having praised the kindness of Shia folk after a Shia had stopped to help him fix a flat tire on his way to school. He managed to fight off the accusation that he had learned to be a magician—certainly a death sentence, since practicing magic is held to be incompatible with Islam. But in the end his sentence was severe enough for the crime of “mocking religion”: forty months in prison and 750 public lashes in downtown Buraydah.
The liberal media came to the rescue. Riyadh newspapers ran mocking coverage of the prosecution and ridiculed the verdict. Within days Prince Nayef had instructed the local governor to shut the case down—to the fury of the judge.
“You were supposed to be killed,” he protested as he reluctantly let Mohammed go.
As the bombs were going off in the Saudi capital, the columnist Hussein Al-Shobokshi wrote of his dream of a better place—of how, twenty years or so in the future, these dreadful shootings would be a distant memory. He imagined himself flying into Jeddah from Riyadh on Saudia Airlines (since this was a dream, the airline was privatized and the plane landed on time) to be met by his daughter, who would then be twenty-seven, qualified and working as a high-powered trial lawyer (female lawyers cannot at present appear, let alone speak, in the courts of Saudi Arabia).
“How was the trip, Daddy?” his daughter asked, as she drove her car smoothly through the Jeddah traffic.
“Great,” replied Hussein. “I attended the World Conference of Human Rights in Riyadh, where the Kingdom received a special award for the fairness and efficiency of its judicial system.”
It was at this point that Shobokshi’s readers realized, if they had not before, that the dreamer had to be joking. Hussein Shobokshi is a larger-than-life character in his midforties, almost as broad as he is tall, his features adorned with black designer stubble. His father, Ali, was the enterprising journalist who rented his floodlights to assist the recapture of the Grand Mosque in 1979. In July 2003 Hussein was the host of his own popular cable TV show, with an equally popular newspaper column to match.
“I went to congratulate our neighbor Fouad Tarshlo on his marriage to the daughter of Sheikh Golehan Al-Otaybi,” Hussein imagined himself saying from the passenger seat. “Then I flew up to Buraydah to meet the mayor, Reza Baqir.”
The satire lay in the surnames. It was quite impossible to imagine a Hijazi (Tarshlo) being accepted into the family of a Nejdi Sheikh (Al-Otaybi); while a Shia (Reza Baqir) could not hope to get work in a Wahhabi stronghold like Buraydah as a street cleaner, let alone become mayor.
“I had dinner,” wrote Shobokshi, “in a smart new restaurant in Al-Shumaysi.” This was the puritannical Riyadh neighborhood next door to Mansour Al-Nogaidan’s Al-Suwaydi, now notorious as the site of Frank Gardner’s shooting.
“Hurry up,” Hussein told his daughter. “I want to get home to watch the television. The minister of finance is on tonight, getting grilled by the Shura members on all the details of the budget.”
Perhaps it was this final fantasy that went a step too far. When the Saudi budget is published every year, no less than 40 percent (166.9 billion riyals in the budget for 2008) is labeled “Other Sectors,” which includes defense, national security, intelligence, direct investment outside the country, and, most interesting of all, how much of the national pie is paid into the coffers of the royal family.
Hussein Shobokshi himself reckons it was his religious imaginings that got him into real trouble. Toward the end of his “dream” he expressed his intention of going to the Grand Mosque in Mecca to listen to the teachings of a learned member of the supreme ulema, Sheikh Taha Al-Maliki. With a name like that, the sheikh could only be a Sufi.
The call came within hours—from Hussein’s editor in chief.
“I’ve had ten calls already,” he said, “from the Ministry of Information.” Shobokshi was banned from being published, with immediate effect, and when he got to the TV studio, he discovered a message canceling his talk show—plus an in-box jammed with angry e-mails.
“Know your limits or you will be punished by God and by his followers on earth,” threatened one. Others called him a goat and a cow—and one wished him cancer. This was clearly not the moment to be jumping too heavily on the toes of the Kingdom’s religious and social prejudices. Bombs were still going off in Saudi streets, and there was also a practical legacy of the many young terrorists who had been captured—a lost generation with which both America and the Kingdom had to deal.