While I was visiting Saudi Arabian contacts in 1990 and 1995, the American
and European expatriates (or expats) I met in their offices and gated
compounds seemed to feel safe and pleased with their living conditions.
In Jeddah, Riyadh, and Khobar, one could walk without fear through crowded
souks and dark streets late into the night. In Jeddah, I joined a group
of adventurous expatriates for jogging and picnicking--they call it
hashing--deep in the desert. It was tempting to envy the expats for
the material and intangible rewards of their work, even though they
were surrounded by one of the most restrictive of Muslim cultures.
All of us knew that in 1979 the Grand Mosque at Mecca had been seized
by 200 armed dissidents who accused the Saudi rulers of corruption and
of allying themselves with Western interests. We also knew of assassinations
of Saudi diplomats abroad and a Shi'ite bombing of the Grand Mosque
in 1989.
Yet, like the expats and Saudis I met, I was not concerned for my safety
because I saw the terrorists essentially attacking what they considered
oppressive and unprincipled government violating the moral standards
of Islam.
One of the most outspoken dissidents agitating from abroad was a millionaire
member of a prominent family, Osama bin Laden. Knowing that he was plotting
terrorist schemes, the government stripped him of his Saudi citizenship
already in 1994.
After the "U.S. Armed Forces Central Command--Saudi Arabia"
had been established in July 1992, minor incidents indicated that Islamist
dissidents began opposing the presence of "infidel" soldiers
on Islamic soil.
The first major attack on a U.S. military post came in November 1995
when terrorists, calling themselves "Islamist Movement for Change,"
exploded a car bomb in the parking lot of the Riyadh office of an American
mission training the Saudi National Guard. Five U.S. citizens were killed.
Saudi authorities arrested the perpetrators and executed them.
In June 1996, an estimated 5,000 pounds of explosives on a truck killed
19 and wounded 500 in the U.S. military complex at Khobar Towers in
the Eastern Province. The terrorists escaped.
At that point, it became obvious that both the Saudi government and
the U.S. Central Command had greatly underestimated the extent and determination
of the insurgent underground. In the vast desert terrain of the kingdom,
one fifth the size of the U.S., with thousands of miles of largely unprotected
sea and land borders, terrorists can operate virtually at will in an
infinite variety of unforeseeable strikes. The attack on the Khobar
Towers woke both Americans and Saudis up to the urgent need to tighten
the security measures for Western personnel and installations.
From June 1996 until May 2000, no major terrorist attacks occurred,
probably because many insurgents had left the kingdom for al Qaida's
training camps in Afghanistan to prepare for major strikes elsewhere,
such as the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar
es Salaam, Tanzania, in August 1998, and the attack on New York's World
Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
By 2003, however, terrorists struck again inside the kingdom, but at
a new target: Westerners and Saudis employed in the oil industry and
residing in walled and guarded quarters. In Riyadh, 35 residents of
a plush compound, including 10 Americans and 7 Saudis, were killed in
May, and 11 in November.
With a suicide car bombing of a government building in Riyadh on April
21, 2004, Al Qaida terrorists made it clear that they were back to fight
Saudis cooperating with infidels. Ten days later they attacked, for
the first time, a Western oil company office in Yanbu on the Red Sea,
gunning down six employees. On Saturday, May 22, they shot their way
into the luxurious Oasis Residential Resort at Khobar on the Persian
Gulf and killed 22, specifically sparing Muslims.
If large numbers of Western specialists in the oil fields get scared
enough to forego their lucrative jobs for the safety of their home countries,
oil production could be seriously hampered, at least until the Saudi
authorities can end the terrorist uprising.
Presently, some 5,000 guards are protecting the oil facilities. Making
the compounds, the streets, and the markets safe, however, will be much
more difficult. Calling upon non-Muslims to provide security in the
kingdom would be counterproductive because it is the presence of the
"infidels in the homeland of Islam" that has caused the insurgents'
fury in the first place.
While terrorist strikes have decreased worldwide, they have substantially
increased in the kingdom. Bin Laden's guerillas have returned to their
home base with a vengeance.