Inside the Kingdom (28 page)

While Prince Salman was wrestling with the problems caused by one demonstration in Riyadh, his nephew Bandar in Washington was trying to encourage another. To help sway U.S. public opinion behind the war, the ambassador called a meeting of Saudi students in Washington. The embassy sent airline tickets to fly in the leaders of the Saudi student clubs from universities all over the country.

“This is a grave moment in your country’s history,” he told them as they gathered in the Radisson Renaissance hotel on Seminary Road in Alexandria, Virginia. “Now is the time for you to go out and demonstrate. Show the Americans how you feel. Be vocal! Make banners! Think up slogans! Go out into your campuses and in the streets and make your feelings felt!”

There was an awkward silence.

“Thank you, Your Royal Highness,” said one of the students. “But how shall we do this? We have never been educated to do such things—we’ve always been told that it’s un-Saudi to demonstrate. How do you expect us to do this now?”

Back in Riyadh, the demonstrators who
had
made their feelings plain were suffering the consequences. All the women lecturers at King Saud University were suspended and banned from the campus. Religious conservatives denounced them fiercely in the newspapers, and their criticisms seemed to meet with popular support. The loudspeakers of the Friday sermons positively quivered with fury. Abdul Aziz Bin Baz issued a fatwa against women driving.

“The situation of women,” declared one of the milder cassettes that circulated, “is the reason for all these woes that are falling on the nation.”

It was a reprise of the arguments that had followed the uprising of Juhayman ten years earlier—with a sinister edge. Leaflets were distributed that publicized the names of the women and their husbands. Good Saudis and Muslims were urged to take action against these “Communist whores.” The cruelest cuts came from young traditionalists among the lecturers’ own female students—they spat on their teachers.

“The king was truly shocked,” remembers one of the royal family. “After the war he invited the women to his majlis to let them know that he felt for their suffering. ‘You are our daughters,’ he told them.”

Dr. Aisha Al-Mana did not attend the meeting.

“So far as I know,” she says, “that meeting was
not
the king’s idea. It was requested by some of the women who wanted to say they were sorry—they were worried about their jobs. They felt they needed to apologize, and that is their right. But I am not sorry. In my opinion we did nothing for which we should apologize. To drive as Saudi women—
that
is our right.”

CHAPTER 15

Battle for Al-Khafji

B
y the middle of January 1991 the little settlement of Al-Khafji on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border was a ghost town. Life in the northeastern corner of Saudi Arabia had grown ever more hectic as preparations accelerated for the U.S.-Saudi military campaign to recapture Kuwait. But Al-Khafji stood deserted—a peppering of empty, angular buildings and forlornly looping power lines on the salt flats of the Gulf coast. Saudi guards had abandoned the northern frontier post to which the emir of Kuwait had driven in such distress on the morning of August 2, 1990. The town was undefendable, decided the commander of the Arab armed forces of the U.S.-Saudi coalition, Khaled bin Sultan, who dug in his first line of fortifications some twenty-five miles to the south.

The serious business of the war was being conducted overhead. Taking off from an arc of bases and hastily constructed desert landing strips in the early hours of January 17, 1991, aircraft of the U.S.-Arab coalition roared into action with a blitzkrieg of precision-guided bombs and missiles that would rain down on Iraq for thirty-eight days and nights, their mission to demoralize and, where possible, destroy, the Iraqi armed forces.

As it turned out, the weeks of remorseless aerial bombardment, followed by the classic outflanking maneuver that Norman Schwarzkopf executed to recapture Kuwait, produced a remarkable victory for the U.S.-Saudi coalition and their allies. Saddam’s army would surrender after less than one hundred hours of ground combat.

But such success seemed anything but guaranteed as January 1991 drew to a close. The Iraqi Army was huge and menacing, with a proven inventory of intimidating chemical weapons. On January 18, 1991, Saddam launched seven of his Scud missiles against Tel Aviv and Haifa, then directed twenty of the missiles at Riyadh and Dhahran in a succession of alarming nighttime attacks. There were disputes within the coalition—Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled clashed regularly, a pair of oddly similar man-mountains with egos to match. How much firepower should be directed against Baghdad? Should not more be done to degrade Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard? The fear of everything that might go wrong was reflected by the coalition’s provision of chemical suits and by some eighteen thousand hospital beds in the theater of operations. It was at this moment, on the night of January 29-30, 1991, that Iraqi tanks of the 5th Mechanized Division, one of Saddam’s crack units, rumbled over the undefended Saudi border with troop carriers and occupied the town of Al-Khafji.

For the second time in less than six months, Saddam Hussein had successfully invaded another Arab country, and he lost no time in trumpeting his triumph. In Riyadh King Fahd was furious.

“I am lucky,” Khaled bin Sultan later admitted, “he did not strip me of my command that night!”

The king called his nephew incessantly, insisting that he take instant action to oust the Iraqis and demanding to know what had gone wrong. The prince’s strategy in abandoning Al-Khafji, which was at the mercy of artillery fire from Iraqi guns on the Kuwaiti border, had been based on the assumption that coalition airpower could deal with any Iraqi land incursions. But air cover of this no-man’s-land was the responsibility of the U.S. Marines based around the “elbow” of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, thirty miles to the west, and they had been busy throughout the night fending off an Iraqi attack on their own positions.

The Saudi commander felt let down by his allies, and he got on the phone to Ahmad Al-Sudayri, the Saudi director of air operations.

“Forget about the Joint Forces!” he recalls himself shouting. “If the U.S. Air Force or the Marines don’t come at once, I want you to take our air assets out of the coalition and send them all to me! I need the Tornados, the F-5s, everything you’ve got!”

His ultimatum produced results. U.S. air command switched B-52s and AC-130 Spectre gunships to the coastal road, where they went into action on the afternoon of January 30, blocking Iraqi attempts to send down reinforcements. The thousand or so Iraqi troops who had occupied Al-Khafji were cut off.

But even as the prince was drafting his plans to recapture the town, he had an additional item of intelligence to digest. Two ANGLICO (Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company) teams—one of five, the other of six U.S. Marines—had been operating secretly among Al-Khafji’s deserted houses, using their advanced undercover position to guide and call down artillery and air attacks on the border. They had not had time to escape, and they now found themselves surrounded by Iraqi troops—though the Iraqis did not yet know that the Americans were there. Khaled realized immediately that this changed everything.

“Our first priority,” he told Sultan Adi Al-Mutayri, his major general in charge of the assault, “is not to free Al-Khafji. It is to get the Marines out.”

Four years later the prince was honest enough to admit his motives.

“I was extremely worried,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that Schwarzkopf might use American troops, either U.S. Marines in an amphibious attack or a heli-borne U.S. Army unit, to free
my
town in
my
sector. The shame would have been difficult to bear.”

Major General Al-Mutayri did not let him down. As dusk fell, a detachment of Saudi National Guard armored cars drove up the coast road, heading for the spot where the ANGLICOs were hiding. Iraqi snipers shot out the tires of the vehicles, immobilizing ten of them, but the fully armored tanks of the Saudi Land Forces were following up. By midnight the eleven Americans were liberated unharmed—if the Iraqis had known they were there, they might have fought harder. Now the Saudis faced the more formidable task, the full liberation of Al-Khafji.

“We were scared,” admits Suleiman Al-Khalifa, then a young captain under the command of Sultan Al-Mutayri. “We had never fought in a real war before.”

Al-Mutayri was an inspiring leader.

“He had been up twice to reconnoiter Al-Khafji itself,” remembers Al-Khalifa, “driving round the outskirts and getting shot at by the Iraqis. Our generals don’t usually do that.”

Al-Mutayri knew he must keep his forces away from the salt flats of the coast, where several Iraqi and Saudi tanks had got stuck in the swampy terrain. Tanks would be the basis of his assault—his U.S.-made M60A3s had double the range of the Iraqis’ Soviet weaponry. But the job would ultimately have to be done by his foot soldiers, advancing under cover of the tanks’ gun barrels and fighting from house to house.

“It was a two-pronged attack,” recalls Al-Khalifa, one of the foot soldiers who fought his way up Mecca Street between the salt marshes on one side and the greasy oil-change garages on the other. “Some of the Iraqis defended really fiercely. They kept on shooting to the end. There was one officer, I remember, in the beach hotel, who absolutely refused to surrender. He was a fanatic for Saddam. Then there were others who were loaded down with video recorders and women’s clothing—they seemed more keen on looting than on fighting.”

The attack started at 8 A.M. on the morning of Thursday, January 31, a combined maneuver by Saudi National Guardsmen, Royal Saudi Land Forces, and two mechanized Qatari companies that were part of the coalition. Eighteen Saudis were killed in the assault and thirty-two wounded, but by midday, Al-Mutayri’s troops were in the middle of Al-Khafji, having killed some thirty-two Iraqis and taken more than four hundred prisoners. The major general radioed the happy news to his commanding officer, who relayed it immediately to the king. Fahd was ecstatic, ordering his nephew to get up to the town itself as soon as possible with a contingent of press to show the world that Saddam’s men had been kicked out of Saudi Arabia.

It was sunset as Khaled bin Sultan reached Al-Khafji, where he was stopped at a Saudi Marine checkpoint. The officer in charge, Colonel Ammar Al-Qahtani, who had known the prince since childhood, pleaded with him not to go farther. There were snipers in the town, he explained, and the mopping-up operations were not complete. At that moment an incoming Iraqi shell exploded nearby.

“Court-martial me if you like,” cried Al-Qahtani, suddenly getting hysterical, “but I will not let you through!”

He thrust himself in front of the prince’s jeep, raising his arms in the air—then relented just as suddenly, reaching inside the jeep emotionally to kiss his commanding officer on the top of his head.