Inside the Kingdom (47 page)

Mansour Al-Nogaidan never received his seventy-five lashes. After a succession of inconclusive meetings—in which one official angrily accused him of writing for “the newspaper of the enemy”—he was finally brought face-to-face with his accuser in the presence of witnesses.

“Do you accept the truth of religion?” he was asked.

“Yes,” Mansour replied—and before the combative ex-jihadi could say another word that might complicate his statement, his case was declared closed. “Those who govern” were desperate that he should not be lashed. By the end of 2003 the main thrust of Mansour’s argument, that “deep-rooted Islamic extremism” had made Saudi Arabia “a nation that spawns terrorists” had come tragically true. The proof was out there to be seen in the streets.

CHAPTER 26

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

M
ay 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.”