Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror
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Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror
The desert kingdom supplies the cash and the killersNick Fielding and
Sarah Baxter, Washington
It was an occasion for tears and celebration as the Knights of
Martyrdom proclaimed on video: “Our brother Turki fell during the rays
of dawn, covered in blood after he was hit by the bullets of the
infidels, following in the path of his brother.” The flowery language
could not disguise the brutal truth that a Saudi family had lost two
sons fighting for Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The elder brother, Khaled, had been a deputy commander of a crack
jihadist “special forces” unit. After his “glorious” death, Turki took
his place.
“He was deeply affected by the martyrdom of his brother,” the Knights
said. “He became more ambitious and more passionate about defending
the land of Islam and dying as a martyr, like his brother.”
Turki’s fervent wish was granted earlier this year, but another Saudi
national who travelled to Iraq had second thoughts. He was a graduate
from a respectable family of teachers and professors who was recruited
in a Saudi Arabian mosque and sent to Iraq with $1,000 in travel
expenses and the telephone number of a smuggler who could get him
across the Syrian border.
Courting compromise for the sake of stability
Britain has the unenviable role, at the US’s urging, of trying to
sound out a compromise with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
Courting compromise for the sake of stability
This tactic won't work for every despot, Miliband
In Iraq he was ordered to blow himself up in a tanker on a bridge in
Ramadi, but he panicked before he could press the detonator. He was
arrested by Iraqi police. In a second lorry, another foreign fighter
followed orders and died.
King Abdullah was surprised during his two-day state visit to Britain
last week by the barrage of criticism directed at the Saudi kingdom.
Officials were in “considerable shock”, one former British diplomat
said.
Back home the king is regarded as a modest reformer who has cracked
down on home-grown terrorism and loosened a few relatively minor
restrictions on his subjects’ personal freedom.
With oil prices surging, Saudi Arabia is growing in prosperity and
embracing some modern trappings. Bibles and crucifixes are still
banned, but internet access is spreading and there are plans for “Mile
High Tower”, the world’s tallest skyscraper, in Jeddah. As a key ally
of the West, the king had every reason to expect a warm welcome.
Yet wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror
networks. “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding
from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,” said Stuart Levey, the US
Treasury official in charge of tracking terror financing.
Extremist clerics provide a stream of recruits to some of the world’s
nastiest trouble spots.
An analysis by NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 55% of
foreign fighters in Iraq. They are also among the most uncompromising
and militant.
Half the foreign fighters held by the US at Camp Cropper near Baghdad
are Saudis. They are kept in yellow jumpsuits in a separate,
windowless compound after they attempted to impose sharia on the other
detainees and preached an extreme form of Wahhabist Islam.
In recent months, Saudi religious scholars have caused consternation
in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for the destruction of the
great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, some of which have
already been bombed. And while prominent members of the ruling al-Saud
dynasty regularly express their abhorrence of terrorism, leading
figures within the kingdom who advocate extremism are tolerated.
Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, the chief justice, who oversees terrorist
trials, was recorded on tape in a mosque in 2004, encouraging young
men to fight in Iraq. “Entering Iraq has become risky now,” he
cautioned. “It requires avoiding those evil satellites and those drone
aircraft, which own every corner of the skies over Iraq. If someone
knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight,
and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free
to do so.”
The Bush administration is split over how to deal with the Saudi
threat, with the State Department warning against pressure that might
lead the royal family to fall and be replaced by more dangerous
extremists.
“The urban legend is that George Bush and Dick Cheney are close to the
Saudis because of oil and their past ties with them, but they’re
pretty disillusioned with them,” said Stephen Schwartz, of the Centre
for Islamic Pluralism in Washington. “The problem is that the Saudis
have been part of American policy for so long that it’s not easy to
work out a solution.”
According to Levey, not one person identified by America or the United
Nations as a terrorist financier has been prosecuted by Saudi
authorities. A fortnight ago exasperated US Treasury officials named
three Saudi citizens as terrorist financiers. “In order to deter other
would-be donors, it is important to hold these terrorists publicly
accountable,” Levey said.
All three had worked in the Philippines, where they are alleged to
have helped to finance the Abu Sayyaf group, an Al-Qaeda affiliate.
One, Muham-mad Sughayr, was said to be the main link between Abu
Sayyaf and wealthy Gulf donors.
Sughayr was arrested in the Philippines in 2005 and swiftly deported
to Saudi Arabia after pressure from the Saudi embassy in Manila. There
is no evidence that he was prosecuted on his return home.
This year the Saudis arrested 10 people thought to be terrorist
financiers, but the excitement faded when their defence lawyers
claimed that they were political dissidents and human rights groups
took up their cause.
Matthew Levitt, a former intelligence analyst at the US Treasury and
counter-terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, believes the Saudis could do more. He said: “It is important
for the Saudis to hold people publicly accountable. Key financiers
have built up considerable personal wealth and are loath to put that
at risk. There is some evidence that individuals who have been outed
have curtailed their financial activities.”
In the past the Saudis openly supported Islamic militants. Osama Bin
Laden was originally treated as a favourite son of the regime and
feted as a hero for fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Huge
charitable organisations such as the International Islamic Relief
Organisation and the al-Haramain Foundation – accused in American
court documents of having links to extremist groups – flourished,
sometimes with patronage from senior Saudi royals.
The 1991 Gulf war was a wake-up call for the Saudis. Bin Laden began
making vitriolic attacks on the Saudi royal family for cooperating
with the US and demanded the expulsion of foreign troops from Arabia.
His citizenship was revoked in 1994. The 1996 attack on the Khobar
Towers in Dhahran, which killed 19 US servicemen and one Saudi, was a
warning that he could strike within the kingdom.
As long as foreigners were the principal targets, the Saudis turned a
blind eye to terror. Even the September 11 attacks of 2001, in which
15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, could not shake their complacency.
Despite promises to crack down on radical imams, Saudi mosques
continued to preach hatred of America.
The mood began to change in 2003 and 2004, when Al-Qaeda mounted a
series of terrorist attacks within the kingdom that threatened to
become an insurgency. “They finally acknowledged at the highest levels
that they had a problem and it was coming for them,” said Rachel
Bronson, the author of Thicker than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership
with Saudi Arabia.
Assassination attempts against security officials caused some of the
royals to fear for their own safety. In May 2004 Islamic terrorists
struck two oil industry installations and a foreigners’ housing
compound in Khobar, taking 50 hostages and killing 22 of them.
The Saudi authorities began to cooperate more with the FBI, clamp down
on extremist charities, monitor mosques and keep a watchful eye on
fighters returning from Iraq.
Only last month Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh, the kingdom’s
leading cleric, criticised gullible Saudis for becoming “convenient
knights for whoever wants to exploit their zeal, even to the point of
turning them into walking bombs”.
And last week in London, King Abdullah warned young British Muslims
not to become involved with extremists.
Yet the Saudis’ ambivalence towards terrorism has not gone away. Money
for foreign fighters and terror groups still pours out of the kingdom,
but it now tends to be carried in cash by couriers rather than sent
through the wires, where it can be stopped and identified more
easily.
A National Commission for Relief and Charity Work Abroad, a
nongovernmental organisation that was intended to regulate private aid
abroad to guard against terrorist financing, has still not been
created three years after it was trumpeted by the Saudi embassy in
Washington.
Hundreds of Islamic militants have been arrested but many have been
released after undergoing reeducation programmes led by Muslim
clerics.
According to the daily Alwa-tan, the interior ministry has given 115m
riyals (£14.7m) to detainees and their families to help them to repay
debts, to assist families with health care and housing, to pay for
weddings and to buy a car on their release. The most needy prisoners’
families receive 2,000-3,000 riyals (£286 to £384) a month.
Ali Sa’d Al-Mussa, a lecturer at King Khaled University in Abha,
protested: “I’m afraid that holding [extremist] views leads to earning
a prize or, worse, a steady income.”
Former detainees from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba
are also benefiting. To celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid, 55
prisoners were temporarily released last month and given the
equivalent of £1,300 each to spend with their families.
School textbooks still teach the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a
notorious antiSemitic forgery, and preach hatred towards Christians,
Jews and other religions, including Shi’ite Muslims, who are
considered heretics.
Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf
Affairs, said: “The Saudi education system has over 5m children using
these books. If only one in 1,000 take these teachings to heart and
seek to act on them violently, there will be 5,000 terrorists.”
In frustration, Arlen Specter, the Republican senator for
Pennsylvania, introduced the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act 10 days
ago, calling for strong encouragement of the Saudi government to “end
its support for institutions that fund, train, incite, encourage or in
any other way aid and abet terrorism”.
The act, however, is expected to die when it reaches the Senate
foreign relations committee: the Bush administration is counting on
Saudi Arabia to help stabilise Iraq, curtail Iran’s nuclear and
regional ambitions and give a push to the Israeli and Palestinian
peace process at a conference due to be held this month in Annapolis,
Maryland.
“Do we really want to take on the Saudis at the moment?” asks Bronson.
“We’ve got enough problems as it is
Mitchell Holman
5bed6a...@w7g2000hsa.googlegroups.com:
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2801017.ec
e
>
> Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror
> The desert kingdom supplies the cash and the killersNick Fielding and
> Sarah Baxter, Washington
> It was an occasion for tears and celebration as the Knights of
> Martyrdom proclaimed on video: “Our brother Turki fell during the rays
> of dawn, covered in blood after he was hit by the bullets of the
> infidels, following in the path of his brother.” The flowery language
> could not disguise the brutal truth that a Saudi family had lost two
> sons fighting for Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
>
> The elder brother, Khaled, had been a deputy commander of a crack
> jihadist “special forces” unit. After his “glorious” death, Turki took
> his place.
>
> “He was deeply affected by the martyrdom of his brother,” the Knights
> said. “He became more ambitious and more passionate about defending
> the land of Islam and dying as a martyr, like his brother.”
>
> Turki’s fervent wish was granted earlier this year, but another Saudi
> national who travelled to Iraq had second thoughts. He was a graduate
> from a respectable family of teachers and professors who was recruited
> in a Saudi Arabian mosque and sent to Iraq with $1,000 in travel
> expenses and the telephone number of a smuggler who could get him
> across the Syrian border.
>
>
Bush Won't Reveal Saudi 9/11 Info
WASHINGTON, July 29, 2003
(CBS/AP) President Bush refused on Tuesday to
release a congressional report alleging possible
links between Saudi Arabian officials and the
Sept. 11 hijackers.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/30/world/
main565782.shtml
*us*
*us*
>Bush Won't Reveal Saudi 9/11 Info
>
>WASHINGTON, July 29, 2003
>
>(CBS/AP) President Bush refused on Tuesday to
>release a congressional report alleging possible
>links between Saudi Arabian officials and the
>Sept. 11 hijackers.
>http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/30/world/
>main565782.shtml
9/11 was an inside job.