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Saudi blasts: More than
meets the eye
By B Raman
Statements emanating from Saudi authorities
about their neutralizing an al-Qaeda cell, which was
allegedly planning to carry out a terrorist strike
against hajj pilgrims, and about the car bomb explosion
at a Riyadh housing complex on November 9, which killed
17 foreign workers, all Sunni Muslims, do not provide a
complete answer to understanding what has been happening
in Saudi Arabia.
The history of Pakistan is
replete with instances of Sunni terrorists killing
Shi'ites in their places of worship and during their
pilgrimage to their holy places and vice versa. Before
September 11, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistan's
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni extremist organization, had
massacred a large number of Shi'ites (Hazaras) in
Afghanistan.
The history of the jihadi terrorism
in India's Jammu and Kashmir has seen the deaths of
thousands of Sunnis at the hands of Wahhabi terrorists
from Pakistan. Some were deliberately targeted and
killed because they supported the government, and many
were the unintended victims of the indiscriminate use of
explosive devices, hand-grenades, mines etc by the
jihadi terrorists at public places.
Many Sunnis
were also the unintended victims of the Bali bombing in
Indonesia in October last year.
Before September
11, the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami,
both Sunni organizations, had killed hundreds of Sunnis
in each other's ranks during their struggle with each
other to capture power in Afghanistan.
However,
there have rarely been instances of al-Qaeda or any of
its associates in the International Islamic Front (IIF)
deliberately targeting innocent Sunni civilians, either
at their places of worship or while they were on
pilgrimage or at their places of residence or work. It
is, therefore, difficult to accept that al-Qaeda was
planning to kill any pilgrims during the hajj or that it
deliberately killed the foreign Sunni workers at the
Riyadh housing complex.
A more convincing
explanation for the presence of the neutralized cell in
the pilgrimage area is that it was there not to carry
out a terrorist strike against the pilgrims, but to
facilitate the transit of jihadi terrorists from and to
their places of training or their areas of operation.
Over the years, the movement of millions of
Muslims from all over the world to Saudi Arabia for hajj
has been exploited by al-Qaeda and other jihadi
terrorist organizations to make new recruitment from
among the pilgrims, take them clandestinely to training
camps in Pakistan and (before September 11) Afghanistan
with the help of plain paper visas issued by Pakistani
diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia, bring them back to
Saudi Arabia after the training and then send them back
to their areas of operation. In this way, there is no
entry in their passports about their visits to Pakistan
or Afghanistan.
Similarly, trained and
jihad-hardened terrorists are sent to Saudi Arabia
during the hajj under the garb of pilgrims and then
infiltrated into other countries. In February last,
dozens of terrorists belonging to the Pakistani
components of the IIF had thus gone to Saudi Arabia and
from there infiltrated into Iraq, even before the US-led
invasion of that country.
To facilitate such
transits, different organizations of the IIF set up
their presence in Saudi Arabia much before the hajj
starts. It is one such cell that seems to have been
detected and neutralized by the Saudi authorities. It is
unlikely that the objective of this cell was to target
the pilgrims, which would have alienated them from
al-Qaeda and the IIF.
It is similarly difficult
to accept at present that the car bomb which killed the
foreign Sunni workers at the Riyadh housing complex was
designed to deliberately kill them. A more convincing
explanation is that the real targets were - either the
members of the Saudi ruling families or foreign
diplomats and their families - elsewhere. There is
reason to believe that the car bomb fitted with the
explosives was being taken to the housing complex to be
kept there before being taken to the real target. The
explosion seems to have been caused by accident or by
the interception of the vehicle by the security guards
at the complex.
There is no doubt that since
February last, there has been an intensification in the
activities of jihadi terrorists in Saudi Arabia - partly
to destabilize the kingdom and partly to set up a rear
base there for organizing jihad against the US troops in
Iraq. Al-Qaeda and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) have been
in the forefront of these activities. There have been
unconfirmed reports that Osama bin Laden is no longer in
Pakistan or Afghanistan, and that he might have moved to
Yemen or Saudi Arabia to coordinate the jihad against
the US troops in Iraq.
For some years now, the
LET has had an active presence in Saudi Arabia, which
has not been neutralized by the Saudi authorities. There
is a growing threat to the stability of the kingdom. The
LET and al-Qaeda want to capture power in Saudi Arabia,
proclaim the establishment of a caliphate there with bin
Laden as the amir and use Saudi Arabia as the rear base
for the jihad against the crusaders and the Jewish
people.
If they succeed, it is likely to
aggravate the already existing threats to the peace and
security of the region from the jihadi terrorists and
affect energy security.
B Raman is
Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat,
Government of India, and presently director, Institute
For Topical Studies, Chennai; former member of the
National Security Advisory Board of the Government of
India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
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