Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  Back inside Abdullah’s house we logged on to the internet, where he was an avid contributor to a chatroom run by Palnet. The internet was, and still is, an ideal mechanism for information-hungry Saudis to discuss events and express views anonymously or under pseudonyms, in case the Mabahith are monitoring the website. Ordinary people tend to use playful names like ‘khalilhero2’. Those who are closer to Al-Qaeda adopt nicknames taken from historic Muslim victories and campaigns, or names that refer to their geographic origins, such as Al-Zarqawi (‘the one from Zarqa in Jordan’) or Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri (‘father of Mus’ab, the Syrian’).

  Abdullah and his internet chat mates were not close to Al-Qaeda. But when he switched on the computer’s speakers it was fascinating to hear some of the pro-Al-Qaeda opinions bouncing around in cyberspace.

  ‘Here,’ said Abdullah, ‘why don’t you join in?’ He introduced me to the online forum and two of the contributors abruptly logged off. But from those who stayed I learned more about why Osama Bin Laden’s enmity for America and the West was finding a ready audience amongst certain Arabs and Muslims. They may not have agreed with his methods, but they admired anyone who could stand up to the most powerful country in the world and still remain at large. (Bin Laden has enjoyed a fugitive ‘survivor’ status ever since President Clinton ordered a cruise-missile strike on his camp in 1998 and failed to get him.)

  ‘We admire Osama Bin Laden because he’s our hero,’ said one contributor. ‘He tells the truth about what’s happening in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir and all the places where Muslims are being persecuted. He stands up for us.’

  ‘So do you think he was behind the attacks of 9/11?’ I asked.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Maybe, but I don’t think so. Arabs don’t have the technology to do something like this. It was most likely the Israelis.’

  By then it was two in the morning and even the tireless Abdullah was yawning. The next day he drove me to a taxi company he knew and haggled the fare back to Riyadh for me. We said goodbye and I never saw him again. A few weeks later I learned through a mutual acquaintance that he had been picked up and questioned, although not about my visit. He vanished from the internet chatrooms for some time before making a cautious return. He is one of thousands of young men to be picked up and interrogated in the wake of September 11th. The authorities were belatedly waking up to the problem of the ‘Afghan Arabs’ – all those volunteer fighters, including Saudis, who took off for training camps in Afghanistan, where they learned to combine their contempt for the West and their own government with the sort of crude military skills perfectly suited to an armed insurrection.

  I know that there are some in the Saudi establishment, including in the Mabahith, who think I had the Riyadh attack coming to me because, in trying to get a true picture of what was going on in their country, I had ventured up to conservative strongholds like Buraida and Sakaka without a government escort. But the irony is that I was never in danger on these solo trips; it was only when Simon Cumbers and I put our safety in the hands of Saudi Information Ministry minders that we came horribly unstuck.

  In 2003 the Saudi security situation changed dramatically. Intercepted phone calls in January between Al-Qaeda’s fugitive leadership hiding out in Waziristan and their followers in Saudi had revealed an order for the Saudi-based militants to begin their insurgency against the government and Westerners in the kingdom. The militants were reluctant, protesting that they were not yet sufficiently organized and saying they feared they would take huge losses if they began the insurgency too early. But Bin Laden and his deputy, Al-Zawahiri, were adamant; they needed to show that they were still a force to be reckoned with after being driven out from their Afghan bases. So in May 2003, their Saudi adherents launched a devastating triple-suicide-bomb attack on housing compounds in Riyadh where Western expatriates were known to be living.

  One of those expats, David Budge from Wiltshire, survived the attack on Al-Hamra compound where his family were living and he later told me how it was carried out. ‘There were seven jihadi militants and they drove straight through the main gate into the walled compound with no difficulty. Dressed in black, they just tailgated behind a Briton in his car. They shot up the gatehouse, wounding the unarmed security people who all then fled. The militants then split up and fanned out along the streets between the villas, firing their guns into the air. That brought a lot of people to the windows and one Jordanian girl mistook them for policemen so she called out for help. They shot her.’ When Al-Qaeda exploded their truck bomb, David recalled: ‘The blast came down the compound and hit like an express train. I was blown out of bed but saved by the curtains, which stopped the flying glass and metal window-frame from tearing through the room.’ He was quite certain that Al-Qaeda had done a thorough reconnaissance: at least one jihadi had been seen on the compound and a safehouse was subsequently discovered near by. One of the most chilling things he remembers about the attack was the jihadi militants calling out as they dismounted their vehicles. ‘You infidels! We’ve come here to kill you.’

  Over thirty people died in the Riyadh attacks of May 2003 in the space of a few hours. It was a tremendous shock for most Saudis, who had never imagined that Al-Qaeda would wage war on holy Arabian soil. Only a few weeks earlier the Saudi Interior Minister had boasted, ‘We have no Al-Qaeda sleeper cells here. If we did we would have woken them up long ago.’ Saudis now called the bombings of May 2003 ‘Saudi Arabia’s 9/11’. The attacks shook the ruling Al-Saud family to the core, but also allowed them to say to their detractors in the West, ‘Look, you see? Terrorism is our common enemy, we are fighting it just as much as you are.’

  Soon after the Riyadh attacks I secured a Saudi visa to go and report on how the government was conducting its counter-terrorism campaign there, but at first things did not go according to plan. Arriving at Jeddah airport I could see no sign of the Ministry of Information officials who were supposed to be meeting me. When I phoned them the next day they said rather crossly they knew nothing about my visit and that I should call them back next week. Fortunately, I managed to obtain the number of the private office of the prince in charge of Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism efforts, and a midnight meeting was arranged. As one of the militants’ most prized targets, the prince was well protected: there were armed guards everywhere and his office in Jeddah was half palace, half fortress.

  ‘I don’t normally meet journalists,’ he said with a smile. ‘I do not believe that intelligence and the media go very well together.’ He was referring, I could tell, to the whole Iraq WMD/MI6/David Kelly/Andrew Gilligan saga which had been brewing in Britain that summer. ‘However,’ he continued, ‘I have been told you are a sincere journalist, so how can I help?’

  I explained that most of the world had no idea how Saudi Arabia was going about fighting terrorism, or whether it even had a counter-terrorism effort at all, so here was an opportunity to show what it was doing. It was as if a curtain had been lifted: I was to be given an unprecedented insight into how this secretive Arab country was battling its Al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency.

  The sun was barely up the next morning before I was boarding the early flight to Riyadh and the headquarters of the Interior Ministry’s Special Security Force, the unit tasked with confronting the country’s Al-Qaeda terror cells. The investigators showed me evidence gathered from the scene of the Riyadh suicide bombings two months earlier, spread out on a long low table. There were fire-blackened Kalashnikovs, twisted and buckled magazine clips and other objects blasted and burned almost beyond recognition. Shortly before the bombings the Saudi authorities had issued the names and photographs of two dozen most-wanted militants, a controversial move at the time since it was highly embarrassing for the militants’ families. The police discovered a massive cache of arms and explosives in a Riyadh safehouse and they began to close in on the wanted men. Then suddenly, mysteriously, they escaped, and days later they drove their deadly cargo into those housing compounds.


  Over at a row of desks a team of technicians was studying a set of monochrome images on computer screens; these were the marks made by the ‘lands’, the rifling grooves inside the barrel of a firearm. Every weapon leaves a microscopically different pattern and from this it is possible to identify which gun has been used; another method is to study the marks on the ejected cartridge case. I had no idea, as I crouched there with my camera looking for the best filming angles, that one year later this would be exactly how the Saudi forensic people would identify my own armed attackers. Now I was being shown the DNA labs, where senior police officers explained how they would take samples recovered from Al-Qaeda safehouses, such as a toothbrush or strand of human hair, then build up what they called a ‘DNA map’ of where a suspect had been staying around the country and whom he had met. The technology, I was told, was quite new and they were receiving a lot of technical help from the Americans and to a lesser extent the British.

  By now the sun was high in the white sky, blazing down from a point almost directly overhead, but it was time to film a black-clad Saudi SWAT team as they blasted their way with blanks through a hollow house, abseiled down vertical walls and lobbed stun grenades into imaginary terrorist lairs. A series of demonstrations was set up, firstly of a rescue operation to intercept a hijacked school bus, then of EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal. The Saudis showed me a robotic device that could open car doors, set off booby traps and blow up briefcases. It all looked very impressive but I was dripping with sweat, dashing around trying to film all this entirely on my own, in a shade temperature of around 45 degrees. And then, as if this was not enough, my mobile rang and someone on the BBC news desk in London announced that there had been a raid just north of Riyadh on a suspected Al-Qaeda hideout, resulting in several casualties. I had to break off filming to gather the details of this operation as best I could, with my mobile buzzing constantly with requests from programmes in London for live interviews. The net result, though, was a highly productive visit, with the films running as exclusive reports on Newsnight and the ten o’clock news. It was exactly this sort of access that Simon and I were hoping to get when we came to Riyadh a year later on our fateful visit in June 2004.

  By then, Al-Qaeda’s militants in Saudi Arabia had struck again and again, scoring an own goal in November 2003 when they blew up the Muhaya housing compound in Riyadh – most of the victims were expatriate Arabs and Muslims from countries like Lebanon. In April 2004 they set off a bomb at a police headquarters, where I had once been allowed to film the surveillance cameras that monitored every passenger movement in and out of Riyadh airport; that explosion killed five, all Saudis, a fact which lost the jihadis further public support. On 1 May 2004 Al-Qaeda targeted Western expatriates working at a petrochemical facility in Yanbu on the Red Sea coast, killing five of them, including two Britons, and reportedly dragging their victims’ bodies around town from the bumpers of their pickup trucks, seemingly impervious to the risk of arrest or execution. And in the same month they executed the murderous raid in Al-Khobar that left twenty-two people dead. The Al-Qaeda franchise in Saudi Arabia now had a self-appointed title, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, and they had an online magazine, Al-Batar, which included biographies of men they called heroes and holy warriors, men whom the Saudi authorities referred to as deviants and terrorists.

  On 1 June 2004, immediately after the Al-Khobar raid, a credible Islamist website posted the biography of AQAP’s leader, a thirty-two-year-old fanatic named Abdulaziz Al-Muqrin. Since March, when his Yemeni predecessor Khalid Bin Al-Hajj had been killed in a shoot-out with police in Riyadh, Al-Muqrin had been heading Al-Qaeda’s operations in Saudi Arabia. Al-Muqrin used the nom de guerre Abu Hajar and his CV gives an intriguing insight into the short, violent lives of international jihadis.

  Al-Muqrin reportedly left school at seventeen to wage jihad in Afghanistan. This would have been the same year that the Soviet Army withdrew, a retreat hailed across the Muslim world as a massive victory for Islam. According to his internet biography, he spent much of the next four years at training camps in Afghanistan, where he was ‘promoted from trainee to instructor’ and took part in a ‘battle’ near the town of Khost in the early 1990s, presumably fighting the remnants of the communist government in Kabul.

  Still only in his early twenties, Al-Muqrin was then said to have moved to Algeria, a country in the grip of a brutal civil war that eventually claimed well over 100,000 lives. His biography records him as training Islamist rebels who were fighting the secular government, instructing them on ‘weapons and equipment bought in Spain and smuggled through Morocco to Algeria’. Al-Muqrin appears to have had a narrow escape from the Algerian security forces, getting out of the country with the help of his fellow jihadis. After a brief spell training militants and fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Al-Muqrin reportedly moved to Somalia, another lawless failed state like Afghanistan. There, it is claimed that ‘He fought against Ethiopia in the Ogaden battles’. (By that time Somalia had been abandoned by the US and the international community, which had tried in vain to restore order from anarchy there in 1993. Somalia’s Islamists were riding high after the humiliating loss of nineteen US servicemen in Mogadishu, a day immortalized by the Hollywood blockbuster Blackhawk Down.)

  In Somalia Al-Muqrin’s luck appears to have run out. The biography reports him as getting arrested and spending over two years in jail before being extradited home to Saudi Arabia. There he faced trial by shari’ah court on a number of charges and was sentenced to another four years in jail. ‘However,’ says his biography, ‘his good manners and his ability to memorize the entire Holy Koran made the competent authorities at the Interior Ministry reduce his sentence by half.’ You might think that after two and a half years in a Somali jail, followed by a further two years in a Saudi one, he would have been tempted to throw in the towel and opt for an easy life, becoming an accountant, perhaps, or a curator in some quiet library. But it seems Al-Muqrin was not to be deterred. After a further stint in Afghanistan in 2001 he made his way back to his native Saudi Arabia, where he went into hiding and took up the jihadi cause once more. At secret desert camps in the west and centre of the country he reportedly trained fresh recruits to Al-Qaeda in preparation for its armed insurgency.

  Reading all this on the plane as I headed for Saudi in June 2004, I remember thinking, ‘Crikey, I hope I don’t run into this guy.’ And yet our paths were destined to cross within a week: Al-Muqrin was to direct the murderous attack on us in Riyadh.

  But Saudi Arabia has been by no means the only country on the Arabian Peninsula fighting a campaign against Al-Qaeda militants. When the Pentagon and World Trade Center were attacked on 11 September 2001, America, not surprisingly, went looking for revenge. With Al-Qaeda’s leaders being the prime suspects, it was always inevitable that their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan would top the target list. But where else would be in the Pentagon’s sights? Iraq was one candidate, but in the Yemeni presidential palace there was deep concern. Would the Pentagon launch some sort of pre-emptive strike on suspected terrorist training camps in the interior, or, worse still, invade this ancestral homeland of the Bin Laden family? President Saleh had no wish to wait and find out. He wasted no time in flying to Washington, where he offered President Bush his country’s full cooperation in the newly minted ‘War on Terror’. ‘Great,’ said the Americans, ‘we’d like to see real cooperation between your people and our FBI and CIA, we want proper maritime patrols of your coastline, which we’ll help you with, and we want real-time intelligence on the movements of Al-Qaeda suspects. Oh, and we want them caught or killed. Please do whatever it takes.’

  The Pentagon sent an extremely low-profile team of Special Forces trainers to help the Yemenis form their own counter-terrorist capability. The State Department sent Ed Hull as ambassador to Yemen, a tough, hands-on Arabic speaker with a counter-terrorist background. He was cautious in his assessment of Yemen’s efforts to combat terrorism. The will was there,
he told me, but too often the security forces failed to act quickly enough on intelligence they were given. I wondered whether the unspoken implication was that somebody on the inside was tipping off the terrorists when an operation was about to be mounted in their area.

  There were three people who particularly concerned the CIA and Britain’s MI6, where Yemen was concerned. A key member of the Hamburg cell that prepared for the 9/11 hijackings was a Yemeni national, Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh. He had hoped to become one of the suicide pilots by training with the others at a US flying school, but his visa application was turned down no less than four times. After attending Al-Qaeda’s final pre-9/11 summit in Spain in July 2001, Al-Shibh disappeared before being finally captured in Karachi in September 2002 after a fierce gun battle.

  The other two were Muhammed Al-Ahdal and Qa’id Sunyan Ali Al-Harithi, thought to be Al-Qaeda’s most dangerous operatives in the Arabian Peninsula. In December 2001 the Yemeni security forces thought they had Al-Harithi pinned down in the village of Al-Husun in Marib province, but their operation was a disaster. The villagers turned out to be heavily armed, and assuming they were under attack they let rip with everything they had, killing at least twenty government troops. The security forces retreated and Al-Harithi remained at large. ‘We think they’re both still hiding out somewhere in Yemen’s Empty Quarter,’ said a Western counter-terrorist official in the summer of 2002, ‘and we think they’re planning something big.’