Riyadh: Nearly three years ago, a Saudi university student applied for a passport to travel to Syria or Iraq, where he hoped to join two cousins fighting for Daesh.
The soft-spoken 29 year old in a crisp white tunic said he had been incensed by the violence he saw directed at his fellow Muslims by those governments and US forces. “I wanted to go fight for justice,” he said.
Young Saudis like Badr, who asked that his last name not be used because of safety concerns, are part of a new extremist threat in the Saudi kingdom, whose leaders have sought to insulate the country from the wars raging around them.
Although Badr didn’t get far — he was arrested when he went to collect the passport — nearly 2,300 Saudis are believed to have joined the ranks of Daesh and other groups fighting in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds have now returned home, bringing with them fighting skills honed on foreign battlefields and a lethal agenda.
Last Friday, Daesh claimed to have carried out its second suicide bombing on Saudi soil in a week, part of a rash of attacks that have hit the normally battened-down kingdom since November.
The bombings, which together killed 25 people and injured more than 100, were aimed at the country’s Shiite community, viewed by extremists such as Daesh as apostates. Security officials have also linked the group to an assault that killed a general in charge of security on the kingdom’s northern border with Iraq, and a string of shootings aimed at police, Westerners and Shiites.
For years, wealthy Saudis have been accused of nurturing the fundamentalist brand of Islam that inspires many militants in the Middle East and beyond. Of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, 15 were Saudi citizens. Weapons and cash from Saudi Arabia have flowed to armed groups fighting the government of President Bashar Al Assad in Syria, who is allied with the kingdom’s chief regional rival, Iran.
Now Saudi Arabia itself is increasingly becoming a victim of Islamist violence, aimed not only at Shiites, but also the government.
Saudi officials say they don’t support extremists like those of Daesh and Al Qaida-affiliated Al Nusra Front in Syria, which they have designated as terrorist groups, and have worked to halt the flow of support from their citizens.
Symbolic target
“I don’t see how we can finance or encourage terrorism when we are being targeted by such groups,” said Major General Mansour Turki, an Interior Ministry spokesman.
Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam and home to its two holiest cities, making it a hugely symbolic target for a group that claims to have restored the caliphate, a form of Islamic rule that ended with the Ottoman Empire. Nearly 400 people have been arrested on suspicion of setting up networks and plotting attacks on behalf of Daesh since last year, most of them Saudi nationals, Turki said.
The group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, made his intentions clear in a November audio recording in which he declared that the caliphate was expanding into the land of “Haramain,” or the two holy sanctuaries in Saudi Arabia, Makkah and Medina.
Al Baghdadi instructed his followers in the kingdom to prioritise attacks on Shiites, and, after that, the monarchy’s forces, before striking at “the Crusaders.”
The late King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud publicly chastised the country’s religious scholars for “laziness” because of their silence about Daesh’s atrocities. His government enacted a series of measures last year criminalising the provision of any support to terrorist groups and making participation in foreign conflicts punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
US officials say the kingdom is now cracking down on wealthy individuals and charitable foundations accused of funnelling funds to extremists. Saudi fighter jets have taken part in the US-led air campaign against Daesh, one of them piloted by a son of the new king, Prince Khalid Bin Salman. The country also co-chairs with the United States and Italy the coalition’s efforts to disrupt the group’s funding.
Regional experts credit the country’s more forceful counter-terrorism posture to its interior minister, Prince Mohammad Bin Nayef, who survived an assassination attempt by an Al Qaida suicide bomber in 2009 and was recently elevated to crown prince.
Mohammad led efforts to crush a previous uprising by extremists who view the monarchy’s close ties with the US as a betrayal of Islam and reject its claim to preside over Makkah and Medina. Between 2003 and 2006, Al Qaida terrorists who had taken part in a Saudi-backed war to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in the 1980s unleashed a wave of deadly bombings, shootings and kidnappings in the kingdom.
“This was Saudi Arabia’s 9/11, in terms of the way it mobilised the government to go after terrorist activity,” said Lori Plotkin Boghardt, a former US intelligence analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Saudi authorities responded by arresting thousands of militants, driving them underground or into neighbouring Yemen, now home to what is considered Al Qaida’s most dangerous affiliate.
At the urging of its Western allies, the Saudi government put in place new financial regulations and controls. A senior US Treasury Department official, who asked not to be identified in discussing counter-terrorism operations, said wealthy Saudi donors remain an important source of funding for extremist groups. But he said it was unfair to accuse the government of condoning such activity.
Last month, the two governments announced that they were imposing sanctions on Al Furqan Foundation Welfare Trust, a Pakistan-based charity that is accused of channelling funds to Al Qaida and other groups. US officials hailed the joint action as evidence of Saudi commitment to fighting illicit finance.
In addition to going after terrorists and their backers, Saudi officials say, they are trying to stamp out their “deviant” ideas. The government has cracked down on incendiary sermons in mosques, fired teachers accused of spreading extremism in the classroom and recruited religious leaders to help counter militant rhetoric online. It has also developed an intensive programme to rehabilitate convicted terrorists through religious re-education, psychological counselling, job training and help starting a business or getting married.
Badr, who had sought to join the militant movement in Iraq and Syria, instead was enrolled at a de-radicalisation centre on the outskirts of Riyadh and has since renounced any notion of fighting abroad.
As part of the programme, Badr spent hours debating the finer points of holy war with counsellors at the Mohammad Bin Nayef Care and Rehabilitation Centre, a complex of sand-coloured buildings with grassy courtyards, an art studio and an Olympic-size pool.
“They told us about the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad [PBUH],” he said. “His neighbour was a Jew, but he didn’t kill him or fight him. Such things brought some sense to my mind.”
Badr has now returned to his wife and children, runs a construction firm and preaches at a local mosque.
But the battle is hardly won: Some of the suspects rounded up in recent months were graduates of the de-radicalisation programme.
A poll commissioned by Boghardt’s institute in September found that just five per cent of Saudis rated Daesh positively. But that, she noted, is still more than half a million people.
— Los Angeles Times
