At a time when the frighteningly fast expansion of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant dominates the news, Al Qaeda almost appears to have become an irrelevance.
For a long time the most feared of extremist groups, it too had ambitions to create a new caliphate. Now Al Qaeda seems marginal, having suffered the ignominy of being ignored by the masses during the Arab Spring and is currently being sidelined by its even more barbaric offshoot in Syria and Iraq.
However, the historical nature of Al Qaeda's "successes" should not lead us to forget just how widespread a threat it once was. One part of the narrative in danger of being overlooked is the years when it strove for nothing less than the fall of the monarchy in Saudi Arabia – an odd omission given that Osama bin Laden's first internationally significant fatwa, in 1996, was a declaration of jihad against America because of what he called "its appropriation of Saudi Arabia". Indeed, one of the foremost historians of the current Middle East, Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics, has argued that the wider world has missed just how central this was to bin Laden. "Transnational jihad was bin Laden's fig leaf, masking a desire to seize power in his native land," he wrote in 2011's The Rise and Fall of Al Qaeda.
Path of Blood [Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk] addresses this deficiency by focusing on the insurgency launched in May 2003 by what would later become known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The outlines of AQAP's campaign, how it initially drew support from some among those returning from what had been deemed quite legitimate jihads, such as in Bosnia against the Serbs and in Afghanistan against the Russians, and how it had religious sanction from a handful of rogue imams, is familiar territory.
But Thomas Small and Jonathan Hacker also trace the background of stricter implementation of Islamic practices after the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Juhayman Al Utaybi in 1979 and its effect on younger generations of Saudis, to the mid-90s, when militants were already beginning to set off bombs inside the Kingdom – evidence that 9/11 was not, in the Middle East, quite the turning point it was in the West.
As they point out, it was in July 2000, more than a year before Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, that Yusuf Al Ayiri, a veteran jihadist, went to Afghanistan and was ordered to set up a network inside Saudi Arabia by Osama bin Laden. Al Ayiri quietly built it up until 2002, when Abdul Rahim Al Nashiri, who had orchestrated the assault on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000, arrived to take charge. That same year, the CIA’s director, George Tenet, warned the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that they had intercepted a communication between bin Laden and Al Ayiri indicating that Al Qaeda hoped to overthrow the Saudi government. By May 8, 2003, the Saudi authorities had gained sufficient intelligence to issue a “list of 19” suspects. Four days later the first of AQAP’s attacks began: the bombing of three compounds in Riyadh in which 27 people were killed and more than 200 injured.
The authors concentrate on 2003 to 2005, by the end of which period the chief players in the then version of AQAP (before it revived in Yemen) had been rounded up, killed or died. They do so in vivid, airport-thriller style, with chapter titles such as “A New Kind of Assassin” and “Terror Strikes the Coast”.
They are to be applauded for making the grim reality of those years as vivid and horrifying as they have, recounting not just the infamous massacres at Khobar and Yanbu, the attack on the US Consulate in Jeddah and those on compounds in Riyadh but also the countless occasions when innocent passers-by were shot dead in their cars; when children were crushed to death by masonry loosened by AQAP’s bombs (one woman was killed in front of her little brother); and the many instances in which members of the security services lost their lives in firefights with well-trained fanatics who thought little of activating suicide vests since they considered anyone linked to the Saudi state to be “apostates” and thus legitimate targets.
To those of us who live in the Arabian Gulf, these atrocities were perpetrated in suburbs and compounds and on roadsides very similar to those that can be found in Abu Dhabi, Dubai or Doha.
Having spent part of my childhood in Riyadh and Jeddah, the thought that during the years of AQAP’s activism it had become, for an expatriate, “an act of courage just to go to the grocery store or take a trip to the desert”, as the then US ambassador James Oberwetter put it, is incomprehensible. A shadow passed over my mind when I read that there was even a terrorist cell in Kharj, an oasis south of Riyadh. To me, it was a farm where I spent many happy weekends playing with friends. Could such evil have infiltrated so close to that haven?
But anyone hoping for analysis of what effect AQAP’s campaign had on Saudi policy, either domestic or foreign, should look elsewhere. They do allude to the rehabilitation programme instituted by Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who directed counterterrorism efforts and is now the Kingdom’s interior minister; an epilogue details how one terrorist who had supposedly repented nearly killed the prince by blowing himself up with a bomb he had concealed in his rectum. Small and Hacker describe Prince Mohammed meeting the “penitent”: “‘I am truly delighted to be speaking to you…’ But before the prince was able to finish his sentence, Abdullah exploded.”
How can they be sure of so exact a detail? The authors were granted more than 50 interviews with security officers who had been involved in countering the insurgency and were given exclusive access to hundreds of hours of tapes and CDs that AQAP members had filmed of themselves, and which were discovered in a raid in 2004. This is clearly a story that the Saudis wanted told and the authors acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the “express approval” of Prince Mohammed. That the prince and the Saudi authorities therefore come over in a flattering light is no bar to this being a fascinating account of a campaign in which more than 100 people died and hundreds were injured (far greater numbers than those in the rather better remembered London 7/7 attacks), and during which terror was brought to all parts of Saudi Arabia.
The authors reveal that only some of the terrorists had paramilitary talent. Some may have been evil fanatics. Others, though, revelled in having such worldly items as gold-plated Kalashnikovs, while some come across as little more than misguided young boys, mucking around in front of the camera when making videos, such as one about fighting in Chechnya.
“Wait brother,” the cameraman interrupted. “Could you lower your headscarf? Bring the brim closer to your eyebrows.”
“Like this?”
“Yes, very fashionable, ha ha! But don’t go thinking you’re a bin Laden or something.”
The story of how the Saudi authorities managed to contain AQAP is one that reflects creditably both on them and their people. After the first compound bombing in May 2003, a campaign emphasised the unity of the populace and the security forces, producing billboards with slogans such as “Our religion rejects terrorism” and posters showing two clasped hands, one arm in uniform and the other wearing a thobe.
The authorities also persuaded some imams to denounce Al Qaeda, including the so-called Takfeeri Troika, who had provided the most authoritative religious backing for AQAP’s activities.
Much valuable information also came from the public. On one occasion a man in Mecca called the hotline suspicious about a neighbouring house in which all the windows were blacked out. When officers raided the apartment block, they found 30 men, weapons, bomb-making equipment and plans to attack a prison in Jeddah, to poison the water supply to an expatriate compound and to murder the governor of Mecca Province.
Small and Hacker are not likely to make Prof Gerges fear for the safety of his chair at the LSE. The authors are film-makers, not journalists, and it shows in the occasional oddity of style and jarring comparison. But any book whose first chapter ends with someone taking a box of tea out of a freezer and finding a severed human head in it, is certain to grab the attention, and the tale of how the Saudis thwarted Osama bin Laden’s dearest wish deserves to be better known.
Sholto Byrnes is a Doha-based writer and commentator.