Al Qaeda forces in Saudi Arabia have shifted their strategy and are now almost exclusively searching for U.S. and other Western targets in the kingdom while avoiding attacks on domestic institutions in a bid to strengthen their flagging network, according to security officials and Saudi experts on radical groups.
While Al Qaeda retains its primary goal of eventually toppling the Saudi royal family -- as Osama bin Laden made clear in an audio recording released Thursday -- an 18-month campaign of car bombings, gun battles and kidnappings has so far failed to generate many new recruits and has resulted in a backlash among many Saudis, even those who otherwise are critical of the government, the officials and experts said.
It appears that Bin Ladin has had a major setback in his major objective: the fall of the House of Saud. Look for him to reorganize his attacks on western targets to gather the imagination of the disillusioned in the Muslim world.
Complete Article
Al Qaeda Shifts Its Strategy in Saudi Arabia
By Craig Whitlock
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Al Qaeda forces in Saudi Arabia have shifted their strategy and are now almost exclusively searching for U.S. and other Western targets in the kingdom while avoiding attacks on domestic institutions in a bid to strengthen their flagging network, according to security officials and Saudi experts on radical groups.
While Al Qaeda retains its primary goal of eventually toppling the Saudi royal family -- as Osama bin Laden made clear in an audio recording released Thursday -- an 18-month campaign of car bombings, gun battles and kidnappings has so far failed to generate many new recruits and has resulted in a backlash among many Saudis, even those who otherwise are critical of the government, the officials and experts said.
More than 80 people have died in the attacks, the majority of them Saudis or non-Western immigrant workers. Many people in the kingdom are not only angry over the bloodshed but also fearful of Al Qaeda's attempt to turn Saudi Arabia, a deeply conservative tribal society, into an even more conservative Islamic theocracy, several Saudi reformers said in interviews.
"People want government reforms and changes, but they are more scared of Al Qaeda extremists," said Mansour Nogaidan, a former Islamic radical who has moderated his views but is still one of the most prominent critics of the Saudi government. "The common people -- those people who thought their life might improve if the government changed -- they are not ready to lose all this for what some young teenagers have in their minds as a utopia."
Despite an Al Qaeda-sponsored attack on the U.S. consulate in Jiddah this month that left 9 people dead, including the four assailants, Saudi government officials expressed confidence that they are steadily gaining the upper hand in their fight with the militants.
Security forces have arrested or killed 17 of the 26 most wanted militant leaders in the country. Two others on the most wanted list are believed to be dead or badly injured, while a key operational planner reportedly fled the kingdom, Saudi security officials said.
Saudi officials said that they have dismantled three of four known Al Qaeda cells and that the insurgents are finding it harder to obtain ammunition, weaponry and money. The size and scope of the attacks have also dwindled since last year, when car bombs in Riyadh blew up two Western residential compounds and caused more than 200 casualties.
"The people who are still there are not as skillful as the ones who were there in the beginning," said Brig. Gen. Mansour Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry. "We feel more confident than we did in the beginning of this fight. We thought it would take much longer to be in control. We cannot deny that there are still possibilities that the terrorists could execute more acts, but they are not as strong as they were a year ago."
Still, few people are predicting that the attacks will end anytime soon.
"The hands-on folks see this as a serious engagement that has some time to run," said a Western official involved in counterterrorism efforts in the kingdom, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They don't see this as ending near term. It's going to take a period of time. Is it months? Is it years? We don't know."
Turmoil in neighboring Iraq is also fueling anger against Americans. A number of Saudis involved with Al Qaeda in the kingdom became radicalized after going to Iraq to fight U.S. military forces there, American and other Western counterterrorism officials said.
Last month, 26 Saudi clerics signed a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring it a duty for Muslims to fight the U.S. presence in Iraq. The fatwa was vague as to whether it was encouraging Saudis or Iraqis to resist the U.S.-led occupation, but American officials said they took it as a serious threat.
"The intent behind the clever words was to encourage young people -- and by that I mean jihadists -- to kill American soldiers in Iraq, and that is something we must protest vigorously," said James C. Oberwetter, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
For the moment, Al Qaeda is seeking to recover from the loss of leaders who have been arrested or killed. Abdulaziz Muqrin, a former cell leader who asserted responsibility in the deaths of three U.S. military contractors last summer, including the beheading of Lockheed Martin employee Paul M. Johnson Jr., died in a shootout with Saudi police in June. Murqin's replacement, Saleh Awfi, is believed to be dead or seriously injured, Saudi officials said.
Internet postings monitored by Saudi intelligence show that Al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers cannot agree on who is in charge these days, or even what strategy they should adopt to remain viable, officials said. The internal disputes have simmered for more than a year, but are now becoming more of a handicap for Al Qaeda because it does not have a firm leadership in place, officials said.
The dissension goes back to early 2003, before the start of the attacks that began in May of last year and quickly rattled the desert kingdom, helping to drive up the price of oil worldwide.
On the run after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, top Al Qaeda leaders including bin Laden and chief ideologue Ayman Zawahiri pressed local operatives in Saudi Arabia to launch an offensive to destabilize the royal family. Local leaders in the kingdom had been building cells and amassing weapons for more than a year, but asked for more time, saying they were unprepared for an all-out assault on the Saudi government and were worried about a public backlash, officials here said.
After a debate, bin Laden ordered the local cells to go ahead with the strikes anyway, officials said. "The internal guys here thought it would be a mistake because it would foul their own nest," said another Western official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were overruled, but they were right -- it has fouled their own nest."
While the opening attack -- a May 2003 car bombing of a compound in Riyadh housing Westerners -- caught the government off guard, the Al Qaeda cells had difficulty sustaining themselves as Saudi security personnel began arresting hundreds of suspected militants.
"It immediately condemned their ship," said Nawaf Obaid, head of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, an independent institute that is preparing to publish a study, along with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, about the Al Qaeda terrorist threat in the kingdom. "They weren't ready for it. They didn't have the support or the manpower that they originally thought they could muster."
Another turning point came last April, when militants detonated a car bomb in front of a five-story police building in Riyadh, killing four people and injuring about 150. Unlike previous attacks, most of the casualties were Saudi civilian employees, prompting many Saudis to rally around the government.
Soon after, Al Qaeda began shifting its targets to avoid Saudis. In May, militants attacked a Western compound in the oil-producing city of Khobar, killing 22 civilians. Gunmen burst into a residential and office compound, looking for hostages and shouting, "Where are the Americans?" The next month, three U.S. military contractors were killed after assailants followed them home from work in Riyadh.
On Dec. 6, gunmen mounted a direct assault on one of the most prominent U.S. targets in the kingdom: the consulate in Jiddah, a half-century-old building overlooking the Red Sea. During the middle of a three-hour gun battle and standoff with Saudi police, the assailants made it a point to lower the U.S. flag flying outside the consulate's main entrance and light it on fire.
The flag was singed, but not destroyed, and embassy personnel raised it again later that day. But U.S. officials said it was clear that the militants had placed a renewed emphasis on attacking American symbols in an effort to drum up support.
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