Saudi Arabia: The Double-Game continues

The reason that the Saudi al-Qaeda haven't been a problem until recently (at least for the regime, periodic killings of Westerners are still occurring and the network's two Saudi e-zines are still being churned out) is not because the Saudis have been successful at rooting them out.

The bottom line is simpler, and less flattering: Prince Nayef and his allies in the Saudi royal family were able to broker another deal with al-Qaeda over the summer to refrain from attacking Saudi targets, a deal in which the Iranians played a cooperative role. In return for being given a green light to mobilize jihadis for Iraq, and allow the fundraising "Golden Chain" to remain in operation, major Saudi targets would be spared.

This is very similar to Saudi Arabia's under the table deals with al-Qaeda up until mid-2003, when al-Qaeda attacks inside the Kingdom led to a crackdown of sorts.

So how was the new deal brokered?

Khalid al-Harbi, a member of bin Laden's court, was wheeled in from Iran to oversee the Saudi al-Qaeda, and ensure that the young turks in the Saudi al-Qaeda shura didn't go off the reservation with respect to the deal that Safar al-Hawali (bin Laden's spiritual advisor and the chairman of the Supreme Council of Global Jihad) had brokered with the princes.

It wasn't completely effective. A few of the shura members refused to accept al-Harbi's leadership because of his acceptance of the Saudi regime's laughable amnesty offer, and split away from the main organization (possibly taking up the banner of the now-defunct al-Haramain Brigades that al-Muqrin created back in late 2003, as a means of attacking the Saudi government while maintaining plausible deniability for al-Qaeda proper).

This splinter group provides the sporadic gunfights (far smaller in number than they were under al-Muqrin's leadership) between Saudi security forces and al-Qaeda fighters that you sometimes read about in the papers/blogs.

I'm being told that the Jeddah Consulate attack, like the others we've seen in Saudi Arabia so far, appears to have been an inside job. This could mean that either the al-Hawali deal is off, that al-Hawali's deal gives the network a carte blanche to hit Western targets, or that the splinter factions still have access to al-Qaeda moles inside the Saudi security apparatuses. Time will tell.

Note that this attack came shortly after the US assault on Fallujah, so my guess would be that somebody wanted to send a message that they're fighting back against the evil Americans. Depending on whether or not the deal is still in force, I would say that every Western citizen in Saudi Arabia is now more or less likely to be considered a walking target for the jihadis.

Which is not exactly a new situation. Hence the U.S. State Department's ongoing travel warnings re: that country.

One thing to keep in mind, Joe...

OK, maybe more than one. Joe posted a pretty good break-down of the situation with respect to al-Qaeda deciding to hit Saudi Arabia, or perhaps more accurately (and one their supporters will likely point out) a 'Western' oil infrastructure target that happens to reside in Saudi Arabia. However, something should be noted with respect to this. Joe said:

Al-Qaeda is strongly engaged in Iraq, somewhat engaged in Chechnya, suffering reversals in Algeria, and facing mixed results in SE Asia. That will be more than enough to keep them busy, without opening a Saudi front that has the potential to collapse several of their global foundations at once.

That's a pretty apt summary, but let me expound on some of it:

• In Southeast Asia, al-Qaeda has a genuine victory in that the Arroyo government seems to have basically ceded part of the southern Philippines to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Mindanao in particular hosts a fair amount of terrorist training infrastructure that the group knows is going to be essential to rebuilding JI and keeping the sectarian conflicts in places like Sulawesi and Aceh going. The southern Thailand insurgency honestly strikes me as a fairly dismal failure to date, certainly nothing compared to what PULO and the like were running during the 1980s.

• Another thing to consider is Bangladesh, where one of the parties in the ruling coalition openly proclaims its allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Bangladesh is about as close to a failed state as they come without ever getting there and the slow, lingering death of its civic order has made fertile ground for al-Qaeda to operate. Joe covered some of that here.

• As for the GSPC in Algeria, near as I can tell they've taken a pretty heavy blow as a result of the US putting them on the radar. Key leaders like Hassan Hattab, Nabil Sahraoui, and Abderrazak el-Para are all dead or in custody and the group has been unable to indulge in no more than a few token massacres over Ramadan. If this trend holds, we may finally see an end to Algerian Islamist violence over the next several years. The al-Qaeda alliance with the MDJT seems to have also collapsed.

• The Chechen conflict doesn't simply involve Chechens anymore, and I'm not just talking about Arab al-Qaeda envoys like Khattab or Abu Walid. Basayev's ranks are now boasting not only Chechens, but also Islamist fighters from other parts of the Russian federation whose presence along with Arabs (and most recently a Vancouver resident) in groups like the International Islamic Peacekeeping Brigade (IIPB) should help even the most anti-Russian observer understand that to people like Basayev, the Chechen conflict is now part of a Pan-Islamist jihad in the Caucasus rather than a battle for national independence.

• Europe is complicated, in large part because a lot of the al-Qaeda "bureaucracy" for lack of a better word is run out of London through MIRA and the like. The Milan wiretaps, which are the best picture I've seen into how al-Qaeda operates on the Continent, make them seem more like a secret society or underground cult than anything else to me. There are recruiting rings, a ruling shura and all of the attendant subordinate shuras, as well as surveillance, procurement, propaganda, and operations nodes. At last report, al-Qaeda was attempting to shift most of the "bulkier" infrastructure east, where there's more corruption but smaller immigrant populations to hide amongst. I should point out, BTW, that the failure to unearth similar infrastructure here in the States is one of the things that worries me.

Also, this comment caught my eye:

If the goal were simply to punish the country [Saudi Arabia], there are easier ways: the entire water supply for Riyadh (excepting a few deep wells) comes through three, above-group pipes from the desalinization plants in the Eastern Province. Were those to go, Riyadh would be a ghost town within three days. That wouldn't cripple the country, but it would surely cause enormous damage to Al-Sauds as protectors of society.

Hehehe. That was actually major part of Saif al-Adel's multi-step plan to stage a coup in Saudi Arabia in early May 2003 so that he could use the Kingdom as a forward base from which to attack US forces in Iraq and throughout the Gulf.

The Riyadh water supply was going to be taken out and the most prominent al-Qaeda opponents among the princes were to be assassinated, paving the way for a mass uprising inside the Kingdom of al-Qaeda's support base and ending with Saad bin Laden sitting on King Fahd's throne in Riyadh as his father's regent, supported by Safar al-Hawali, Yousef al-Ayyeri, Louis Attiyat Allah, and all of the other attendant holy men. The third part of the coup plan involved an attack on US nationals inside the Kingdom using the Saudi National Guard, which has been heavily infiltrated by al-Qaeda.

The first two parts of the plan failed or were thwarted by Saudi security forces, but the third was actually carried out - we call it the May 2003 Riyadh bombings.

From Russia With Love: More chechnya Playas

At the end of his Oil Infrastructure article, Joe drew attention to the Chechnya/Russia situation and the serious potential for disruption there. While we're on that topic, I wanted to address some of the remarks in the comments section of my December 3rd article Quick Impromptus on Russia from Robert, Nathan, and David, in that particular order.

From Robert:

Keep in mind the ungoing debacle in Chechnya began as the USSR empire fell. Nation states annexed into the USSR and Czarist Russia immediately began to spin away. There was far too little talk of what this meant in the West at the time when most of the movements were strictly nationalist in orgin. That the New Russia tried to keep the empire by force is what lead to this current diaster. If the Jihadists are to be seperated from nationalist movements where the population practises Islam a more nuanced policy is going to have to be proposed. Otherwise we are going to be constantly creating Jihadists.

I agree, which is why I think Russia should engage Maskhadov in order to further isolate Shamil Basayev, who seems to be preempting them by trying to draw support from separatist and Islamist elements in places like Ingushetia, Dagestan, and North Ossetia. The current Chechen insurgency, however, draws a lot more from the minority Wahhabism of people like Basayev than it does the separatist nationalist impulses that triggered the original insurrection in the early 1990s. Other readers are directed to my Thoughts on Beslan article for the complete briefing.

From Nathan:

No, I understand why you use the term and it's pretty accurate. Georgia can hardly be bothered to care about Russia's separatists when Russia is protecting Georgia's separatists.

That gets us into kind of a chicken and the egg dilemma, except that Russia was backing the Georgian separatist first and, in a note of high irony, Basayev was in fact fighting in Abkhazia at one point in the early 1990s - on the Russian side!

I can certainly understand why Shevardnadze did what he did, though I think that after people like Saif al-Islam al-Masri and Abu Khabab started popping up in Pankisi that it should have become clear to him that this was a lot nastier than just a bunch of regional separatists that he could use to his advantage. It's an academic argument now though, given that Ed is gone and that Georgia is now a pro-Western democracy, in contrast to the quasi-fiefdoms that Russia has sponsored the creation of in places like Abkhazia.

Russia played both sides in Tajikistan. It's tremendously difficult to find a complete account of Russia's behavior in Tajikistan during the 90s but some of the things I've seen referenced in passing are pretty damning. The 201st rented out their armor to whichever side would pay them to use it. One side would take a tank or two for a while only to be attacked by the same tanks the next day when their opponents had money. There are numerous stories of Russian troops ferrying Juma Namangani and Tohir Yo'ldosh from their Afghan camps into Tajikistan to launch raids on Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Russian soldiers also have been caught running drugs across the border posts they guard (as recently as last summer even).

While it's possible that these are the acts of soldiers trying to make a little money on the side while posted in a backwater far from home, Russia's message to Tajikistan has pretty clearly been "you need us." It's kind of like the mafia shooting up your place when you refuse their offer of protection.

As I think I wrote on your blog many moons ago, Tahir Yuldashev was a former Soviet soldier and may well have retained enough of his old army connections to assist him in fighting the Tajik government. Khattab was also active there at around the same time at bin Laden's behest, so it's possible that he could have given the Tajik rebels the necessary cash with which to more or less buy Russian assistance. As for the drug-running among Russian border guards, such behavior is unfortunately not all that uncommon these days.

The war goes on.