"...Ruhhhhh rohhhhhhh...."!!! The wacko-ragheads have apparently pissed off King Fahd. We could end up getting lower gas prices even sooner than we thought....
Attack on police prompts Saudis to shake off apathy
WITH its severe judges and state-enforced piety, Saudi Arabia can seem a strangely oppressive place to outsiders. Its citizens have long preferred to see their country as a haven of wholesome family living and crime-free streets.
But the huge suicide car bomb that wrecked a police headquarters in central Riyadh on Wednesday, reportedly killing at least four people and wounding more than 140, is only the latest in a spate of incidents that have battered that pure self-image.
The change began with the revelation that most of the 11 September hijackers were Saudis. Yet within the kingdom, that sign of something gone wrong was often shrugged off. Those killers were oddballs and their anger against the United States’ policy was understandable, if perhaps exaggerated, it was said,
Even when such complacency was shaken by al-Qaeda suicide bombs that killed 52 people in the Saudi capital last year, some still argued that while some Arabs died, the intended victims were citizens of western countries that have provoked Muslims by invading and occupying their lands.
But the latest attack was a direct assault on the very heart of the Saudi state. It shattered a six-storey building used by Riyadh’s traffic police, in a district packed with government offices. The damage would have been worse had guards not stopped the vehicle outside a perimeter fence.
A group calling itself al-Haramain Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement posted on two Islamic websites, it praised "imam Sheikh bin Laden" and promised more attacks against "heresy, apostasy and crime".
In the week before the bombing, Saudi security forces had claimed to have captured and defused no fewer than five similarly designed car bombs. At least two of them had been stuffed with some 3,000lb of ammonium nitrate - not much less than the fertiliser explosive used to murder 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Those two vehicles were only found by chance, when an army unit conducting desert exercises happened upon them parked in a rocky wasteland. The obvious guess was that more of them remained in circulation.
That likelihood, soon proved correct, was enough to inspire the US Embassy to issue an unprecedentedly stern security warning last week.
Announcing the immediate evacuation of all non-essential embassy staff, the bulletin "strongly urged" the estimated 15,000 US citizens living in the kingdom to leave as soon as possible.
Considering Saudi Arabia’s historic and lucrative business links with the US, that represented a significant motion of no confidence.
Not that anyone believes terrorism is an elemental threat to the Saudi state. As widespread as frustration with the feudal rule of the al-Saud family might be, and as admiring of Osama bin Laden’s riches-to-rags image as some Saudis are, the attacks on the kingdom’s own soil have radically curtailed any lingering support for al-Qaeda.
And while it appears Saudi terrorist cells are well funded, well equipped and well trained, their actions have so far been limited to a small part of the vast kingdom, stretching north from the capital to the arch-conservative central region of Qasim.
Many Saudis, along with foreigners, do worry about the effectiveness of the kingdom’s police force. Although hundreds of terrorist suspects have been rounded up since the first large Riyadh bombing a year ago, the police have also bungled badly.
From a roster of 26 prime suspects issued then by the interior ministry, with bounties of up to £1.2 million placed on their heads, 22 are still at large. In the past week, five police officers have lost their lives in half a dozen shoot-outs with wanted men, against only eight arrests. In one Riyadh suburb, police found themselves outgunned by assailants armed with rocket-propelled grenades.
Clearly, the Saudi authorities are guilty not only of waiting too long before taking on the terrorist groups, but also of underestimating their scale. The al-Saud dynasty’s determination to eradicate what Crown Prince Abdullah, the country’s acting ruler, calls "the forces of evil" can no longer be doubted.
news.scotsman.com
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