Blast Exposes Cracks In The House Of Saud

The bombing of a U.S. Air Force housing center in Saudi Arabia has exacerbated fears of further violence by home-grown Islamic militants who have denounced their leaders as corrupt handmaidens of the West.

Pinched by lower oil prices, Saudi Arabia is grappling with a surge of militancy by people who say they are acting in the name of Islam in the best interests of the country. This militancy has manifested itself in occasional protests, the emergence of vocal dissidents abroad and, last November, a bomb attack on a U.S. Army training mission in Riyadh that killed five Americans and two other foreigners. Four young Saudi men were beheaded for that crime last month.

Tuesday night’s truck-bomb explosion, however, far surpassed the destructiveness of the November blast, killing at least 19 Americans, seriously wounding scores of others and prompting condemnation and alarm in Saudi Arabia and abroad.

“They’re all expressing shock,” Andrew Green, the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said in a telephone interview from Dhahran, near the site of the blast.

In the West, the bombing is sure to fuel concerns about political stability in the kingdom, especially in light of uncertainty over the health of King Fahd, who suffered a stroke last November and has transferred most of his duties to his younger half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah.

Despite the daring and power of Tuesday’s bombing, there is no evidence that the militants pose an imminent threat to the regime, whose main security concerns have tended to focus on hostile neighbors such as Iraq and Iran. Firmer oil prices over the past year or so have given the government some economic breathing room.

In an interview in Riyadh last month, a senior government official estimated Saudi Arabia harbors no more than 300 hard-core militants, comparing them to the right-wing American extremists who recently held U.S. law officers at bay in Montana.

“Basically, these are our freemen,” the official said. “They say the same thing - that they do not recognize the government.”

Although terrorist violence is not unheard of in Saudi Arabia, its vast oil wealth has long served as a kind of cushion against unrest. While money flowed freely in the late 1970s and 1980s, the ruling Saud family spent lavishly on subsidies for the middle class.

The government also has worked hard to maintain its conservative Islamic credentials, rigorously enforcing the Islamic legal code, known as sharia, and spending billions to refurbish the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

But then came the collapse of oil prices, coupled with the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which cost the government an estimated $60 billion. The government was forced to trim subsidies and curb hiring.

Islamic fundamentalists began to build a following by criticizing the presence of foreign “infidels” - American soldiers - on Saudi soil. They also began attacking the Saudi royal family on grounds of insufficient fealty to Islam, citing lavish lifestyles and widespread evidence of corruption.

In 1994 security forces arrested prominent Islamic clerics Safar Hawali and Salman Audeh and detained hundreds of their followers. Around that time, Saudi dissidents led by Mohammed Massari, a former physics professor at King Saud University, gathered in London and began peppering the kingdom with faxed propaganda.

The November bombing, in which a pickup truck packed with explosives was parked outside the U.S. training mission, added a new and frightening dimension.

After four suspects were arrested earlier this year, the officials said they had uncovered ties to several key dissidents, including Massari. But they never established more than an ideological connection, and in conversations last month, senior officials acknowledged the bombers appeared to have been acting with little or no outside help.

Because the training mission was attached to the Saudi National Guard, which handles domestic security and is headed by Crown Prince Abdullah, diplomats and some Saudi officials speculated the royal family might have been the target. But Americans being hit twice is causing a reassessment.

Said one Saudi official, “If they were upset with the government, you’d see riots. This is directed at the heart of the U.S.-Saudi relationship.”

He added, “We have every intent of finding these people, trying these people and chopping their heads off. So far we’ve had a 100 percent batting average.”