Security forces have killed 15 Islamic militants in four days, including three on the most-wanted list, in the most intensive fighting seen to date in Saudi Arabia’s two-year war on terror — a sign the kingdom may have al-Qaeda on the defensive.
The latest slain leadership figure was Abdul-Rahman Mohammed Mohammed Yazji, killed on Wednesday by police in a raid in a rundown industrial area of the capital.
Yazji was holed up in a two-story building hidden away in a maze of alleys full of garages and car-part shops. Police swooped down on the site in the morning, said neighbours, who heard explosions and saw flames leaping from the building. On Wednesday evening, the building’s facade was charred and a plastic awning half-melted.
Yazji was number 25 on the country’s list of 26 most-wanted terrorists, and his death means the government has killed or arrested 23 of the listed militants.
The raid came a day after the end of the kingdom’s longest and deadliest shootout with militants — a three-day battle in the desert town of Rass, north-west of Riyadh. Special forces killed two top figures there, along with 12 other militants, and captured six others.
Visiting Rass on Wednesday, Interior Minister Prince Nayef said he hopes terror attacks ”will decrease” in the country, warning militants: ”Either come back to your senses or you’ll face death.”
”We’ll carry on [the fight] until it’s over and that won’t be long, God willing,” Nayef said, in remarks carried by the Saudi official news agency.
Interior ministry spokesperson Brigadier General Mansour al-Turki refused to say whether information from Rass led to Wednesday’s raid but underlined that the Saudi security forces have the momentum against militants.
”We have a security system in place that is working. The success of this security system has been shown since the crackdown began,” he said.
Saudi Arabia launched its crackdown on militants in 2003 after a string of suicide bombings, kidnappings and gun attacks, claimed by a branch of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror network. The attacks were a wake-up call for Saudis — an alert that Bin Laden was targeting the rulers of the nation of his birth, not just the West.
”There’s no doubt that terrorists in Saudi Arabia are struggling for survival. They’re on the run,” Khalil al-Khalil, a Saudi terror expert, said of the militant groups. ”Their ability to organise and plan has been severely incapacitated. They are very weak, both organisationally and morally.”
But, he warned, attacks will likely not stop because al-Qaeda continues to recruit, particularly through radical clerics.
”It’s hard to say at what rate they are recruiting. Definitely they have sympathisers, but the sympathy for them is drying up,” al-Khalil said.
The top fugitive from the three figures still at large from the wanted list, issued in December 2003, is Saleh al-Aoofi, who is believed to have become the new leader of al-Qaeda in the Gulf region after his predecessor, Abdel-Aziz al-Mogrin, was killed in June.
A statement from the official Saudi Press Agency reported Yazji’s death in Wednesday’s raid and said another militant was captured.
In this week’s gunbattle in Rass, special forces killed numbers four and seven on the most-wanted list — Kareem Altohami al-Mojati, a Moroccan, and Saud Homood Obaid al-Otaibi, a Saudi who was a leading al-Qaeda figure in the kingdom.
Al-Mojati was said to have been sent by Bin Laden to Saudi Arabia some time after 2001 to help put together the al-Qaeda network in the kingdom.
The two were among a nest of militants that security forces raided on Sunday in Rass, 355km north-west of Riyadh, sparking a battle that lasted until Tuesday night when police stormed a villa where the militants were holed up. Fourteen militants were killed and 14 security personnel wounded.
On Wednesday, police collected evidence from the building in which the militants had held out for three days in Rass, a conservative town with mosques on nearly every corner in a province known for Islamic fundamentalists.
On the internet on Wednesday, the Ansar website announced the deaths of al-Mojati and al-Otaibi and invited contributors to congratulate them on their ”martyrdom”. Statements purportedly from al-Qaeda have often been posted on the Ansar site. — Sapa-AP