Two jailbreaks and a series of arrests in recent months suggest that sympathy for al-Qaeda militants in Saudi Arabia still runs strong despite a government crackdown, analysts said this week.
The authorities in the world’s biggest oil exporter say they have seized nearly 80 al-Qaeda members or sympathisers from around the country over the last three months.
Four of them are among six men who escaped from a detention centre in Riyadh in June. The authorities also said that prisoners who escaped a higher level prison earlier this year could also be linked to al Qaeda.
Saudi commentators say there could be a solid base of support in the vast desert country, the birthplace of Islam, to explain the escapes and arrests.
”Despite how numerous the sympathisers are and their increasing role, people are still underestimating their importance and how dangerous they are,” analyst Faris bin Houzam wrote in Saudi daily al-Riyadh.
”There is shock every time the Interior Ministry says it has arrested of dozens of supporters, but it shouldn’t shock since internet forums show that there are hundreds of people with the desire to back and support the organisation,” he said.
Three years ago, al-Qaeda supporters began a campaign to bring down the US-allied royal family with suicide bombings in May 2003 against Western housing compounds in Riyadh.
Officials say more than 136 militants and 150 foreigners and Saudis, including security forces, have died since then. Toughened security measures, backed by close cooperation with Western security agencies, has reduced major attacks.
But militant ideology is still vibrant, analysts say.
Problem of ideology
”The problem is that the ideology is still there and it is an ideological problem in the first place,” commentator Qainan al-Ghamdi told Reuters.
”You can only uproot it with an ideological alternative, but there is no ideological strategy to combat it at all,” he said.
This criticism challenges official rhetoric suggesting that the deaths of Muslims and Arabs caused by the early militant attacks had turned the public against the followers of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born dissident who heads al-Qaeda.
The authorities also said last week that ”correction programmes” had straightened out the thinking of some 700 Saudi men who had believed in the ‘takfiri’ ideology behind al-Qaeda.
‘Takfiri’ thinking permits branding Muslim governments or ordinary Muslims as infidels because of policies, behaviour or beliefs. Militants around the world use the theory to justify attacks on governments, foreigners and civilians.
A recent study reprinted in the Saudi press even warned that women working as preachers and teachers could make their way to the forefront of the militant campaign at a future stage.
”The climate is there — women calling themselves preachers and spiritual guides have already begun to appear in women’s circles,” wrote Yousef bin Othaymeen, a well-known academic.
He also said sympathy with the radical Islamist movement was far higher than the government was prepared to admit.
”The real danger facing the Saudi state — unlike other societies that have faced terrorist incidents — is the presence of wide circles of sympathy for the ‘deviant group’ among different groups of citizens,” Bin Othaymeen wrote.
Most analysts say the reasons for militancy in Saudi Arabia lie in institutionalised anti-Westernism in the country’s austere Wahhabi form of Islam and the education system.
They also say Arab governments’ close ties with Washington and apparent inability to influence its perceived pro-Israel foreign policy in the Arab world is another key factor.
”As long as governments are silent and can’t do anything, it will go on,” Bin Houzam told Reuters.
He also pointed to Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, a Shi’ite political and paramilitary group which fought a 34-day war with Israel in July and August. Sunni militants will want to outdo Hezbollah in the resistance stakes, bin Houzam said.
”The Hezbollah experience will influence al-Qaeda, they saw what Hezbollah can do,” he said. – Reuters