Saudis bewildered by attack in Riyadh

By Megan K. Stack
Los Angeles Times

	ADNAN HAJJ ALI / AP A worker sweeps the floor in a school near the site of a suicide bombing last week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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"They're mentally ill, this crowd," he said of the Islamist militants who killed at least five people and wounded 148 Wednesday. Raikhan, 30, works as a maintenance man for the Saudi security forces; luckily, he was on the other side of town when his office was blown up.

"There's not one American in this entire area," he said plaintively, sweeping an arm to take in a neighborhood eerily still, its streets laced with police tape. "Not one! What kind of jihad is this?"

Throughout the Saudi mainstream, the call has risen: This insurgency is not a jihad, because a jihad, or sacred struggle, does not kill fellow Muslims, let alone Saudis. Wednesday's attack, plainly meant to kill Saudi police and civilians milling through the tightly wound streets of downtown at rush hour, has infuriated Saudis.

Now this ascetic, oil-rich kingdom is stuck between the religious ideal of jihad, still widely embraced here, and the bloody, nerve-wracking reality of a nation targeted by armed militants. Saudis curse the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah and praise Hamas suicide bombings in Israel even as they pass through metal detectors and steer their cars through the checkpoints that choke Riyadh's traffic to a standstill.

Many people here who have praised and supported jihad around the world are shocked to find themselves on the receiving end of a violence fueled by religious extremism.

"This is not against invading armies like Afghanistan or Iraq. This is against a legitimate system, against civilians and traffic officers," said Khaled Batarfi, an analyst at Saudi Arabia's Arab News and a childhood friend of Osama bin Laden. "We don't see this as jihad. We have the ability to differentiate between what's jihad and what's not."

Popular culture here is rife with the lore of holy warriors, and the past two decades have been punctuated by holy war: There was the fight against the Russians in Afghanistan. There was Chechnya, and now Iraq. Thousands of eager Saudi men streamed out of their homeland to fight those distant battles. Many Saudis see all of those causes, and especially the Palestinian intifada, as righteous and, more important, tied to Islamic duty.

Saudis are bewildered by the most recent attack and complain that the bloodshed is nothing but aimless, reckless attempts to destabilize their government.

"It doesn't make sense; they're losing popularity and credibility, if they ever had any," Batarfi said. "The (U.S.) troops have left, so what are you doing?"

Islamist militants, notably Saudi-born bin Laden, complained bitterly about the presence of U.S. troops on the sacred ground of Saudi Arabia, and derided the unfaithful government that allowed the soldiers to stay. There were 10,000 troops stationed in the vast Prince Sultan Air Base in the desert south of Riyadh during the recent invasion of Iraq.
 
But most of the equipment and staff at the sprawling air base was packed up and moved to Qatar shortly after Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, fell to U.S.-led troops. Quietly, the number of U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia has dwindled into the hundreds.

However, postings on Web sites associated with Islamist radicals warned that word of a troop withdrawal was a lie. The infidel soldiers weren't going anywhere, the Web sites argued, it was just government propaganda.

Foreign soldiers are only one among many of the militants' grievances against the Saudi government. Saudi Arabia runs on the rhythms of daily prayer, but that's not enough for radicals who want to create a pure Muslim society in the land of the Prophet Muhammed. Islamic fundamentalists disapprove of everything from the spread of satellite dishes to the presence of foreign oil workers to the private church services secretly held by Christians here.

"It is some form of jihad, because they see the Saudi state as apostate," said Jamal Khashoggi an expert on radical Islam and adviser to the ambassador in London. "That's how they justify going after Muslim Saudi security forces."

The first explosion came last May: suicide bombings at three gated Riyadh compounds. But the housing compounds were thick with Western, expatriate tenants, so many Saudis chose to view the bombings as unfortunate attacks against the United States. The next blast came in November and rattled the society even more deeply; this time, the targeted compound was home to many foreign Arabs.

"The immediate reaction is, 'Oh, they're trying to get rid of the foreigners,' but it's not that at all," said a Western diplomat. "It's much more challenging. It's an attack against the regime."

Some analysts argue that rhetoric against America has turned into a sort of fig leaf for all manner of political rage. The real struggle, they say, was always against the royal family itself.

"They just use the word 'America' as a good cause, but really they want to destroy this country," said Nourra Youssef, a U.S.-educated economist who is active in the push for women's rights.

"They hate the people of this country," she said. "They want them to be like the Taliban."

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