Inside the Kingdom (9 page)

On the Brethren’s side, Mohammed Abdullah Al-Qahtani was enjoying his immortality as Mahdi. He had fought recklessly in the Safa-Marwah corridor. Now, as the Saudi soldiers advanced through the forest of pillars throwing hand grenades, he would run forward whenever he heard a grenade hit the marble. He would pick it up and fling it back in the brief second before it detonated, scoring hit after hit—until his luck ran out. As he bent down to pick up another grenade, it exploded. When the government eventually located the bloodstained proof of his mortality, they lost no time photographing his corpse, his face still curiously handsome, and published it in the newspapers.

Rumors had been swirling since the beginning of the siege, and according to one, King Khaled had sent for Al-Qahtani’s mother. The perplexed old king wanted to investigate the truth about her son, which she found easier to grasp than he did.

“If my son is the Mahdi, he will kill you,” she said bluntly. “If he is not, you will kill him.”

It is a good story, but the Al-Saud say it did not happen.

By Sunday morning Saudi forces controlled the Mosque from ground level upward, and Turki Al-Faisal went inside through the shattered gates to survey the damage with his brother Saud, the foreign minister. What struck him, he later told the author Yaroslav Trofimov, was the eerie silence in the shrine, which he had always experienced as so crowded—and the lingering aura of the evil that he knew had occurred there.

It was by no means over. As the government troops moved through the pillars, Juhayman had ordered his long-planned change of tactics, a strategic retreat down into the khalawi below the Mosque’s pavement. The insurgents had already stashed boxes of food, water, and spare ammunition in the honeycombed maze of prayer rooms and were planning to hold out for weeks. They refused all appeals to surrender. They could not expect to live very long or very pleasantly if they did turn themselves in. So they blackened their faces and holed up in the grubby little catacombs with mattresses, their womenfolk, some unfortunate children who had been brought along, plus what was left of their dates and water.

Saudi assault troops flooded the cellars and flung live electrical cables into the water. They had more success when, after some delay, they smashed holes in the Mosque pavement and dropped down canisters of paralyzing CS gas that had been flown in from Paris by French commandos. Technically known as
o
-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, CS was similar to the lethal chemical used by Russian troops to liberate the Moscow theater seized by Chechen rebels in 2002. An irritant that blocks breathing, CS gas “knocks out” those who inhale it and can cause death in sufficient concentrations. The compound used in Moscow killed more than 170 people.

One of the French commandos later claimed that he had briefly sneaked into the Grand Mosque before the attack, but this was denied by his commanding officer and by his two companions who had helped him train the Saudi gas handlers. By all reliable accounts, the three French agents did not fight in Mecca. They recall waiting up in Taif during the final attack with their telephones cut off, feeling rather helpless in their luxurious hotel rooms as they gave a Saudi medic advice on how to deal with the sinister effects of CS gas.

The hard work was done by Saudi assault troopers wearing gas masks, plodding day after day through the now filthy darkness of the khalawi catacombs, flinging out gas canisters, then stumbling forward through the toxic fumes.

“The defenders,” remarks Prince Turki, “definitely had the advantage.”

Not a single rebel surrendered voluntarily; they sprang ambushes and fought viciously to the bitter end. Finally, on Tuesday, December 4, 1979, two weeks to the day from the beginning of the siege, the attackers burst through a metal door to find a huddled group of men, their faces blackened with soot, their ragged clothes soiled with blood and vomit. The gas had had its effect. Some were shivering uncontrollably. But one, hidden among crates of weapons and piles of colored pamphlets, retained the wild, and now surprisingly frightened, eyes of a cornered beast of prey.

“What is your name?” asked the Saudi captain, pointing his gun.

“Juhayman,” came the oddly subdued reply.

The capture of Juhayman did not end the rumors—indeed, they swirled more fiercely than ever. One described Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, commander of the National Guard and number three in the royal heirarchy behind Khaled and Fahd, going to see the blasphemous culprit as soon as he was captured. Juhayman was lying on the ground, and when the black-bearded commander-prince caught sight of his former National Guardsman, he started growling with rage. Handicapped with an embarrassing stutter, Abdullah was notorious for being a man of few words, and, according to the story, he wasted none on Juhayman. He simply walked across the cell and, without more ado, stood firmly on the rebel’s head. The story was not true, but it contained a truth—the House of Saud did not build a country the size of a small continent by being soft with their enemies.

Prince Turki Al-Faisal went to get his own firsthand look at the insurgent leader in the hospital, where he was lying shackled to his bed.

“Forgive me,” cried Juhayman beseechingly, his bravado suddenly gone. “Forgive me,
tal omrak
[May God prolong your life]. Please ask
ammi
Khaled [my uncle Khaled] to forgive me!”

In saying “
ammi
Khaled” Juhayman was using the term of endearment traditionally employed by slaves and retainers in princely Saudi households, and the young intelligence chief ignored his plea, furious at the familiarity and also at the loss of life that had stemmed from this man’s delusion that he knew the truth of Islam. The government had lost 127 soldiers dead and 461 injured, along with 117 rebels and a dozen or so of the worshippers who were killed in the first morning’s gunfire. The prince pointed derisively at the captive’s matted beard and electrified, wispy hair.

“So that’s Islamic?” he sneered.

The soldiers led them out just before dawn—a shuffling group of men shackled hand and foot, shivering a little in the cold. There were soldiers on the square and up on the roofs around the old bedouin marketplace in central Riyadh, with a huddle of robed princes and ministers in the darkness, waiting on a balcony to see justice done. Sixty-three men were due to be executed that morning in eight towns around the country,
⁶
starting with Juhayman in Mecca. Here in Riyadh the tall, square-framed governor, Prince Salman—the brother whose looks, say the family, most resemble those of his father, Abdul Aziz—was reading intently down a list.

“He was checking the tribal names of the soldiers,” recalls an eyewit ness, “to make sure that the killing was done by and in front of their own. They are masters, that family, at doing things the tribal way.”

One of the prisoners was screaming and writhing. He was an Afghan, one of the twenty or so foreigners whom Juhayman had swept up in the preceding months and on the day itself. The official roll call listed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Sudanese, and Egyptians.

“I am innocent!” cried the Afghan as they led him in front of the executioner. He was wriggling so much that the blade missed its mark, slicing into his shoulder. His screams got shriller as the uniformed soldiers struggled to keep their hold. An officer stepped forward to finish him off with a revolver shot to the head.

But it was the first of the victims whose death would set the sinister tone of that chilly morning. No one who saw him would ever forget. He was one of the Mahdi’s friends who had helped organize the Riyadh Ikhwan, and he carried himself as a leader, defiantly raising his shackled arms in prayer.

“
Bismillah, Al-Rahman, Al-Raheem
—In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful!” he called out in a strong and confident voice, quite unafraid. “You know what they have done,” he cried—and here he raised his blindfolded eyes toward heaven. “You have witnessed their sins and their corruption. May their end be most horrible!”

With a proud stiffening of his back and shoulders, he invited the executioner to do his work. He flexed his body and seemed almost to rise into the sword as it descended. The blind, utter belief of the man was breath-taking. He was God’s warrior, and having done God’s work, he had no doubt at all that he was now going to heaven.

CHAPTER 4

No Sunni, No Shia

I
f there was one member of the House of Saud who most powerfully embodied everything against which Juhayman and his Brethren had protested, it was the complex figure of Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdul Aziz. He was Mr. Modernity, playing the dynamic CEO of Saudi Enterprises Unlimited to King Khaled’s genial chairman of the board. Fahd had been appointed the Kingdom’s very first minister of education by his brother Saud, then served under Faisal as minister of the interior. In both positions he had gained a reputation for shifting Saudi life in a Westerly direction. Now with the oil boom he was taking things further.

The shocking assassination of King Faisal in 1975 had had one upside in the eyes of progressive Saudis—his death had loosened the national purse strings. The old king had been cautious with his own money, and he was still more cautious with that of the country. A tale that his sons admitted was probably apocryphal, but which they liked to relate just the same, described an angry Henry Kissinger threatening Faisal during the 1973 oil embargo with the possibility that America might choose to stop consuming Saudi oil.

“In that case,” replied the hawk-faced monarch, “we shall go back to our tents and live on camels’ milk. But what will
you
do, Mr. Kissinger, without any gas for your cars?”

Faisal’s parsimonious policy was to save oil profits for the Saudi equivalent of a rainy day, but his Westernized younger half brother was not afraid of spending. Fahd believed with a passion that the national revenues should be invested as soon as possible inside the Kingdom to create more wealth: Within months of Faisal’s death, the crown prince was forming committees and drawing up spending plans in which words like
infrastructure
and
take-off
figured prominently. Hospitals, schools, highways, airports; two new industrial cities, one on each coast; more planes for Saudia, the national airline; more weapons for the armed forces; and a set of huge “military cities” to defend each vulnerable corner of the country.