DEADLY EXPORT

While condemning terrorism, the Saudi royal family spends millions that fall into the hands of Islamic extremists who foster conflicts throughout the world.
   IN LATE 2001, NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] peacekeepers intercepted a phone call from a Muslim charity worker in Sarajevo [capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia] to an Al Quaeda terrorist commander based in Afghanistan.  In response, they raided an organisation linked closely to the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia and Herzegovina.  The raid netted computer files on crop duster aircraft, instructions on how to fake US State Department ID badges and credit cards, along with before and after photographs of New York's World Trade Centre, and maps of US government buildings and military installations.  A second raid in Zenica yielded a cache of blank Western passports.
   Authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina arrested six men suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda.  All are now believed to be in the American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
   It wasn't the first time that individuals involved with Saudi humanitarian organisations have been linked to terrorism.  The Bosnia and Herzegovina offices of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, for example, are accused by the US Treasury Department of funnelling money earmarked for orphanages and mosques in Mogadishu, Somalia, to a local terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.  Al-Haramain is active in more than 50 countries.
   Officials of the Saudi Arabia-based International Islamic Relief Organisation (IIRO) have also been implicated in terrorism around the world, according to testimony to the US Congress from Matthew Levitt, a

former FBI agent who is now a senior fellow in terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
   The IIRO's Philippine office was headed for eight years by Osama Bin Laden's brother-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, "through which he channelled funds to terrorist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, including Abu Sayyaf," said Levitt.  "IIRO is part of the Muslim World League, which is funded and supported by the Saudi government."
   Saudi Arabian officials claim that any involvement of these organisations with terrorism is the work of "rogue elements."  But few people believe this claim.  "All individuals running overseas charities are government appointed and the government watches every penny," a Saudi academic told Reader's Digest in the country's capital, Riyadh.

   The charities are in fact part of a vast effort to spread Islam.  Over two decades, according to government publications, the Saudi royal family has spent billions of its oil wealth to finance some 1350 new mosques, 210 Islamic centres, and hundreds of universities in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa.  Much of the money comes directly from the Saudi king himself, Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud.
   Unfortunately, this huge proselytising effort has propagated a version of Islam – called "Wahhabism" – whose message is that of jihad [holy war] against all "infidels".  Saudis print millions of free educational textbooks that deliver this inflammatory message wherever there are Islamic communities.  One book for ninth-year students declares, "The last hour will not come before the Muslims fight the Jews."  Another announces, "It is allowed to burn or destroy the bastions of kufar (infidels)." [p 121 a]

   Jihad is a duty, said the late Maneh al-Johani, secretary-general of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which has 55 outposts across the world.  "If Muslim land is occupied you are obliged to free it.  If you die you go to heaven."
   No-one, not even its fiercest critics, suggests that a majority of Wahhabi Muslims are terrorists or potential terrorists.  Nevertheless, Western analysts and many moderate Muslims agree that Saudi Arabia is exporting extremist messages that have contributed to bloody conflicts from North Africa to Kashmir.
   The [Saudi] government looks the other way, meanwhile claiming to co-operate with the West in the war on terrorism.
ONE SWELTERING evening last year, a Saudi Islamic expert took me to a square in Riyadh.  "Here is the heart of Wahhabism," he said.
   On one side stood the ochre, mud-walled Musmak Fort, captured from a rival tribe by Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud a century ago.  From here the patriarch of the modern Saudi dynasty went on to seize the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, conquer and unify [sic] the Arabian peninsula and proclaim his kingdom in 1932.
   On the other side of the plaza was Riyadh's main mosque, a massive, austere building, in traditional desert style, faced with biscuit-coloured limestone and topped by two square minarets.  The vista was monumental testimony to the alliance that is the raison d'être of the Saudi state.
   More than two centuries ago tribal chieftain Muhammad Ibn Saud struck a deal with Sheikh Muhammad Bin Abd al-Wahhab.  Al-Wahhab was a religious heretic who vilified the Islam of his day as debased and corrupt, demanding a return to the pristine faith.
   Ibn Saud agreed to commit his warriors to help spread the Sheikh al-Wahhab's message.  For his part, al-Wahhab promised never to seek sponsorship from another prince.  The Ibn Sauds' reward, he predicted, would be supremacy over all of Arabia.

It took almost 50 years of bloodshed before that prediction came true.
   The royal family is keeping its end of the bargain.  When the sun went down in Riyadh, I listened to the muezzin summoning the faithful to prayer.  Immediately, all shops and businesses closed.  Crowds of worshippers, men in ankle-length white robes and chequered headdresses, women covered in black from head to toe, hurried towards the mosque.  And in the square and neighbouring streets, squads of muttawa, the feared religious police, trawled for slackers.
   The rules of behaviour and dress are draconian and enforced with barbaric cruelty.  Last March in Mecca, a girls' school caught fire.  Some of the students escaped.  But they were without veils.  Muttawa zealots herded the panicked girls back into the blazing building.  Fourteen teenagers died and dozens more suffered horrific burns.  The muttawa later said they hadn't realised the severity of the fire.
   It hasn't always been that way, however.  In the 1970s Saudi Arabia was tiptoeing into the modern era, moving to allow women to drive and mix with men in the workplace.  But the reaction was sharp.
   In 1979, hundreds of Islamic radicals, angered by lurid tales of the royal family's corruption and extravagance, occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca.  In the same year, other Islamic radicals deposed the shah of Iran, a ruler as imperious and self-indulgent as the House of Saud.
   Afraid they were next, the royal family "gave the Wahhabis money and a quasi-political mandate to expand their influence," says Paul Michael Wihbey, president of the Centre for Strategic Resources Policy in Washington.  "In return, the powerful Wahhabite clergy allowed the Al-Sauds to remain in power and the princes to continue their un-Islamic lifestyles."
   Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  Saudi oil money helped bankroll the jihad against the invaders.  Roused by preachers, thousands of pious young Saudis volunteered to fight alongside their Afghan Muslim brothers.  The government paid their airfares.

Some, notably Osama Bin Laden, son of a wealthy family close to the royal family, worked with the Saudi intelligence service to funnel resources and Arab recruits into the war.
   The war was a turning point, moreover, for the propagation of Wahhabism abroad.  Victory in Afghanistan would eventually lead to the Taliban regime, which had close ties to Saudi Arabia.  Meanwhile, Saudi politicians and clerics, as well as so-called "Arab Afghan" veterans, grew intoxicated.
   "After 1989 they believed 'We defeated the Russians, we can do anything!' " a Riyadh-based diplomat told Reader's Digest.
   They've done plenty.
IN PAKISTAN, Kashmir, the newly-independent Central Asian republics, and Chechnya, Saudi religious and charitable agencies have encouraged radical Islamists and armed rebellion against secular governments.  [p 122 b] "It's hard to know where the line is drawn between funding charity and weapons for insurgents or money for terrorists," says Ahmed Rashid, a leading Pakistani expert and author of a best-selling book about the Taliban.
   Saudi money has also financed thousands of religious seminaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia and Africa.  Professor Vali Nasr, a US-based expert on Islamic extremism, characterises many of the seminaries as "Islamic West Points mixing a dosage of Islam with a lot of military training."
   When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Osama Bin Laden offered to raise an army of Arab Afghans to fight.  The Saudis declined, and welcomed Westerners onto Sauid soil.
   After Bin Laden issued a fatwa denouncing the Saudi government as corrupt, he was expelled and he moved to Sudan and was later stripped of his Saudi citizenship. In early 1996, seeking to improve relations with the West, Sudan expelled Bin Laden and he moved to Afghanistan where the Taliban regime was in place.

   Many members of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network are graduates of these Saudi-funded schools.  Harun Fazul, for example, was a scholarship student at Wahhabi Koranic schools in the Cormoros islands, off the coast of east Africa, and Pakistan before he allegedly helped to blow up the United States Embassy in Nairobi and kill 213 people in 1998.
   In Western Europe, from Edinburgh to Lisbon, from Brussels to Moscow, a large number of mosques, Islamic centres and schools are now under Saudi control.  This is bad news indeed, say moderate Muslim leaders.
   "The Wahhabis are everywhere and they are very dangerous," says Dr Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Muslim Institute at the Paris mosque.  He says that high profile Islamic institutions built with Saudi money, such as landmark mosques in Lyon, Èvry and Mantes-la-Jolie, are watched by the authorities and are careful to respect French laws and preach moderation.  The Wahhabi message is spread by clerics in small prayer groups.
   "They catch young people in prisons, in hospitals, in the streets and, little by little, draw them into the fundamentalist web," Boubakeur says.  "They teach intolerance and war and religious violence."  [p 124 a]
   In Italy, Shaykh Professor Abdul Hadi Palazzi, secretary-general of the moderate Italian Muslim Association, calls the Wahhabis "a menace."  After the attacks on the World Trade Centre towers, Italian authorities arrested men with links to the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan on charges of trafficking arms and explosives and recruiting for Al Qaeda.
   In Belgium, a leaked parliamentary intelligence committee report revealed that 30 of the 300 mosques in Belgium are run by fundamentalists who recruit jihad fighters, organise parliamentary training and openly support Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.
   Saudi Arabia has meanwhile given scholarships to thousands of impoverished foreign Muslims to study at the Islamic University of Medina [in Arabia].  Among Medina graduates are spiritual leaders of the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), Algerian Islamists who share Wahhabi ideology.

The GIA has slaughtered thousands of civilians in a continuing warfare against the country's secular government.
   Another Saudi graduate – of the Imam Ibn Saud University – is Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, a Jamaican-born British convert to Islam.  El-Faisal was arrested in London in February 2002 on charges of soliciting to murder and inciting racial hatred, and held for seven months before being released on bail, pending trial.  Titles of audiotapes featuring the cleric include "No Peace With the Jews" and "Jihad."  [page 124 a & b]
   Moderate British Muslims interviewed by Reader's Digest accuse el-Faisal's extremist preaching of radicalising Richard Reid, a Briton who attempted to blow up an Air France trans-Atlantic flight with a shoe-bomb.  They say el-Faisal also influenced Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan origin accused of involvement with the September 11 hijackers.
WAHHABI leaders, such as Abdullah Bin Matruk Al-Haddal, a preacher from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have reportedly condoned the actions of Osama Bin Laden.  Nevertheless, the Saudi government says it is co-operating with the West in the war on terrorism.
   Its behaviour doesn't match its words.  In November 1995 an American [U.S.] military installation in Riyadh was bombed.  Suspects were arrested but before American officials could question them, the government had them beheaded.  Less than a year later the Khobar Towers, a U.S. military complex near Dharban, Saudi Arabia, was also bombed and 19 U.S. servicemen were killed.  The U.S. investigation has been stonewalled by the Saudis, according to Louis Freeh, former head of the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S.A.] claims.

   Asked to comment by Reader's Digest, Prince Abdullah Bin Faisal Bin Turki Al-Saud said, "We could not trust the US Congress with raw intelligence.  Next day it would be with the Israelis."
   Nevertheless, in a statement to Reader's Digest in November 2002, the Saudi embassy in London said:  "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has for decades been taking action to root out terrorism, including cracking down on its sources of finance.  These efforts have intensified since the events of September 11.  Since then, Saudi Arabia has succeeded in blocking over $120 million in terrorist assets, working with the international coalition initiated by the USA.
   "Charitable organisations in the Kingdom are audited to ensure that there are no links to suspected groups."

FOR YEARS the West has turned a blind eye to the House of Saud's dangerous double game – officially saying they are close to the West, while nurturing a vehemently anti-Western religious ideology.  That era may be drawing to a close.
   "Times are changing," observed a specialist writing for the authoritative Jane's Islamic Affair Analyst magazine.  "The Saudis who thought they could behave as they wished, luxuriating in the south of Spain or desert palaces while quietly lending their backing to a violent and puritanical brand of Islam, are about to discover [that] the Americans are thinking the unthinkable."  [p 125 b]
   While still claiming that Saudi Arabia is an ally in the war on terrorism, the Bush administration's avowed intention is to foster democracy in the Middle East, including democracy in neighbouring Iraq.  Assuming that happens, it would lessen America's need for Saudi oil, military bases and, ultimately, the troublesome and increasingly vulnerable House of Saud.