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NEWS & LETTERS, July 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarrySaudi Arabia murderThe gruesome beheading of Paul Johnson, a U.S. engineer and employee of Lockheed Martin, in Saudi Arabia on June 18, has been one of the latest in a series of terrorist attacks by "Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula." A few hours after the announcement of Johnson’s murder, the Saudi police reported that it had killed Al Muqrin, an Al Qaeda leader. According to an Islamic fundamentalist website, however, Johnson had been kidnapped by Al Qaeda members who were aided by Saudi security forces. The latest wave of terrorist attacks has targeted foreign workers as well as Saudi citizens. In April, a massive suicide car bomb tore through the Saudi Arabian police headquarters in Riyadh. It killed four and wounded 148. On May 1, gunmen shot Saudi and foreign employees at the office of ABB Lummus, an oil contractor in Yanbu. They killed five and tied the naked body of one victim to the back of their car and dragged him around, boasting of a "Jihad" against the "infidels" before they were killed by security forces. On May 31, gunmen stormed into an office and then a housing compound in Khobar. They rampaged through the homes in search of Westerners and took many hostages. During a 25-hour standoff, they killed 22 foreign civilians including Asians and Africans. Most of the gunmen then fled. Saudi Arabia is home to six million foreign workers and professionals who are from neighboring Arab countries as well as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, England and the U.S. They constitute a quarter of the country’s 23 million inhabitants. The Saudi kingdom from its inception has been the product of an alliance with the Islamic fundamentalist Wahhabi sect. The fact that some fundamentalists have turned against some sectors of the Saudi leadership, does not make the Saudi regime less reactionary. The U.S. administration is not only concerned about a drop in Saudi oil exports but depends on several trillion dollars of Saudi deposits in U.S. banks and stock market investments that buttress the U.S. economy. --Sheila Sahar |
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