Path of Blood , livre ebook

P ATH OF BLOOD tells the gripping and horrifying true story of the underground army that Osama Bin Laden created in order to attack Al Qaeda s number one target: his home country, Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden s aim was to conquer the land of the Two Holy Mosques, the birthplace of Islam, and, from there, to re-establish a Muslim Empire that could take on the West and win.
Following the invasion of Afghanistan and the run-up to the Iraq War, the West was unpopular with many Saudis and Al Qaeda s leadership in Saudi Arabia was able to lure impressionable young recruits through a mix of religious and political rhetoric, as well as by promising them everlasting glory and heavenly bliss. Many joined, and a murderous and highly visible campaign of kidnappings, shootings, and bombings was launched across the Kingdom.
Thomas Small and Jonathan Hacker use new insider evidence to expose the real story behind Al Qaeda. Far from the image jihadists present of themselves as single-minded holy warriors, these self-proclaimed lions of Islam are revealed to be riven by infighting and lacking basic discipline. Yet the threat they posed was unquestionable. They killed without remorse, targeted innocent civilians, and even tried to acquire a nuclear bomb.
Drawing on unprecedented access to Saudi government archives, interviews with top intelligence officials both in the Middle East and in the West, as well as with captured Al Qaeda militants, and drawing on exclusive video footage captured from Al Qaeda safe houses, Path of Blood tells the full story of Al Qaeda s Saudi campaign and the desperate and determined attempt by the Kingdom s internal security services to put a stop to it.
In memory of my friend Alexandros Petersen, 1984-2014

For Kim, and Nina, and Sam
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com , or write us at the address above.
Copyright 2014 by Thomas Small and Jonathan Hacker
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1690-2
Contents
Dedication
Copyright
List of Illustrations
Preface to the American Edition
Introduction
Dramatis Personae
Map 1 Saudi Arabia
Map 2 Riyadh
Prologue: The Head in the Freezer
1 Blood Moon Rising
2 Facing Facts
3 The Riyadh Compounds
4 A Bloody Success
5 The Prince s Crackdown
6 Salvaging a Friendship
7 A Ruthless New Leader
8 The List of Twenty-Six
9 Operation Volcano
10 Terror Strikes the Coasts
11 The Khobar Massacre
12 The Assassination Cell
13 The Network Splits
14 Stamped Out
Epilogue: A New Kind of Assassin
Glossary
Timeline
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About the Author
List of Illustrations
1 Al Qaeda tapes
2 King Fahd neighbourhood raid, 20 July 2004
3 Electronics training
4 Piecing together the evidence
5 Riyadh compound bombings, 12 May 2003
6 Crown Prince Abdullah
7 Yusuf al-Ayiri, killed 30 May 2003
8 Turki al-Dandani tracked down, 3 July 2003
9 Ghuday farm shootout, 28 July 2003
10 Jazan hospital siege, 23 September 2003
11 Prince Nayef
12 Abu Ayub
13 Abdullah al-Rashoud records a propaganda video
14 Isa al-Awshen
15 Cell class photo
16 Amr al-Shihri s funeral
17 Painting a truck bomb
18 The attack team with the Muhaya truck bombs
19 The Emergency Forces HQ bombers
20 Prince Muhammad
21 The Muhaya compound the morning after the bombing
22 Ali al-Khudayr
23 Campfire
24 Attempted rescue of Khalid al-Farraj by Abu Ayub and his men, 29 January 2004
25 Lorry-driving training
26 Children with guns
27 Abdulaziz al-Mudayhish before the Washm Street bombing
28 The 72 Heavenly Virgins
29 The Washm Street bombing, 21 April 2004
30 Crowd cheering in the aftermath of the Safa neighbourhood raid, 22 April 2004
31 Police questioning a young man after the Safa raid
32 An Al Qaeda cell at prayer
33 The Khobar massacre, 29 May 2004
34 The Soha Oasis Hotel, Khobar
35 Victims of the Khobar massacre in a stairwell
36 Kidnapping victim Paul Johnson, Riyadh, June 2004
37 The body of Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, 18 June 2004
38 The MOI headquarters attack, 29 December 2004
39 MOI snipers scramble to safety: the battle of Rass, 3-5 April 2005
40 The battle of Rass, day three
41 Captured AQ member Osama al-Wahaybi in a police car, 3 July 2005
42 The Dammam siege, 3-5 September 2005
43 Fahd al-Juwayr
44 Preparation for the Abqaiq oil refinery attack, 24 February 2006
45 The Munasaha programme
46 Abdullah al-Asiri, the would-be assassin of Prince Muhammad
47 Assassination attempt on Prince Muhammad, 28 August 2009 16
Preface to the American Edition
We delivered the final draft of the first edition of this book to our publisher in London in early May 2014. Within weeks, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was dominating the headlines. * It had already taken effective control of huge swaths of territory in eastern and central Syria, but on June 9, 2014, it stunned the world by conquering Mosul, Iraq s second-largest city. In the process it captured worrying quantities of advanced weaponry left behind by the fleeing Iraqi army as well as hundreds of millions of dollars from the city s central bank. Jihadist militancy was, once again, all that anyone could talk about.
This initial storm of events then took a gruesome turn. Shi ites and other recalcitrant Muslims were rounded up and executed; ancient Christian and Yazidi communities were driven from their homes or slaughtered; Kurdish enclaves, and even Kurdistan itself, were threatened; Western journalists and charity workers were publicly beheaded by a masked jihadist with a British accent; and reports flowed in that the number of soldiers under ISIS s command was increasing exponentially and included recruits from Europe, Australia, and the United States. This new spectre, we were told, was even worse than Al Qaeda.
Yet despite what is commonly thought, ISIS is not essentially different from Al Qaeda. After all, Al Qaeda in Iraq, a notoriously violent branch of Bin Laden s diffusely organized global network, was the most prominent of the several jihadist groups that established the Islamic State in Iraq, as it was then called. They joined forces in October 2006, and it was only much later, in February of 2014, after it had successfully thrown its hat in the ring of the Syrian civil war and begun to set up basic governmental institutions, that ISIS was officially disowned by Bin Laden s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Not because its mysterious leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was too violent. But because he had gone over Zawahiri s head and effectively claimed the leadership of the global jihadist movement for himself.
The new generation of jihadist recruits have so far been inclined to accept his leadership. Not only is it true that nothing attracts a militant like military success, but also, in July 2014, ISIS announced that Baghdadi would thenceforth be known as Caliph Ibrahim. It was a rallying cry and a statement of his pretensions to universal Islamic authority. ISIS then went on to emphasize these pretentions further by saying that it was dropping all geographic referents from its name. From now on, ISIS would be the Islamic State, plain and simple. So powerful has ISIS s appeal become that Al Qaeda affiliated groups around the world have switched allegiance overnight and even Zawahiri himself has extended a palm branch to Baghdadi. ISIS is becoming Al Qaeda with an alternative leadership.
This is a book about the campaign of terror that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) carried out inside Saudi Arabia between 2003 and 2006. That campaign, which aimed to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and erect a Taliban-style Islamist regime in its place, has some connections to what is going on in Syria and Iraq today. The failure of Bin Laden s designs on the Kingdom has had far-reaching consequences on the entire global jihadist movement. Knowledge of this campaign is indispensable for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of what, though the Obama administration calls it the Overseas Contingency Operation, is really just the latest phase of President Bush s war on terror.
What ISIS is now accomplishing in Syria and Iraq is no different from what AQAP sought to accomplish in Saudi Arabia, or what they went on to attempt in Yemen in 2011 when for several months it held a sizeable chunk of Yemeni territory and set up a government there. What is more, AQAP leader Abdulaziz al-Muqrin s posthumously published A Practical Course for Guerrilla War , cobbled together out of articles he wrote for AQAP s magazine Muattar al-Battar in 2003 and 2004, remains the standard textbook for would-be revolutionary jihadists, including ISIS. As will become clear to the reader, Muqrin s ideas on how best to terrorize the populace and recruit the vulnerable, to overthrow the state and re-establish it along Islamist lines, are being closely followed by Baghdadi and the rest of the ISIS leadership.
However, ISIS has managed to fulfill its ambitions to a far greater degree than AQAP ever did. Why is that? The answer lies in Path of Blood s second primary protagonist: the Saudi state.
Al Qaeda, AQAP, ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab-under whatever name, Islamist militancy likes nothing better than a power vacuum. This was true of Al Qaeda in the early years, when it put down roots in