TERRORIST RECRUITMENT AND RADICALIZATION IN SAUDI ARABIA

Middle East Policy, Winter 2006 by Hegghammer, Thomas

In studies of the contemporary Middle East, Saudi Arabia is often seen as a source of Muslim extremism, Much has been written - rightly and wrongly - about Saudi Arabia's alleged role as an exporter of recruits, ideology and money to violent Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda. Yet there is a remarkable paucity of detailed studies of the Islamist community within Saudi Arabia itself, and the prevailing view of Saudi lslamism is rather monolithic. There have notably been few attempts at understanding the dynamics and patterns of radicalization inside Saudi Arabia.1 In the literature on militant lslamism. there is even a tendency to fall back on tautological arguments, whereby the extremism of Saudi militants is explained by the fact that they are Saudi. Such analyses rely on the assumption that there is something about the religiosity in Saudi society or the Wahhabi religious tradition which predisposes Saudis for extremism. However, this does not explain why some Saudis become militants while others do not. Key questions have thus remained unanswered: Exactly who in Saudi Arabia become militants and why?

The current article addresses this question through an analysis of biographies of Saudi militants. The study focuses on the individuals who took part in the terrorism campaign that started in Saudi Arabia in May 2003.2 I will seek to answer two questions: First, who joined the organization known as al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula [QAP] and why? Second, to what extent does Saudi Arabia present specificities in terms of radicalization and recruitment to Islamist militancy?

One of the main objectives of this article is to fill an empirical gap in the growing corpus of profile-based studies of Islamist militancy.1 The individual-oriented approach to terrorism studies, which fell out of fashion in the mid-1980s, has regained popularity since 9/11 and has yielded significant new insights into the causes of Islamist violence. However, most of the empirical data for the existing studies are drawn from countries or regions other than Saudi Arabia.4 This article analyses profiles of militants drawn exclusively from the Saudi context, which will hopefully enable us to validate existing hypotheses and make comparisons with data from other regions.

The source data for this analysis is a collection of 240 biographies of Saudi militants, which I compiled over a two-year period from a broad range of primary and secondary sources, mostly in Arabic. In addition to international and local press reports, I have made extensive use of the militants' own publications, which contain a wealth of biographical information.5 Moreover, during a series of research trips to Saudi Arabia in 2004 and 2005, I conducted numerous interviews with former radicals as well as families and acquaintances of militants. My sample includes only people who have been directly or indirectly involved in militancy inside Saudi Arabia since 2002. I have included the names of all individuals who are mentioned in the jihudisi publications, as well as all those mentioned in press reports in connection with attacks, shoolouts or arrests. As with most databases of this kind, the profiles do not always contain the same type or amount of information. I shall therefore distinguish between, on the one hand, a core group of 70 individuals whose biographies are relatively extensive, and, on the other hand, the entire sample of 240.6

There are undoubtedly certain problems with this material. For a start, the information may not always be one hundred percent accurate. Regrettably. I have not had the chance to interview the militants themselves, because most are dead or in high-security prisons. Most biographical details come from jihadist publications and Interior Ministry statements that were produced in a context of intense mutual conflict and information warfare. Another problem is that the militants portrayed here may not be entirely representative of all the followers of the QAP. While the exact total number of QAP-related individuals is unclear, we know that Saudi authorities have arrested between 500 and 1000 suspected militants, while around 150 have been killed in attacks and shootouts.7 Having said this, our core sample of 70 is likely to include most of the prominent and active members of the QAP. These are, after all, the most relevant for understanding the organization.

The analysis will proceed in five steps. First, we shall provide a brief outline of the historical origins and context of the terrorism campaign launched in Saudi Arabia in 2003. Second, we shall present basic statistics about the militants and show their distribution according to criteria such as socioeconomic background and geographical and tribal origin. In the third part, we shall look at why and how so many of the QAP militants had gone to Afghanistan between 1999 and 2001. In the fourth section, we shall examine why and how the militants joined the QAP between 2002 and 2005. Fifth and finally, we shall look at our findings in a comparative perspective and identify differences and similarities with radicalization patterns in other countries and regions.