TERRORIST RECRUITMENT AND RADICALIZATION IN SAUDI ARABIA

Middle East Policy, Winter 2006 by Hegghammer, Thomas

This is not to say that there was no topdown recruitment to Afghanistan in Saudi Arabia in this period. There were indeed people who sought to influence others to go to Afghanistan. Some, but far from all, were connected to the local al-Qaeda network supervised by al-Ayiri. A common recruitment ground was an informal religious study group or gathering^sup 70^ Recruiters were also active in schools.^sup 71^ They would invite pupils to evening lectures and social occasions and give them pamphlets to read. Then they would show jihad videos from Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere, and thus motivate people to travel to Afghanistan.^sup 72^ There were also recruiters in Mecca who were particularly active during the pilgrimage or the last ten days of Ramadan, when many young Saudis go to the Holy City.^sup 73^' Radical imams and scholars also played a very important role. Many of them encouraged their students to go to Afghanistan.^sup 74^ It must be noted, however, that clerics who recommended students to go to Afghanistan seem to have been more interested in assisting the Taliban regime than Bin Ladin's organization.^sup 75^

Many of the Saudis who went to Afghanistan between 1999 and 2001 would never return. An unknown number, possibly close to a thousand, were killed in combat before or after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.^sup 76^ Others were captured and sent to Guantanamo. Those who made it back to Saudi Arabia were the prime recruitment target for al-Qaeda's new project: Jihad on the Arabian Peninsula.

RECRUITMENT TO "QAP"

While those who went to Afghanistan may have had varying intentions and levels of awareness of what their journey would entail, those who joined the nascent QAP in 2002 and 2003 knew the stakes: they would be killing people inside Saudi Arabia. To the vast majority of the Islamist community in the kingdom, the concept of a jihad at home was alien; those who did not consider it illegitimate saw it as counterproductive. The returnees from Afghanistan, on the other hand, viewed things differently for a number of reasons. First, and most important, they had been battle-hardened and indoctrinated in training camps and combat. They had a more global, anti-American and intransigent ideological vision than most radicals who had never left the kingdom. Second, many of the returnees had problems reintegrating into society, not only because they were radicalized, but also because their absence had marginalized them economically. Moreover, arrest and interrogation upon their return from Afghanistan left many feeling betrayed by state and society.77 Faced with these and other adaptation problems, many of them ended up socializing mostly with other Afghan veterans. Hence, the internal social networks in the jihadist community strengthened at the expense of their links with the rest of the Islamist community.

This does not mean that the returnees were a completely isolated group. As we have seen above, the QAP did include a number of people who had no previous jihad experience. Some, though not all, of these new recruits were linked to the Afghan veterans by pre-existing social networks such as friends, relatives or neighbours. The expansion of the QAP as an organization seems to have followed a pattern of concentric circles. In the beginning, most of the QAP recruits were Afghan Arabs or their acquaintances; as the campaign evolved and the organization became known, others joined in.