TERRORIST RECRUITMENT AND RADICALIZATION IN SAUDI ARABIA

Middle East Policy, Winter 2006 by Hegghammer, Thomas

THE MILITANTS

Like most militant Islamist organizations, the QAP was an almost exclusively male organization. While most QAP militants had left their families behind, some wives accompanied their husbands in their underground existence. A handful of these wives performed minor logistical and media-related tasks for the organization, but none were involved in operations.20

The majority of QAP militants were in their late twenties at the beginning of the campaign in 2003. The average age was 27 with a range between 19 and 42. Even if we account for source-related problems, this is relatively high.21 For a start, it debunks the myth of Saudi militants as young and gullible teenagers. Moreover, it means the QAP militants were older than the members of many other militant Islamist groups.22 There are indeed indications that some QAP followers were teenagers, but they do not seem to have played important roles in the organization. The relatively high-age average probably reflects the fact that many of the militants were veterans from Afghanistan, as we shall see below.

The vast majority of QAP members were Saudi nationals. Between 5 and 10 percent were foreigners from countries such as Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Chad and Mauritania. Some foreign nationals, such as the Yemeni Khalid al-Hajj and the Morocean Karim Majati, are believed to have held positions of leadership. It is worth noting that practically no South Asian expatriate workers seem to have joined the QAP.

The Saudi militants came from many different parts of the country.23 Most major cities and governorates are represented in our sample (see figure 1 ).

In comparing the geographical distribution of the QAP militants to the distribution of the population as a whole, three important observations may be made.24 First, the regions commonly viewed as socially and religiously conservative (often described in Western media as "hotbeds of extremism"), such as the central region of Qasim or the southern regions of Asir, Jizan and Baha, are not overrepresented in our sample (see figure 2). After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, there was a widespread view that the southern regions of Saudi Arabia had produced a disproportionately large number of al-Qaeda recruits, because 11 of the 15 Saudi hijackers were from Baha or Asir.25 Our data contradict this view. There are two possible explanations for this discrepancy. Either southerners were overrepresented in the Afghan training camps but did not join the QAP in 2002, or southerners were never overrepresented in the training camps, but were specifically selected to partake in the 9/ 11 operation.26 It is worth noting that southerners are in fact underrepresented among Saudi fighters in Iraq." The data from the QAP and Iraq combined strongly suggest that there is no specifically southern radicalism in Saudi Arabia.

second, the sample does not contain a particularly large number of militants from regions that are considered poor or rural, such as the far south or the far north (see figure 2). Saudi militancy has sometimes been explained as a reaction of "neglected peripheries" to the economical or political domination of the Najd. Our data do not support this hypothesis.