TERRORIST RECRUITMENT AND RADICALIZATION IN SAUDI ARABIA

Middle East Policy, Winter 2006 by Hegghammer, Thomas

There is one clear common denominator in the life stories of the QAP members, however, and that is previous jihad experience, primarily from Afghanistan. At least 39 of the 70 people in our core sample are known to have participated in combat or training camps abroad before joining the QAP. In our sample there are clearly two separate generations of Saudi jihad veterans: those who went before 1996, and those who went after 1999 (see figure 6). The first generation is a heterogeneous group in terms of their jihad experience. Some went out to fight in the first Afghan war, while others went to Bosnia, Chechnya or elsewhere. These older veterans pursued one of two different paths after their first jihad ended. Some, like Saud al-Utaybi and Hamad al-Humaydi. returned to Saudi Arabia, led quiet lives and remained "passive Islamists" until 2003. Others, like Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin and Yusuf al-Ayiri, became "lifestyle jihadists" and developed close links with the al-Qaeda leadership. The second generation of jihad veterans all followed a relatively similar path. They went to Afghanistan between 1999 and 2001 and trained at the Faruq camp in Qandahar. Many of them fought alongside the Taliban on ihe Kabul front in late 2001 and left Afghanistan by way of Iran.40 This means that they had been through many of the same experiences and that many certainly knew each other in Afghanistan.

The crucial role of training camps and combat experience in radicalization processes is well known. In the early 1990s, Arab veterans from the first Afghan war distinguished themselves by their brutality and were accused of escalating conflicts in Algeria, Egypt, Bosnia and elsewhere. It is commonly accepted that the training camps in Afghanistan played an extraordinarily important role in the operational ization of al-Qaeda's recruits in the 1996-2001 period. Recruits who attended these camps underwent four important and interlinked processes: violence acculturization, indoctrination, training and relations-building. These processes are the key to understanding the extremism, ideology, abilities and intra-group loyalty of the militants who returned from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia in late 2001.

Another frequent and no doubt radicalizing consequence of taking part in jihad abroad was imprisonment and torture. A striking number of QAP militants - at least 14 in our core sample of 70 - had spent time in prison before 2003.41 Some, like Ali al-Harbi and Yusuf al-Ayiri, had been caught in the wave of arrests of jihad veterans after the 1995 and 1996 bombings in Riyadh and Khobar. Others, like Abd al-Azizal-Muqrin or Khalid al-Baghdadi, had been imprisoned abroad for their jihad activities in countries as diverse as Ethiopia or Pakistan. Yet others, like Amir al-Shihri and Isa al-Awshan, spent time in Iranian or Syrian prisons on the way back from Afghanistan in late 2001. Many of those who returned from Afghanistan in late 2001 or early 2002 were arrested upon arrival in Saudi Arabia and held for periods of one to six months. Most of the militants who spent lime in prison said they were subjected to physical and/or psychological torture.42