TERRORIST RECRUITMENT AND RADICALIZATION IN SAUDI ARABIA

Middle East Policy, Winter 2006 by Hegghammer, Thomas

Another, more qualitative approach to the analysis of militants' backgrounds consists of identifying the different functional categories within a given group and looking for correlations between a member's background and his role in the organization. In the QAP, one can distinguish relatively easily among three categories of members: the "top commanders," the "ideologues" and the "fighters."43 The top commanders were "lifestyle jihadists" from the first generation of veterans.44 They had left for Afghanistan at a very young age (16-17 years) between 1989 and 1991, i.e., just too late for the jihad against the Russians. They had distinguished themselves by their physical abilities and leadership skills and worked as instructors in training camps. They had remained active militants throughout the 1990s, spent years in prison and suffered severe torture. The ideologues, on the other hand, had little or no practical jihad experience.45 They had all studied religion, either officially at university or privately with shaikhs.46 Most of them had mediocre resumes or failed careers in the religious sector, and none of them were particularly well-known as religious scholars before the outbreak of the campaign.

The fighters were a more heterogeneous group that can be broken down into three subcategories. The first and operationally most important category consisted of the young jihad veterans who had gone to Afghanistan after 1999 and returned in late 2001.47 They had trained in Bin Ladin's camps during al-Qaeda's "peak" and had left Afghanistan against their own will, so they returned highly trained and motivated. Most of the mid-level leaders of the QAP, such as Turki al-Dandani, Mitib al-Muhayyani and Faisal al-Dukhayyil, were drawn from this category. The second subcategory consisted of older jihad veterans who had "retired" in the mid- or late 1990s and were mobilized by the QAP campaign in 2003.48 They were experienced and respected fighters but lacked the leadership skills to become top commanders. The third category consisted of the new recruits, i.e., people who had been too young to go to Afghanistan but were recruited into the QAP from 2002 onwards. Many of them, such as Bandar al-Dukhayyil and Mansur Faqih, were friends and relatives of jihad veterans or QAP members. In addition to the commanders, ideologues and fighters, the QAP also relied on a certain number of "helpers" who sympathized with the core members and offered various kinds of assistance but did not take an active part in the fighting. The background of these individuals is not well known, but many seem to have been young sympathzsers without previous jihad experience.

Our review of the militants' backgrounds has shown the limits of socioeconomic explanations of the QAP violence and underlined the importance of the so-called "Afghanistan factor" in both the radicalization and the organization of the militants. However, this raises two intriguing questions: First, why and how did they go to Afghanistan in the first place? second, why and how did they go from being war veterans to becoming terrorists inside Saudi Arabia?