Al Makkren – Al Qaeda’s No. 1 in Saudi Arabia

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terrorism sources, the ringleader of the Saudi networks is Abu Hajar Abdul Aziz al-Makkren. An activist in the radical Muslim movement since the age of 17, this 35-year old Riyadhi was recruited and trained by Al Qaeda back in 1985 and has since amassed a wealth of experience in terrorist attacks in both open and built-up areas. For years, he traveled back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, visiting the bin Laden family’s ancestral Yemeni tribes. He cut his teeth on the famous Blackhawk Down battle of October 10, 1993 on the mean streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Beleaguered US special forces, Delta Force and Ranger contingents believed at the time they were fighting militiamen loyal to Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aideed. The combatants were actually members of Al Qaeda.

From Somalia, Makkren traveled via East and North Africa to Spain, where he smuggled purchased or stolen weapons to Muslim movements fighting in Algeria. In 1994, he moved to Zagreb to fight with an Al Qaeda brigade in the Bosnian conflict. Part of that brigade was equipped and trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers with whom al Qaeda was already cooperating.

Three years later, Makkren was in Afghanistan, an instructor in an Al Qaeda training camp.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington and the US invasion of Afghanistan in October that year, he took part in battles around the city of Khost. Makkren later fled to Pakistan and eventually reached Saudi Arabia. Last June, he took over from Youssef Abiri, who was killed in a battle with Saudi forces in Mecca, as Al Qaeda’s Saudi commander.

Al-Majati – Al Qaeda’s No.1 recruiter

Until a few weeks ago, Karim al-Majati, one of the 26, was Al Qaeda’s main liaison officer in Morocco. He has proved an exceptionally versatile terror executive. Known by his nom de guerre “Abu Elias”, the 30-year-old is married to a woman with US citizenship. His mother, a Frenchwoman, runs a cosmetics business in Saudi Arabia, which is a convenient front for his “business trips” between the kingdom and Morocco. Majati it was who planted Al Qaeda operatives in Saudi palaces as royal servants - an operation uncovered in detail for the first time by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terrorism sources in issue 135 on December 5.

Between the years 1997 and 2000, Al-Majati used the family business and his habit of travel as the front for his real employment as al Qaeda’s chief recruiter of Moroccan volunteers for training in the network’s camps in Afghanistan. He knew the men well enough to re-enlist them in 2002 and 2003 for Al Qaeda’s revived operation with allied groups in Morocco.

According to our sources, Majati was the mastermind of the five synchronized suicide attacks on Jewish and Spanish targets in Casablanca on May 16, which left 44, including 11 bombers, dead and more than 100 injured. He was also behind the Riyadh bomb assaults four days earlier that killed 35 people, including nine assailants, in three housing compounds for foreigners in the Saudi capital. Both attacks were meant to betoken the peril in store for the Moroccan and Saudi royal families.

Youssef Fikri, leader of the fanatical Moroccan Salafia Jihadia group and Majati’s top lieutenant, does not figure on the wanted list. He is already in a Moroccan prison and faces trial proceedings as a self-confessed murderer whose specialty is Jewish targets. From prison, he is believed to have aided Majati in setting up the Casablanca bombings.

Strong tribal core

Ten of the 26 people on Saudi Arabia’s most-wanted list hail from nine different Saudi tribes. Thirteen are city-dwellers from al-Qasim in Nejd province, Riyadh in the center of the country, Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz and Jizan in the south. The remaining three are foreign nationals. The suspects’ disparate city and tribal origins belie the Saudi officials’ steady insistence that most Al Qaeda operatives and backing centers on the Assir province bordering Yemen in the south.

In fact, several belong to the central tribes of the Hijaz. For instance, the Harb tribe, which inhabits lands near Medina and Mecca; the Utaiba tribe whose lands lie between Mecca and Riyadh; the Zahran tribe which controls part of the al-Baha district, south of the district of Mecca. Some come of tribal groups living in the oil-rich Eastern Provinces. Ghamid tribesmen, also from the al-Baha district, have surfaced in terrorist operations.

Analysis of the wanted men’s identities brings out three outstanding features:

1. Al Qaeda and its support base have swelled and seeped through the Saudi kingdom in the two years since 9/11. Fourteen of the 19 suicide-hijackers were found then to have hailed from Assir. Saudi and US counter-terrorist accordingly focused their pursuit on that region where heavy al Qaeda concentrations were thought to be found. The main thrust of these operations in the past now appears to have been much too narrow. Osama bin Laden’s network has spread far and wide and penetrated Saudi society more deeply than admitted.

2. Quite amazingly, members of the same fundamentalist Wahhabi Utaiba tribe that led the November 21, 1979 revolt in the Grand Mosque in Mecca, have joined al Qaeda as combatants. Their insurrection 24 years ago against the Westernization of Saudi society and government corruption was crushed and Utaibi insurgents put to death – but not before they seized the Grand Mosque and Black Stone and brought the House of Saud close to collapse by their claim that the ulema, the clerical establishment and the throne it supported were spiritually bankrupt and not fit for the authority of determining which Muslims were heretics. This power is paramount in the eyes of fundamentalists. So fierce was their uprising that it defied the combined efforts of the Saudi Army and the National Guard for two weeks.

3. Al Qaeda’s new Saudi networks, by declaring war on foreign infidels – Christians, Jews and other non-believers – have for the first time brought together two Sunni Islamic schools of fundamentalism, those fighting what they regard as the taint of heresy in the kingdom and those dedicated to war against unbelievers at large. Organizations that once scorned Bin Laden’s venture have now come in under his umbrella, providing him with a far broader entrée that once conceived into different parts of the kingdom. Domestic Islamic radicals have for the first time gained the operational ability to wage a war of terror against the perceived foes of their faith.

A case in point is the participation of Abdel Majid Manie of the Utaiba tribe, whose name appears on Riyadh’s most wanted terrorists list. Manie’s tribe is dedicated to combating what it regards as the root of evil in the kingdom, deviation from the austere precepts of state Wahhabism, the rationale of the 1979 Mecca Uprising. His kinsman Jamiyan al-Utaibi led the revolt, his father is a blind cleric much venerated by the tribe which faithfully obeys his fatwas.

Al Qaeda’s threat to the Saudi throne is seriously aggravated by its strong religious bond with the Utaibi fundamentalists.

A large number of terrorists graduated from a university called Imam Mahmood bin Saud, whose center is in Riyadh with branches in Buraida, capital of Qasim district, in Jeddah and smaller cities in the Hijaz and Jizan provinces. Of the four Islamic universities in the kingdom, this is the largest and appears to be the main reservoir for al Qaeda recruits and supporters.

Town-dwellers

Although they are townsmen, one particular group chooses to live in small remote towns, far from the large urban centers of heresy. This tendency of Islamic radicals is not new to Islam or to Saudi Arabia. Muhammad and Islamic reformers who came after him were wont to seclude themselves in isolated places to consolidate their positions and strengthen their faith. Al Qaeda may have adopted this practice for adherents seeking to prepare themselves spiritually in seclusion for the move into operational activity in the al Qaeda network. The families of some of the wanted men claim that one day their sons disappeared, some several years ago. They may have gone through this reclusive phase in remote locations preparatory to their integration in the terrorist network in the big towns.

After Integration

Ten men on the wanted list who are not identified as tribesmen lived in four cities - three in the Hijazi towns of Mecca, Medina and Jizan; one in Buraida, the capital of the Qasim district north of Riyadh. The last is known for piety and conservatism and is the source of many groups in opposition to the throne and the national religious hierarchy.

The large number of Hijazis among al Qaeda activists can be attributed in part to the government bureaucracy’s preferential policies from the early 1980s towards the Najd, where King Fahd and his Sudairi brothers endeavored to build their power base, to the detriment of the Hijaz. This discrimination sowed a sense of injustice in the Hijaz and a harking back to symbols of the past, such as the bygone Hashemites and the old non-Wahhabi Sunni schools like the Maliki and the Shafi’l as expressions of opposition to the Saudi throne. Osama bin Laden found the Hijaz to be a fruitful source of recruits to his flag.

More than spin needed to lift Assad regime's image

Our sources say it is safe assume that it was the former secretary of state who pulled wires for the rare New York Times interview to take place with the Syrian leader – a chance for him to polish Syria’s tarnished image with the American public.

Additional polish was supposed to be applied last week by Syria’s minister for expatriate affairs, Butheina Shaaban. She launched a charm offensive among American Jewish leaders to break some ice ahead of possible progress in setting up peace talks with Israel.

Shaaban has been portrayed in the United States as spokeswoman of the new breed of young, liberal Syrian bureaucrats. Fayez Sayegh, director of Syria’s official news agency under Assad’s father, the late president Hafez Assad, was also brought back into play as a “talking head”.

However, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources, Shaaban’s mission was not exactly a smash success. The violent accusations she flung at Israel and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in her address to Los Angeles Jewish leaders Monday, December 8, were not very popular; neither was her version of events in Iraq and the US military role in the country. In fact, voices were raised and harsh recriminations exchanged.

In the Middle East arena, meanwhile, the Syrian president is described by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Beirut sources as swinging two ways. He clings to his links with the four most dangerous terrorist groups in the Arab Muslim world – the pro-Saddam guerrillas, Al Qaeda, Hizballah and Palestinian rejectionist terrorists. Yet he also persists in his private conversations with semi-official Americans, without coming down one way or the other on any issue.

He looks as though he is performing a delicate balancing act on a tightrope that no one can quite see.

Assad’s impenetrable maneuvers have had three important consequences, as DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive sources have discovered.

1. Al Qaeda Begins to Pull up Stakes in Syria

Al Qaeda’s top command appears to have decided on a course of prudence. Tuesday, December 9, secret emergency orders were issued to fighters and activists present in Syria to depart the country with all possible speed. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s counter-terrorism sources, network members planning travel to Syria were instructed to cancel their plans, warned that on Syrian soil they now ran the risk of arrest, interrogation with torture and being handed over to the enemy – the United States.

Ironically, the fundamentalist network’s order was couched in similar terms to the advisories published by the US and British governments warning citizens against traveling to Middle East locations for fear of al Qaeda terrorist attacks.

Our sources are trying to establish what proportion of al Qaeda strength scattered across Syria – in Damascus, the madressas around the capital, and northern towns like Homs and Aleppo – picked up the order to leave and obeyed it. Or where those who did, went next. But one thing is clear: The bond of trust that governed al Qaeda’s relations with President Assad and his military intelligence for three years – and provided the terrorists with free passage between Syria and Iraq as well as the unrestricted use of Syria’s air and sea ports – has been seriously weakened.

It is too soon to tell how this apparent turning-of-the-tide will affect the level of warfare American and coalition forces face in Iraq from Syrian-Arab combatants partnered by Al Qaeda terrorists. DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military and counter-terrorism sources have not confirmed news reports this week of “search and destroy” missions carried out by US special forces inside Syria to halt the influx of terrorists into Iraq. What is certain is that US special forces deployed in the frontier area do occasionally cross into Syria.

2. Syria and Jordan zoom into crisis

Syrian president Assad and Jordan’s King Abdullah have never been the best of friends and rarely had a good word to say about one another. Their respective fathers, Hafez Assad and King Hussein, also stayed at arm’s length although over the years they came to respect – and beware of – each other.

The sons do not share their fathers’ restraint. Syrian-Jordanian frictions simmering for the past months have now flared up to such a degree that Damascus abruptly stopped construction of a dam on the Yarmuk River that was to be hub of a joint water project. Tempers in Damascus rose during last week’s visit to the White House by King Abdullah. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Washington sources, Assad flew off the handle to his close advisers, accusing the Jordanian monarch of maliciously stirring up ill will against him in his talks with the US president.

According to reports reaching Damascus, Abdullah asked Bush why no American action was taken against Syria and why it was allowed to continue to move fighters into Iraq.

To even the score, the presidential palace ordered the Syrian media into action. On Tuesday, December 9, they lampooned Abdullah as wearing a paper crown and hard-selling Israeli military and financial interests in Iraq. Syrian newspapers cast aspersions on Jordanian firms for the “crime” of acting as agents for Israeli manufacturers supplying food and construction to Iraq.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly sources in Amman report that Faisal Fayez, Jordan’s new prime minister, got on the phone to top Syrian business leaders in an attempt to pour oil on troubled waters, with no success.

The next step predicted by some Middle Eastern military and intelligence sources as par for the course would be the call-up of reserves in Syria and Jordan and military buildups on both sides of the neighbors’ shared frontier.

3. Assad’s New York Times interview censored for home consumption

While the cause of much speculation in the West, Bashar Assad’s comments to The New York were carefully edited before they reached the average Syrian in the streets of Damascus.

The presidential censors made sure that such “sensitive” remarks, as those relating to possible peace talks with Israel and events in Iraq, were expunged before the paper hit domestic news stands.

Several Middle Eastern Internet sites have taken Assad to task for repressive practices which are compared to the methods of North Korea’s Kim Jong II. The website of the Syrian communist party, an important ally of Assad’s Baath party, stated: “The deletions were the best and clearest examples of the kind of mentality at work in the presidential palace and the fossilized philosophy of a president who still believes leaders can say one thing in English and then make it look different in Arabic.”

As one editor put it: To think that some Westerners still believe that Syria has a forward-looking, reform-minded ruler!

Reformist factions falling apart

For two weeks, his speech was at the center of a war of words between the radical and reformist camps. Ali Emami-Rad, a minority legislator, described reformists as “the Zionists who have infiltrated the Majlis”. During a particularly stormy parliamentary session, epitaphs such as “a spokesman for Israel Radio’s Persian Service” and “Zionist Israeli agents” filled the air.

As the debate raged on, other senior legislators were beaten up badly enough to require hospital treatment. Leading reformist Mohsen Mir-Damadi, chairman of the parliamentary foreign affairs and defense committee – and one of the Khomeinist students who seized the US embassy in Teheran in 1979 -- was attacked brutally by Hizballah thugs during a visit to Khatami’s hometown of Yazd, where he was to make a speech.

Another legislator, Issa-Gholi Ahmadi-Nia, was attacked in the oil city of Masjed Soleiman, where he was to lecture on the contribution of the Bakhtiari tribe toward Iran’s democratization. Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mussavi-Lari, essentially a puppet controlled by the radicals, warned that if the situation continued, he would “spill the beans on the thugs”. But another parliamentarian, Nasse Ghavami, did not wait for any bold move by the minister. He declared in parliament that since the reformist victory in the previous election four years ago, gangs have been trying to terrorize the freedom fighters. A Western diplomat in Teheran said the situation reminded him of the way Hitler used Nazi thugs to gain power in Germany in the 1930s.

Under constant attack, the reformist camp – made up of 18 factions ranging from progressive clerics to secular Iranians with Western values -- is losing the cohesion that held it together for the past four years.

Jebheh-Ye Mosharekat E Eslami, a progressive secular party led by Mohammad-Reza Khatami, the brother of the president, approved a series of decisions this week on the importance of promoting democracy and restricting the interference of religious authorities in everyday life. Militant clerics belonging to another reformist faction, the Majma-E Rouhanioun-E Mobarez, refused to join forces with the Mosharekat. The declaration was subsequently disavowed by the faction’s leaders, but it is clear that it has moved closer to the pro-government conservative-religious camp.

The radical Jamiat-E Mo’Talefeh-Ye Eslami faction, the Islamic coalition, also held its conference this week. It decided to do its utmost to block a reformist majority in the incoming legislature.

If the radicals persist in their plan to take over parliament by hook or by crook, they will be confronted with an electorate that votes with its feet. Less than 30 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the municipal elections two years ago. But the Majlis vote is no local contest – it is a bellwether of support for the government. Since most of the country’s voters were born after Iran’s Islamic revolution or children at the time, turnout will be a key indicator of the degree of support the Teheran regime enjoys. Iranian leaders need a strong mandate to meet powerful challenges in the international arena. They are also well aware of the Shiite Muslim precept that a government that has no popular support has no reason to exist.

Radicals want people’s court to punish “traitors”

Under the first no-win scenario, Iran would have to comply with International Atomic Energy Agency demands and open its facilities to international inspection that, in the words of one hardline cleric, would “desecrate the country’s holy places -- including the grave of Ayatollah Khomeini – and expose Iran’s most precious military secrets to alien eyes”.

Iran would have to abandon forever its dreams of building an Islamic bomb – a project in which Iran has sunk billions of dollars over the past 18 years.

Under the second option, Iran would refuse to sign the protocol and then go forward with resumed uranium enrichment and its nuclear bomb program.

In that case, Europe would align itself with the United States and demand that the U.N. Security Council impose economic sanctions on Iran, including an embargo on its oil exports. Again, the Tehran regime, already under pressure at home from opponents itching for active outside support, would face imminent collapse as the Iranian economy tanked.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in Tehran report mounting demands in Iran for the establishment of a secret, revolutionary court to try the officials who advised the government to capitulate to Western pressure. One top Iranian has already fallen victim. Ali-Akbar Salehi, Iran’s delegate to the IAEA, has been dismissed and replaced by a foreign ministry official. Salehi, the chief technocrat who pushed for Iran to sign the protocol and cease uranium enrichment, was widely regarded back home as particularly knowledgeable about the workings of the IAEA, and his recommendation carried significant weight.

But there’s a catch to setting up a court to make heads roll: Iran’s omnipotent spiritual leader Ali Khamenei personally entrusted the leading miscreant, the head of the national security council, Johat-Ol Eslam Hassan Rouhani, to represent Iran in negotiations with European foreign ministers and the chairman of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, on the nuclear issue. And Khamenei is above criticism in today’s Iran.

The radicals have meanwhile busied themselves with finding devices to avoid the trap and continue building the bomb. They must fend off the heavy pressure coming from ElBaradei and the European Union to sign the protocol soon. In early January, EU foreign policy executive Javier Solana is due in Tehran with a big stick. But efforts will be made to postpone signing as long as possible, perhaps even until mid-January, a week or two before the nuclear watchdog’s governing board meets in Vienna and expects action from Tehran. Iran would thus avoid censure and the risk of a losing confrontation with the Security Council.

But then, the Iranians could drag the process out for many more months, claiming legitimately that the Majlis will be dissolved in late January for a February election and ratification must await a new parliament, in which the hard-liners will hold a majority.

This will give the Islamic republic time to keep its uranium enrichment plants humming and international pressures at bay.

Some Iranian scientists maintain that Iran is no more than six months away from building a nuclear bomb. But most estimate at least 18 months. Iran will meanwhile spin out its commitments for as long as possible.

Beyond Iran’s elections, Tehran is also banking on the coming US presidential vote for salvation. They believe President George W. Bush will be too preoccupied with the crisis in Iraq and campaigning to make a military move on Iran.

The deep divisions in the Bush administration over a tough action against Iran – mainly between the State Department and Pentagon – are not lost on the ayatollahs in Tehran. The fact that Congress earmarked a paltry $1.5 million to fund Iranian opposition groups in this year’s budget was taken as a sign of Bush’s unwillingness to confront the Teheran regime. Iran hopes it can continue to dissuade Europe from aligning itself with the United States.

Blaming the EU for not making good on its promise of non-military nuclear technology will be one of the pretexts offered by Iran for reneging on its pledge to suspend uranium enrichment. However, Britain, Germany and France are obliged by their commitment to the United States to withhold the transfer until Iran signs the Additional Protocol and delivers proof of renouncing all ambitions to attain a nuclear bomb.

While the chicken-and-egg argument goes back and forth, Iran is advancing on its objective.