by Robert Lacey
King Khaled wanted guidance from the sheikhs. What should his soldiers be doing? Every Muslim knew the rules against violence in God’s house—that was what made the action of these violators so shocking. So was it permissible for Saudi troops to attack the kidnappers with guns and bombs inside the haram (holy place), with all that implied for damage to the Mosque?
The religious sheikhs, who included Bin Baz, played for time. Neither then, nor ever since, has any Saudi cleric admitted the slightest responsibility for the monster that, Frankenstein-like, they had nurtured in Juhayman. But their long delay in condemning him and his latter-day Ikhwan suggested deep embarrassment. The ulema granted the king an emergency fatwa (judgment) to take “all necessary measures” to “protect the lives of Muslims inside the mosque.” Then they sat down for three full days to ponder the detailed measures to be taken against the pious young men they had once blessed as their missionaries.
Mahdi Zawawi saw two women sauntering in the deserted Mosque courtyard with rifles. He could not believe his eyes. He was one of the helicopter pilots flying patrols over the haram, peering down on the rebels from a thousand feet. The women were dressed in black and totally veiled—with bandoliers crisscrossed over their robes, and automatic weapons in their hands.
“They were very tall,” he remembers. “And they were carrying themselves proudly. It was quite a sight—two women, scarcely anyone else, walking slowly round the Kaaba, talking to each other and wearing pistols in their belts! Those bedouin wives . . .”
Zawawi was flying at too great an altitude to see any more—or to hear the tak-tak-tak coming from the snipers in the minarets. When he got back to his base in Taif, in the mountains above Mecca, he discovered that a bullet had pierced his fuselage. The hole it made was less than half an inch from the fuel tank.
Down on the ground, meanwhile, a lull had descended. Events were proceeding in a curiously haphazard fashion.
“I went over as a spectator,” remembers Khaled Al-Maeena, then working as a sales director for Saudi Airlines in Jeddah. “I could see the snipers up in the minarets taking potshots. Beside me were some Yemenis who’d arrived wearing their white pilgrim towels. They knew nothing about the trouble. The government had blanked out the news for the first twenty-four hours. So these guys had turned up to do their umrah [small pilgrimage].”
Girls on a school roof were playing ball—unconcerned to be in sight, and also in range of the minarets. Arriving home in a nearby street after a long business trip, Maatooq Jannah knew nothing of the trouble until he knocked on his mother’s door to be greeted not by a welcome but by a horrified scream—“Trim down that beard at once!” she cried. “You’ll get us all killed!” In just a few hours the rebellious connotations of wearing a bushy Salafi beard had already spread around Mecca.
As the twilight darkened, the reporter Ali Shobokshi noticed how difficult it was becoming to see clearly in the open plaza around the Mosque, and he sensed a business opportunity. Like many a Saudi, the journalist had his own freelance enterprise on the side, a floodlight-rental business—so he hurried off to the Saudi command headquarters in the Shoubra Hotel to propose a deal. The princes had their fatwa in hand, and they were planning to attack and recapture the building that very night.
The bombardment started at 3:30 A.M. Bright flashes and deafening explosions blasted through the darkness as artillery on the hills around the town lobbed nonpercussive shells, intended to minimize physical damage, into the Mosque. Under cover of the shelling, groups of commandos raced for the haram gates, aiming particularly for the Bab Al-Salaam, the Peace Gate, in the middle of the 490-yard-long Safa-Marwah gallery, which ran along the eastern side of the Mosque. This was where, in normal times, pilgrims would move to and fro, replicating the Koranic story of Abraham’s wife Hagar as she ran desperately looking for water.
Juhayman and his marksmen were waiting. They fired down on the attackers, only opening the Peace Gate momentarily to pour out a stream of bullets into the ranks of the hapless commandos. The attack was a fiasco. Dozens of Saudi troops were killed. It was deeply disheartening. When a battalion of paratroopers from the northern city of Tabuk arrived soon after dawn, the princes insisted that they should go immediately into action.
Their commander, Colonel Nasser Al-Homaid, was not so sure. He suggested it might be better to wait until that evening, after darkness, when floodlights could be used to blind the defenders. But he was countermanded by his royal superiors.
“You are not a man!” shouted one of the senior princes, dismissing the colonel’s strategic thinking as cowardice. Loss of life did not matter anyway in this mission, as the royal commander saw it, since any soldier killed would be considered a martyr and would go straight to Paradise.
It is not known who this senior prince was. Turki Al-Faisal, then a junior prince, denies that any such conversation took place. But on Thursday, November 22, 1979, someone in royal authority certainly commissioned a daylight attack on the Mosque that was virtually identical to the attack that had just failed so miserably under cover of darkness.
These were days of high tension, and there are many reliable tales of angry princes snapping out contemptuous orders—starting with Prince Fahd shouting imperiously into the phone, first from Tunis and then from Jeddah when he got back on Friday. It is, regrettably, the Saudi way, and it is not an exclusively royal failing. Many Saudi teachers and even some university lecturers adopt the same dismissive, autocratic style with their students. Promotion? Positive reinforcement? These are, literally, foreign concepts when it comes to the exercise of authority in Saudi Arabia.
So later that day in broad daylight the brave Colonel Al-Homaid dutifully led his paratroopers into the Safa-Marwah gallery, where, as it happened, the supposed Mahdi, Mohammed Abdullah himself, was waiting in ambush with several dozen marksmen. A junior paratroop officer, Lieutenant Abdul Aziz Qudheibi, later described in the newspaper Al-Riyadh the courageous way in which his commanding officer met his death, along with many of his comrades. Since the paratroopers had flown south from Tabuk, there was a macabre sense in which an army from the north had been swallowed up—though not by angels.
The young Qudheibi himself was wounded and captured. The Ikhwan bathed his wounded forearm with water from the haram’s holy spring of Zamzam, which, they assured him, was more healing than any man-made disinfectant. Eager to convert the young officer, they shared the exciting news about the coming of the Mahdi. Henceforward, they explained, television, radio, khaki uniforms, and salaries paid by the Ministry of Defense would all be forbidden. These things were offensive to the Almighty.
. . .
Next day the ulema finally reported. Impatience at their tardiness had been expressed all around the Muslim world. From Cairo the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar had sent a telegram urging “quick decisive action”—by which he meant a meeting of the world’s leading Islamic scholars that would “save the Holy House of God.” This proposal to remove the issue from Saudi hands was an ill-concealed rebuke of the stewardship of Bin Baz and his colleagues, who had allowed this tragedy to happen.
The defenders of the three-day delay pointed out the difficulty of discovering what the religious sources had to say about violence in the haram. Their critics pointed to a verse in the Koran itself, the most reliable authority, that seemed to make the issue crystal clear: “Do not fight with them in the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it. But if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.”
This proved to be the verse on which the ulema ultimately based the verdict they issued late on Friday, November 23, 1979. But since they knew very well that the young men inside the Mosque were not unbelievers, they also issued an explanatory statement that set out the problem with which they had had to wrestle: “Although this verse has been revealed in connection with the infidels, its connotations include . . . those who acted like them.” They were not prepared, in other words, to deny the Muslim faith of the rebels.
Their language was curiously restrained. The sheikhs had a rich vocabulary of condemnation that they regularly deployed against those who incurred their wrath, from kuffar (infidels) to al-faseqoon (those who are immoral and who do not follow God). But the worst they could conjure up for Juhayman and his followers was al-jamaah al-musallaha (the armed group). They also insisted that the young men must be given another chance to repent. Before attacking them, said the ulema, the authorities must offer the option “to surrender and lay down their arms.”
By now those at the very top of the government had discovered the truth about the compromising relations between the religious sheikhs and Juhayman.
“They [the religious sheikhs] knew them all well,” says Prince Turki. “The so-called ‘Mahdi’ had been a pupil.”
Prince Nayef was anxious to make clear that his Mabahith (secret police) had identified Mohammed Al-Qahtani and a number of the Ikhwan as troublemakers. They had got them all safely locked up months before—only to release them at the request of Sheikh Bin Baz. As Fahd put it ruefully in an interview in January 1980: “We had earlier taken action against them, but some people intervened for their release out of good intentions. . . . Those who intervened believed that perhaps they were something useful for the propagation of Islam.”
These words are, so far as is known, the closest the Al-Saud ever got to issuing a rebuke to Bin Baz or to any member of the ulema for their enabling role in the Grand Mosque debacle. Princes are pragmatists. The fatwa of Friday, November 23, was a wishy-washy document, but its conclusion gave the government the authority they needed: “The ulema, therefore, unanimously agree that fighting inside the Sacred Mosque has become permissible. . . . All measures can be taken.”
As darkness fell that evening the floodlights were switched on in Mecca and a military jeep with loudspeakers drove slowly around the outside of the massive compound. “To all those who are underground and inside the Mosque,” crackled out the message that had been requested by the ulema. “We warn you so that you can save your souls. Surrender or we shall force you. . . . You have to surrender.”
No one moved. The jeep went on driving and broadcasting. Around and around the walls of the Grand Mosque it drove—for one hour, two hours, three hours, calling out the same surrender message, only to be greeted with silence. For some reason the snipers in their gun nests gave no response.
They might have done so if they had known what would happen next. Suddenly the truce was ended as, one by one, the Mosque’s towering minarets were struck by TOWs—tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-command-link guided missiles—that exploded with a deafening bang. As they struck the marble balconies, a cluster storm of shrapnel and orange flames carbonized every sniper in the gun nests. Now the minarets really were silent, as plumes of thick smoke drifted over the parapets.
The TOW missiles were part of the Kingdom’s enormous arms sales program with America, as were the M113 armored personel carriers that had started lining up around the Mosque, waiting to crash their way in. A small tracked armored vehicle that looked like an undersized tank with an automatic weapon on top, the M113 was a rare U.S. success story in the Vietnam War. It could hold up to eleven soldiers. As a succession of these motorized battering rams smashed into the gates, Saudi soldiers jumped out to pursue the rebels who retreated into the pillared arcades.
It was a bitter battle. None of these young assault troops had ever seen action like this, stalking deadly enemies a few miles from their homes. Creeping through the pillars, Lieutenant Mohammed Sudayri, only a year out of Sandhurst (Britain’s West Point), heard the sound of a magazine being loaded a few yards away.
“I knew it was not one of my men. I had checked every magazine before we started. They had all loaded up correctly. So I went round the pillar with my rifle ready.”
There the young officer—a distant cousin to Hissa, mother of the Sudayri Seven—saw a rebel standing, a few yards away, with his back to him, loading his magazine.
“My first thought was to arrest him. But I remembered how others of them had pretended to surrender, then produced hidden guns, daggers, grenades even, and killed us. They had no scruples. When one of their comrades died, they poured petrol on his face and burnt it so we could not find out who he was. They gave the job to their women. And whenever those women found one of our men, they cut off his private parts.”
Like all the troops, the lieutenant had heard the fatwa read out: “If they do fight you, then slay them.” This was a contest to the death. He raised his rifle, took point-blank aim at the rebel’s head, and pulled the trigger.
On the Brethren’s side, Mohammed Abdullah Al-Qahtani was enjoying his immortality as Mahdi. He had fought recklessly in the Safa-Marwah corridor. Now, as the Saudi soldiers advanced through the forest of pillars throwing hand grenades, he would run forward whenever he heard a grenade hit the marble. He would pick it up and fling it back in the brief second before it detonated, scoring hit after hit—until his luck ran out. As he bent down to pick up another grenade, it exploded. When the government eventually located the bloodstained proof of his mortality, they lost no time photographing his corpse, his face still curiously handsome, and published it in the newspapers.
Rumors had been swirling since the beginning of the siege, and according to one, King Khaled had sent for Al-Qahtani’s mother. The perplexed old king wanted to investigate the truth about her son, which she found easier to grasp than he did.
“If my son is the Mahdi, he will kill you,” she said bluntly. “If he is not, you will kill him.”
It is a good story, but the Al-Saud say it did not happen.
By Sunday morning Saudi forces controlled the Mosque from ground level upward, and Turki Al-Faisal went inside through the shattered gates to survey the damage with his brother Saud, the foreign minister. What struck him, he later told the author Yaroslav Trofimov, was the eerie silence in the shrine, which he had always experienced as so crowded—and the lingering aura of the evil that he knew had occurred there.
It was by no means over. As the government troops moved through the pillars, Juhayman had ordered his long-planned change of tactics, a strategic retreat down into the khalawi below the Mosque’s pavement. The insurgents had already stashed boxes of food, water, and spare ammunition in the honeycombed maze of prayer rooms and were planning to hold out for weeks. They refused all appeals to surrender. They could not expect to live very long or very pleasantly if they did turn themselves in. So they blackened their faces and holed up in the grubby little catacombs with mattresses, their womenfolk, some unfortunate children who had been brought along, plus what was left of their dates and water.
Saudi assault troops flooded the cellars and flung live electrical cables into the water. They had more success when, after some delay, they smashed holes in the Mosque pavement and dropped down canisters of paralyzing CS gas that had been flown in from Paris by French commandos. Technically known as o-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, CS was similar to the lethal chemical used by Russian troops to liberate the Moscow theater seized by Chechen rebels in 2002. An irritant that blocks breathing, CS gas “knocks out” those who inhale it and can cause death in sufficient concentrations. The compound used in Moscow killed more than 170 people.
One of the French commandos later claimed that he had briefly sneaked into the Grand Mosque before the attack, but this was denied by his commanding officer and by his two companions who had helped him train the Saudi gas handlers. By all reliable accounts, the three French agents did not fight in Mecca. They recall waiting up in Taif during the final attack with their telephones cut off, feeling rather helpless in their luxurious hotel rooms as they gave a Saudi medic advice on how to deal with the sinister effects of CS gas.
The hard work was done by Saudi assault troopers wearing gas masks, plodding day after day through the now filthy darkness of the khalawi catacombs, flinging out gas canisters, then stumbling forward through the toxic fumes.
“The def
enders,” remarks Prince Turki, “definitely had the advantage.”
Not a single rebel surrendered voluntarily; they sprang ambushes and fought viciously to the bitter end. Finally, on Tuesday, December 4, 1979, two weeks to the day from the beginning of the siege, the attackers burst through a metal door to find a huddled group of men, their faces blackened with soot, their ragged clothes soiled with blood and vomit. The gas had had its effect. Some were shivering uncontrollably. But one, hidden among crates of weapons and piles of colored pamphlets, retained the wild, and now surprisingly frightened, eyes of a cornered beast of prey.
“What is your name?” asked the Saudi captain, pointing his gun.
“Juhayman,” came the oddly subdued reply.
The capture of Juhayman did not end the rumors—indeed, they swirled more fiercely than ever. One described Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, commander of the National Guard and number three in the royal heirarchy behind Khaled and Fahd, going to see the blasphemous culprit as soon as he was captured. Juhayman was lying on the ground, and when the black-bearded commander-prince caught sight of his former National Guardsman, he started growling with rage. Handicapped with an embarrassing stutter, Abdullah was notorious for being a man of few words, and, according to the story, he wasted none on Juhayman. He simply walked across the cell and, without more ado, stood firmly on the rebel’s head. The story was not true, but it contained a truth—the House of Saud did not build a country the size of a small continent by being soft with their enemies.