Thread: The siege of Mecca

I stumbled upon an article about this long forgotten event that occured 30 years ago which may have a lot to do with the rise of Al Qaida since the people involved, the event in itself bears more than a passing resemblance with what we're currently witnessing now. So I thought I could start a thread about it.

It is close to 30 years since the “siege” of Mecca, when the most sacred of Islam’s shrines, the Grand Mosque, was stormed and taken over by an armed contingent of religious zealots numbering over 300, led by a young man who believed himself to be the promised Mehdi come to cleanse the earth of sin and bring the kingdom of God to man.

That seminal event, which took place on the first day of the new Islamic century, has been all but forgotten, while little has been written about it that coincided with facts. It was left to an intrepid journalist, the Ukraine-born Yaroslav Trofimov, now with the Wall Street Journal , who while based in Jerusalem, learnt Arabic and Hebrew, and went on to write the first authentic account of what happened during those shocking, eventful days that shook the world of Islam. His book, The Siege of Mecca describes how on November 30 1979, the first morning of a new Muslim century, hundreds of gunmen seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. These men came from more than a dozen countries, but the vast majority was Saudi. Theirs was the first global jihad operation of modern times. These deluded and desperate men were to become the founding fathers of al Qaeda.They believed that the Saudi royal family had become a spineless servant of American “infidels,” and by seizing the Grand Mosque and hoping to eventually take control of the Saudi state itself, they sought a return to the glory of what they saw as pure Islam. The takeover was violent and it had 100,000 worshippers trapped inside the compound. The siege lasted two weeks and caused hundreds of death and massive damage to the Grand Mosque. Most Muslims held Americans or Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran responsible for the seizure, although both were innocent of the charge. The Saudis finally enlisted the help of French commandos to plan and prepare the final assault. “The Saudi royal family also ultimately compromised with the rebels’ supporters, helping to set free the forces that produced the attacks of 9/11 and the harrowing circumstances that surround us today,” according to Trofimov’s publishers.

The radicals were led by Juhayman al Otaibi, a young Saudi Syed, and his party of raiders even included Pakistanis. The author interviewed surviving participants and eyewitnesses, including former supporters of Juhayman al Otaibi. He also examined hundreds of declassified American, British and French government documents.

The French commandos were led by Captain Paul Barril, who prepared the final assault and supplied poison gas that knocked out the insurgents. The fierce battles that the liquidation of the outrage involved took a heavy toll. One hundred and twenty-seven men of the Saudi National Guard lost their lives, while 250 of al Otaibi’s fighters were killed. Sixty-eight were captured and summarily beheaded. It has not been possible to determine if a Pakistani contingent based at the time in the Kingdom also took part in the fighting. Trofimov’s book does not say so, but many Pakistanis believe otherwise.

Ironically, in order to defeat the insurgents, the Saudi government had to make several compromises with the ultra conservative Saudi religious establishment before it agreed to accord its blessings to the operation against al Otaibi’s men. Many of the clerics were actually in sympathy with what the insurgents believed. The rise of al Qaeda and its ideology and the spread of an intolerant version of Islam owe a great deal to the compromises the Saudi royal house was forced to make to get the siege lifted.

The other day in Washington, Akmal Aleemi, who recently stepped down from Voice of America’s Urdu service after more than 30 years of a distinguished career as a broadcaster and reporter, read a paper on the siege of the Grand Mosque at a meeting of the Society of Urdu Language, a local literary group. Aleemi is currently translating Trofimov’s book into Urdu and expects to have it published in Pakistan and possibly India in the next few months. Aleemi writes that most of the fighting took place in the vast basement of the Grand Mosque. In order to force al Otaibi’s men to lay down their arms, the Safa and Marwa gallery was shelled so that troops could storm in. Several gates of the mosque were blown away and the minarets where al Otaiba’s sharp-shooters were ensconced were smashed with heavy shelling. To block the advance of Saudi armoured cars through the mosque basement, the rebels had set fire to the carpets that covered the floor. Once the siege was lifted, the Saudi government, working at breakneck speed, repaired the damage and today there are no signs anywhere of that traumatic and bloody event.

Aleemi recalled that the takeover coincided with the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran by Iranian youth. On November 21, a day after the capture of the Grand Mosque, Aleemi was on duty in the VOA newsroom, the morning bulletin he translated for the Urdu newscast led with the dispatch of a US naval task force to the Persian Gulf and the attack on the Grand Mosque. He did not realise that his listeners would link the two events and interpret them as a US-led assault on Islam. In Islamabad, the US Embassy was stormed by an angry crowd while Zia ul-Haq cycled around Rawalpindi. The police stood around as the US Embassy burnt.

Although the occupiers of the Grand Mosque were mostly Saudis, most in the Muslim world held the US and the Iranians responsible for the sacrilege. The Iranians were in a bind because, while on the one hand they wanted to use the siege to suggest American complicity, on the other hand they did not want to be blamed for the outrage. According to Aleemi, “The Mecca conspiracy was defeated but it gave birth to the lethal anti-US al Qaeda movement, which has become a franchise of global terrorism. In England, Spain, India and Pakistan, thousands have perished at the hands of terrorism.

The siege of Mecca :

Some pics of the seizure

Photo Gallery | The Siege of Mecca

The Bin Laden involvement during the siege :

"A young member of a prominent Jeddah family financed the publication," the cable states. The charges laid out in the pamphlet were remarkably similar to those later levied against the Saudi government by Osama bin Laden, who lived in Jeddah with other members of the bin Laden family at the time.

Bin Laden and his brother, Mahrous bin Laden, were arrested during the 1979 siege, according to Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower.

Media accounts, which could not immediately be verified with independent documentation, have alleged that Mahrous bin Laden was a member of Oteibi's sect and that he helped the militants obtain floor plans to the mosque, which had been renovated by the bin Laden family a few years earlier.

Egyptian Extremist Sect Linked To 1979 Terrorist Attack On Mecca | INTELWIRE Terrorism Blog | J.M. Berger | Investigative reporting on terrorism, research, Freedom of Information Act, War on Terror, television production, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Ali

Lawrence Wright reports that the bin Laden family actually provided important assistance in taking back the mosque by providing maps and technical information about the mosque critical in the assault.[23]

Grand Mosque Seizure - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Is this international group of fanatics that stormed the Mecca the ancestors of Al Qaeda?