On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (29 page)

Khalid fit the profile of Saudi terror recruits—a young high school graduate from a middle-class family. Always politically aware, he says, he began reading newspapers at age ten. When he finished high school, he studied power systems and earned a certificate with a 4.8 out of a possible 5 that helped him secure a job at an electric company in Dammam, some 720 miles from his Jeddah family. “
I missed my family. I didn’t like my life,” he recalls, “so I decided to become religious, though my family never had been very religious. I bought videotapes of jihad. I liked the idea of doing good for others. I liked the real jihad—helping other Muslims get freedom—so I went to the Philippines to help the freedom fighters there.”

In Mindanao he met other Arabs who gave him the idea of training in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had just won control of Kabul. So off he flew to Islamabad and drove into Afghanistan. “I spent two months training on everything from a pistol to antiaircraft plus mines and explosives,” he says. “You feel this is the real life. You discover something in yourself. Every day is new. No regularity, like at work.”

During his time in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-1990s, Khalid fraternized with a plethora of high-profile terrorists, including Abu Zubaydah, still in Guantánamo prison, and Osama bin Laden, now dead. “When you stay more, you see more. When you see more, you see mistakes. You see they aren’t all honest. Some are looking for money, some for power, some for fun, and only some are there out of belief.”

With this new awareness, Khalid decided to return to Saudi Arabia. Because his passport had been confiscated earlier by Pakistani police, he flew to Yemen, got a fake identification, and walked across the border into the kingdom. He had told
his father he had been in Malaysia and Turkey spreading Islam. He told his mother something closer to the truth: he had been in Bosnia for jihad. “My mother supported me,” he says. “She supported my brother when he married an American woman, and she didn’t question me about my jihad.” She helped him hide the truth from his father.

Remarkably, he returned to his old job in Damman without any questions being asked about his absence of more than three years. But soon he felt drawn again to the excitement and purpose of jihad, so again he fled Saudi Arabia for Afghanistan, using his brother’s passport to exit the country. Thus, he found himself in Kabul on the night of September 11. “I got in a taxi and heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center,” he recalls. “Everybody was cheering, including me, because at last something big had happened. It was sunset in Kabul. At eleven
P.M.
we got a videotape from Al Jazeera. When I saw people jumping out of the building, I began to ask, ‘Is this religiously right?’ I could not show doubts in front of the group, or I would be killed.”

When the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began, Khalid fled from Kabul to Jalalabad to Tora Bora as the American strikes succeeded in breaking the Taliban’s hold on city after city. He recalls Osama bin Laden telling him and the other fighters to be patient. “He said the bombing would get worse but that the Americans will lose the war as it is far away.” After another six weeks, Bin Laden reappeared to order all the fighters to leave Afghanistan, saying supplies were running out. “He did nothing for us,” Khalid says with bitterness. As Khalid and the others sought to enter Pakistan, the Pakistani police rounded them up for jail and then turned them over to the Americans. “It was the worst night of my life,” he says. “We never thought it would end like this. The Americans punched and kicked us, and a Marine jumped on me with his shoes and broke my middle finger.” But at least after the near starvation in Tora Bora, Khalid relished the U.S. military’s MRE (Meals Ready to Eat). After two weeks of intermittent interrogation at least ten times each night, his U.S. captors shaved his head, dressed him in an orange suit,
covered his eyes with goggles, and put him on a plane that he hoped was bound for Saudi Arabia but instead terminated in Guantánamo. “On the plane they gave us the best apple I ever ate and the best peanut butter and honey sandwich.”

He is philosophical about his time in Guantánamo, where he soon told his captors the truth about his activities in Afghanistan because his friend Abu Zubaydah already had done so. “Most of the people I knew in Afghanistan are dead, so I was lucky to be in Guantánamo,” he says. He used the time there to read U.S. Civil War history and came away with an admiration for the American work ethic. “I learned from the guards about hard work,” he says. “We thought in Tora Bora standing guard for two hours was hard work. The guards in Guantánamo worked twelve hours.”

These days Khalid has a new Toyota Corolla, a job, a new wife, and a baby daughter, all thanks to the Saudi regime’s commitment to rehabilitating terrorists in hopes of quelling extremism, which the regime clearly sees as a threat to its survival. Upon Khalid’s arrival in Riyadh from Guantánamo in 2005, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef greeted Khalid and other returnees with a handshake. “You are our children,” Khalid recalls the prince saying. “We hope you learn from what you did. We are going to take care of you, get you married, get you a job. We aren’t perfect, but we are a family. If you see a mistake in Saudi Arabia, don’t blow up the house. Let’s talk about it.”

Khalid, who tells his story in fluent English in the lobby of the modern Hilton Hotel in Jeddah, could be any of the professional Saudi men who frequent Western hotel lobbies. His white
thobe
is immaculate. He is clean shaven with short black hair barely visible beneath the red-and-white scarf that he adjusts constantly to ensure perfect placement. He recounts his life’s story and his prolonged foray into terrorism with intelligence and evident enjoyment, as a thirty-something American man might fondly recount his wayward college days. He smiles often and conveys a desire to get on about life after a decade of what he now says were futile efforts to help fellow Muslims. “I was angry in Guantánamo. I wanted
to kill Americans. But then I realized I wasn’t innocent.” His U.S. interrogators wanted to know why he and others turned to terrorism. “If you are someone with no job, no family, and you find someone who says ‘I have the way,’ it is easy to follow,” he says, though he had both a job and a family. (Saudis often fail to see the obvious contradictions in their conversations.)

Khalid excuses himself to go pray in the corner of the Vienna Café, where he has been telling his story for nearly five hours. When he returns, he recalls one of his American guards at Guantánamo telling him upon release that he didn’t blame Khalid. “ ‘If I had grown up like you, I might be here too,’ ” he recalls the American saying. For the first time, Khalid shows emotion. “I will never forget this,” he says, his voice choking. “If you grow up in Saudi Arabia, you are for sure affected by the religious atmosphere.”

Other young Saudis who chose jihad and wound up in prison in Guantánamo or Saudi Arabia say they were motivated not by religion but by a desire to escape abusive fathers—or fathers too busy to give them any attention. Khalid al Bawadi, thirty-two, says he went to Afghanistan in his early twenties to escape a father who beat him and his eight siblings as well as both his wives. “I tried to defend my mother and brothers, but we suffered too much,” he says in a meeting arranged by the Prince Muhammad bin Nayef Care Center in Riyadh, which seeks to rehabilitate young jihadis whom the center calls “beneficiaries” because they benefit from a second chance extended by the Saudi government.

A shy young man who clearly isn’t as worldly as Khalid, Al Bawadi says, “
I was not religious. I hadn’t memorized even one line of the Koran. I just used religion as an excuse to justify leaving Saudi Arabia to find independence and adventure.” Al Bawadi departed via Bahrain for Afghanistan just two months before September 11. When the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan began in the wake of 9/11, he, like Khalid, was shunted toward the Pakistan border, where he was arrested and then imprisoned at Guantánamo for six years and six months before being freed in 2007. “Muhammad bin Nayef
met us here in Saudi and told us, ‘Forget the past. You are born today,’ ” recalls Al Bawadi. Like other beneficiaries, Al Bawadi was given a job and a car and help in securing a wife. He is currently working at the chamber of commerce, pursuing a high school degree and focusing on his young son. “The whole experience is like a bad dream. I don’t want to have enmity for America. I want to get some benefit from it.”

What did he learn from six years in Guantánamo? Surprisingly, two things that are absent in Saudi Arabia: respect for the rule of law and punctuality. “There were rules, and everyone had to obey them, and they were applied fairly to everyone,” he says. “This was something new.” His second lesson from prison, says Al Bawadi: “Everything happened with precision. Showers, lunch, everything had a time, and everything occurred on time. This also was new.” (In Saudi Arabia time is an elastic concept, and rules are made to be broken by those in charge.)

Muhammad Fozan, another “beneficiary,” says he was arrested even before he could reach his jihad destination—Iraq. His family informed the government of his disappearance, and he was nabbed at the Saudi border as he returned from seeking training in Syria and was sentenced to three years in a Saudi prison. Muhammad illustrates another piece of the Saudi terrorist profile: young men who receive little time or teaching from their fathers. One of twenty-three children from his father’s two wives, Muhammad was a high school dropout with no religious piety. “
I smoked. My father had no beard. We were not religious,” he says. “I traveled a lot, and God knows what I did when I traveled.” His induction to jihad came when he saw a report on Al Jazeera television showing an American soldier in an Iraqi mosque killing a wounded man. “I snapped,” he recalls. “After that moment I couldn’t sleep. My life went upside down. I decided to go help the Iraqis and asked a relative in Mecca to facilitate my trip to Iraq. If I had slept through that report, none of this would have happened to me.”

Like so many other rehabilitated beneficiaries, Muhammad insists the idea of jihad was out of his mind even before
he entered the Prince Muhammad bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Care. And like Khalid al Bawadi and Khalid Sulayman al Hubayshi, he doesn’t seem truly to accept responsibility for his decision to pursue jihad. “I was tricked into jihad,” he says. “When the government showed me the right way, I repented. Some people say to me, ‘You benefited a lot—a wife, a car, a job.’ I say everything the government gave me isn’t worth one night in prison.”

Like Khalid al Bawadi, Muhammad has found something he admires about America. Holding his new iPhone in his hand, he displays a photo of his new baby boy. “This is the best thing America ever made,” he says, holding the iPhone aloft for emphasis.

The inescapable conclusion from the stories of these young Saudi men who chose the path of jihad largely for escape and to find some purpose in their lives is just how ordinary they are. They obviously aren’t terrorist leaders. They are the willing foot soldiers bred by a society that protects the young from learning to think and judge issues for themselves by wrapping them in a straitjacket of religious rules that, as often as not, they see prominent Saudis, including religious officials and royal rulers, violate. Accustomed to following without thinking, the young are susceptible to the siren song of jihad as a route to authenticity in life and paradise in death.

Belatedly, the government is trying both to rehabilitate those who chose terrorism and to moderate religious extremism, to prevent yet more young Saudis from straying down a path that threatens not just Western lives but also the Al Saud regime’s survival. For the past half-dozen years, the government has pursued these twin goals of rehabilitation and prevention and clearly has managed to curb the number of terrorist attempts inside the kingdom. But it is far less clear what progress has been achieved in the hearts and minds of young Saudis, all too many of whom are undereducated, unemployed, bored, and frustrated.

Senior government leaders can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the government’s own role in spawning terrorism. Prince Muhammad, the English-speaking deputy
minister in charge of combating terrorism, insists in a midnight meeting at his ministry that terrorism was imported by Egyptians in the Muslim Brotherhood who began coming to the kingdom to work in the 1960s. He expresses no regret for the Saudi government’s own generous financial and political support of fundamentalist Islam in the 1980s inside the kingdom, and then throughout the Middle East and beyond. For him, the battle seems to be more a military challenge than one of changing the mind-set of young Saudis, admittedly much more difficult. As we conclude our meeting in 2007, he points to a photo of two of his security officials dressed in camouflage carrying on their shoulders a dead comrade. They have a look, he notes, that is grim but proud. “
So long as they have that look on their faces, we will win,” he says—grimly and proudly.

Not necessarily. “
If you just cut the weeds, they will grow back,” says Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist who covered Osama bin Laden’s rise and then was editor of the
Al Watan
newspaper, until he was fired in 2010 for running afoul of the government’s unpainted red line on investigative journalism. “The government has won the military battle but not removed the roots,” he says. “It is wishful thinking that an anti-extremism campaign will work when this country was founded on puritanical Islam. We have to grow out of this, like England had to grow out of the Church of England with an archbishop who could veto whatever he opposed.”

At the Interior Ministry’s Ideological Security Directorate, Dr. Abdulrahman al Hadlag is in charge of tracking terrorists’ efforts to recruit young Saudis. Despite ever improving technology and deeper cooperation with Western security agencies, especially the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, he acknowledges that the task gets harder, as the terrorists too use technology and information to stay one step ahead. For instance, the government banned objectionable books, but the terrorists turned to posting their documents and writings on the Internet as well as using the Internet to recruit.
As a result, the government now is paying religious clerics and scholars to visit jihadi Web sites and participate in the debate, in an effort to dissuade impressionable young Saudis.