The Siege of Mecca

The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al-Qaeda by Yaroslav Trofimov

At dawn on November 20 1979, the first day of the new Muslim millennium, hundreds of armed jihadists from more than a dozen countries stormed Mecca’s Grand Mosque – Islam’s holiest site and home of the Kaaba towards which Muslims pray five times a day. They bolted the 39 doors, fired their weapons in the air, and announced to the more than 100,000 worshippers trapped inside that their aim was to overthrow the corrupt, pro-western Saudi royal family and usher in a new Islamic era.

Led by a charismatic young Saudi preacher, Juhayman al-Utaybi, the rebels were convinced that the Mahdi, or redeemer, was among their ranks, poised to purge the world of evil and injustice. For two weeks they held out against the Saudi forces. Eventually, 62 jihadists, including al-Utaybi, were captured alive. All were then beheaded in public.

Yaroslav Trofimov’s The Siege of Mecca, based on a wealth of information amassed from classified documents and face-to-face interviews, offers a gripping, highly informed narrative of this momentous event. Trofimov places the siege in its historical context, and illustrates how the al-Sauds’ response would pave the way for a wave of Islamist extremism and terrorism inspired by the conservative Wahabi creed.

Short of suitably trained men, the al-Sauds’ attempts at dislodging the rebels were a fiasco. The natural choice for outside help was Jordan, a fellow Muslim monarchy with a British-trained army. However, the al-Sauds had booted these rival Hashemites out of Mecca in the 1920s. As a Saudi official tells Trofimov, the fear was that “if the Jordanians come to Mecca, they will never leave!”

Losses mounted. A failure to broadcast Friday noon prayers from the mosque exposed the Saudi claim of victory for the lie it was. With rebels entrenched in the vast network of the mosque’s underground tunnels, and the National Guard no longer considered loyal to the regime, the al-Sauds turned to Washington for help.

CIA operatives were quickly converted to Islam so they could enter Mecca, but their plan to gas out the jihadists backfired with the gas knocking out the Saudi forces instead. The French Foreign Legion then came to the rescue, pumping gas through specially bored holes before overpowering the rebels.

The al-Sauds had called on the official religious establishment to issue a fatwa approving the use of force inside the sacred compound. The clerics extracted a heavy price: the al-Sauds would have to commit to their Wahabi obligations, and social liberalisation be rolled back. The Saudi princes adopted al-Utaybi’s agenda in order to crush the rebellion. Saudi petrodollars were soon being poured into spreading hard-line Wahabi doctrine around the planet.

A young Osama bin Laden watched this duplicity in disgust. The rest is history we all know well.

January 5 2008

John R. Bradley is the author of ‘Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis’ (Palgrave Macmillan)