Targeting Oil Industry Would Mark Radical Shift for Al-Qaeda

The twin car bombings in Riyadh on Wednesday came just two weeks after such attacks were called for by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, a strategy immediately endorsed by the Saudi wing of the Al-Qaeda terror organisation.

If Osama’s unprecedented call to sabotage the crucial oil facilities is also acted on, it would mark a dramatic shift in Al-Qaeda tactics.

Osama’s message to Saudi militants in a Dec 16 audio tape reversed a fatwa issued by Al-Qaeda in the 1990s that labelled oil facilities as off-limits. The hope for a pan-Islamic empire, he and other jihadis said in Sudan in 1993, would need oil revenues to thrive, so the oil facilities should be preserved for the glory of Islam.

However, in his hour-long lecture on the latest tape, he openly called for the Saudi oil industry to be sabotaged. He accused the West of buying the oil far too cheaply, saying the world price had fallen several times while the prices of other commodities had doubled.

’Most ordinary Saudis would be totally against an attack on the oil industry, because it is their lifeline,’ said Mr Ali Al-Ahmed, head of the Washington-based Saudi Institute think-tank. ’But the extremists would easily justify such actions in light of Osama’s statement, by saying they are stopping the West from stealing the cheap oil.’

Attacking Saudi Arabia’s main oil facilities would not be easy for a terrorist group as splintered as the Saudi wing of Al-Qaeda.

But small-scale attacks are more likely on the more than 16,000km pipeline network which criss-crosses the kingdom. They would be much easier to carry out than attacks on Western diplomatic missions and government buildings.

The Saudi oil web is more than double the size of Iraq’s, where insurgents repeatedly sabotage lines despite the massive US military presence. Also, like those in Iraq, most of the Saudi pipelines are above ground.

’The pipelines are the obvious new targets for the Saudi jihadis, because they are not capable of launching a full-scale attack on the oil facilities,’ said Dr Faoud Ibrahim, editor of Saudi Affairs magazine. ’They could be sabotaged by an amateur with no military training, and a successful attack would have a huge psychological impact.’

While Saudi Arabia’s Gulf oil production facilities are largely in Shi’ite eastern Arabia, ’it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to totally prevent extremists ready to sacrifice their lives in Allah’s name from infiltrating Aramco’s workforce, or otherwise hitting weak spots in the oil industry’, said Professor Mordechai Abir of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Aramco is Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant.

’Even an abortive attack on the Arabian oil network would seriously spike oil prices.’

Crude oil prices soared more than US$2 (S$3.30) on the day of Osama’s call, and rose by the same figure after Wednesday’s Riyadh bombings.

’The most important issue for the US is to keep the oil tap open,’ said Dr Mai Yamani, a Saudi expert at London’s Royal Institute for International Affairs and daughter of former Saudi oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani.

’An attack on the oil industry would make Washington reassess its relationship with the Al-Saud regime. US forces are already helping to guard the main installations, and if they were threatened, that military presence would almost certainly be increased.’

However, others cautioned that it was still far from clear that a concerted campaign against the Saudi oil fields was about to get under way.

’If Al-Qaeda does open up a campaign against Saudi oil installations and the royal family, then it is a whole new conflict: The final round,’ said Dr Michael Scott Doran, an expert on Saudi Arabia at Princeton University.

’Given the losses it has suffered over the last year, I doubt the organisation is ready for such a showdown,’ he added.