Terror network built on outcasts

There was no spontaneous uprising, but the royal family got the message loud and clear that Muslim fundamentalists - even adherents of their own orthodox branch of Sunni Islam - posed a direct threat to their continued rule.

While most of the captured rebels were publicly beheaded in cities across the kingdom, it remained unclear how many other Saudis might be sympathetic to such calls for Islamic revolution to topple the House of Saud.

The Soviet invasion and the emerging Afghan resistance offered the royal family a possible solution.

"The Saudi leadership found it very convenient to export these guys to Afghanistan to alleviate some of the pressure at home," says Joseph Kechichian, a Los Angeles-based political consultant and author of "Succession in Saudi Arabia."

"They did it without realizing that 20 to 30 years down the line these [holy warriors] will be so war-hardened and embattled that they will come back to haunt them," he says.

Similar clashes with Islamic militants were taking place in other pro-western Arab governments, including the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

The Sadat assassination, carried out by Islamic fundamentalists within the Egyptian military, further heightened fears among Arab leaders that their own defense forces were being converted against them from within. The same issue had arisen two years earlier in the Grand Mosque siege. Many of the Saudi rebels were members of the Saudi National Guard, and virtually all of the rebels were armed with weapons supplied from national guard armories.

According to analysts who observed them in Afghanistan, the exported Arab militants weren't always welcomed by the Afghans. Some of the Arabs lectured the Afghans about Islam and criticized them for not being Islamic enough, or for failing to abide by the Arabs' strict interpretation of Islamic doctrine.

Warfare was another matter. Among Afghan mujahideen, the Saudis and other Arab holy warriors were seen as overly zealous and inefficient fighters who in some cases seemed a little too eager to die.

"They called them sheep," says a source with extensive knowledge of Afghanistan who asked not to be identified by name. "The mujahideen used to use sheep to clear minefields, but the Saudis were a lot cheaper."

The extent of Afghan tolerance of the Arab fighters is difficult to gauge. Some analysts say the Arabs have combat experience and pose a substantial military threat even to the combat savvy Afghans. But others say it may be only be a matter of time before Afghans take up arms against the Arab holy warriors.

"A lot of Afghans resent the control of their country's life by these extremist foreigners. They believe that their country has become a religious concentration camp," says Thomas Goutierre, an Afghanistan expert at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Saudis scaled down their involvement in the jihad effort. But by then bin Laden was already well organized, with his own recruiting operation and independent sources of funding from wealthy Muslims who supported his increasingly extremist outlook, analysts say.

The Arab jihad effort may have bought the Saudi royal family an extra 25 years in avoiding a head-on confrontation with its own home-grown Muslim extremists, says Mr. Kechichian. But he says the result now is that the Saudi royal family is facing an extended period of even greater vulnerability.

This explains the Saudi reluctance to openly grant US access to its military facilities for operations against Iraq, and more recently, against Afghanistan. And it explains Saudi concern about the lack of progress on the Arab-Israeli peace front.

"This goes beyond Osama bin Laden," Kechichian says. "The Saudis are not just concerned about one man, they are concerned about the entire mujahideen infrastructure. Here is a group of mostly young men who are Saudis by birth - a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand. They have become anti-Western and anti-American, but first and foremost they are anti-Saudi," he says.

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