WASHINGTON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has signaled it will allow U.S. troops and aircraft stationed on Saudi soil to participate in military action again Islamic militant Osama bin Laden and his protectors in Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported on Friday.

The newspaper, which earlier reported the Saudis were resisting a U.S. request to use a new command center on the Prince Sultan Air Base, said the new Saudi assurances allowed U.S. officials to drop plans to organize an alternate command center elsewhere in the Gulf.

Saudi officials have repeatedly said they are committed to an international coalition President George W. Bush is building to root out Saudi-born bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon...

U.S. military aircraft have taken off routinely from the Prince Sultan base to watch over Iraq's military since the end of the 1991 Gulf War. But Saudi Arabia has long had a policy prohibiting the United States from staging offensive air operations from Saudi bases.

An ex-soldier for Osama bin Laden says the terror chief planned to kidnap a high-ranking U.S. official and offer to swap him for the blind sheik imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. "The next plan is to release Omar Abdel Rahman from jail," the former fighter says on ABC's "PrimeTime Thursday." "Maybe they kidnap [an] ambassador there and bring him to Afghanistan, and ask for release. They are trying, even now, just looking for a chance." Rahman is serving a life sentence in a maximum-security federal prison for masterminding the WTC bombing eight years ago.

[The Independent - UK - 27 September 2001]: Our fleets and aircraft may be heading for the land and sea close to Afghanistan but, in the days to come, the attention of diplomats and intelligence agents is likely to be focused on an ally whose citizens - perhaps as many as 12 of them - were among the 19 hijackers who slaughtered more than 7,000 people: Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis are not handing out visas to journalists right now - and why should they when their enquiries would reveal a kingdom that is ever more dangerously balanced between religious extremists and the royal family which first invited American troops to Saudi Arabia more than 11 years ago? At least six of the hijackers aboard the four jets come from Saudi Arabia, most from middle-class, even wealthy families. Some of them are followers of Safar Hawali, a dissident cleric who has repeatedly demanded - like Osama bin Laden - that US forces be withdrawn from the Gulf.

Saudi Arabia's internal tensions are becoming more transparent as the full story of the attacks is pieced together. If the Taliban government in Afghanistan - itself a Saudi creation funded with millions of dollars by the now-fired head of the Saudi secret police, Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud - is hiding Mr bin Laden, what of the Saudis whose intelligence service was so poor it had no idea six of its citizens were planning an attack on the US? In private, most Saudis acknowledge the growing strains - if not open hostility - between the Saudi ulema (religious authorities) and the royal family.

"This has always been a problem and we know the sensitivities that exist now," an old Saudi friend remarked yesterday. "Hawali is a fanatic and I had an argument with him once. He has no idea of compromise. His mind is made up about everything. But every country has its fanatics and mad guys. You had them in Lebanon. They exist in Chechnya and Pakistan." None of those countries, however, can boast six - perhaps 12 - of its citizens among the suicide crews who killed so many thousands in America this month.

Hamza Alghamdi was from Baljurchi, in the Saudi province of Baha, the same town from which Ahmed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alhaznawi - both named as hijackers - came. The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan published a report this week that a man named Hamza Saleh Alghamdi had left home for Chechnya and then telephoned his parents to ask them to forgive him and pray for him. His father insists that the photograph of Alghamdi published by the FBI is not that of his son.

So is this a case of yet another stolen passport being used to create a false identity for the hijackers? Hani Hanjour, the hijacker who piloted the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, came from the Saudi hill resort of Ta'if. Like the Lebanese family of Ziad Jarrahi, who apparently piloted the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania after a revolt by passengers, Hanjour's parents insist that he must have been an innocent passenger on the plane.

The brothers Wail and Waleed M Alshehri came from Khamis Mushayt near Abha, the city where Safar Hawali preaches. Ahmed Alnami was also from Asir province - Abha is its capital and he appears to have been a prayer leader in its mosque.

Despite this clear evidence that Saudi Arabia has been a cradle of determined killers, no debate has been opened in the kingdom as to how - or why - these young men, all of whom were in their twenties, would form a suicide squad. To ask this question would open the schism within Saudi society and demonstrate the power of the ulema, the same religious leaders whom Mr bin Laden has always claimed were on his side. The most recent rift between the ulema and the Saudi government came over, of all things, insurance - with the religious leaders claiming it is un-Islamic. Instead of opposing the powerful religious elite, the government allowed policies to be issued by "offshore" companies with representatives living in the kingdom.

Fearful that the US will discover the deep-seated friction within Saudi society, the Saudis have effectively neutered American efforts to interview men arrested for suspected bombings. Prince Turki al-Saud has made no comment since his dismissal last month. As usual, the Saudis want to keep a very thick Arab robe tied tightly around their own dissidents - lest the world discovers that Afghanistan only nurtures what Saudi Arabia produces.

[The Independent, UK, 26 September 2001: The Saudis, who helped to create the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, thereby spawning a baby that turned into a monster, severed all diplomatic ties with the Kabul government yesterday.

Their decision, which ended seven years of shameless Saudi support for the most obscurantist and cruel regime in the region, came scarcely a month after the Saudi Royal Family fired the man who did more than any individual to cement the Taliban's power in Afghanistan: Prince Turki bin Feisel al-Saud, the head of the Saudi secret service.

Saudi Arabia's break with the Taliban ends a relationship that embarrassed the Saudis as much as it infuriated the United States - even though it was studiously ignored by US administrations and the American media.

The links began in 1994 when Saudi and other Arab princes flew to Afghanistan's second city of Kandahar for a hunting expedition, bringing with them jeeps, money and an entire mobile phone system for their Afghan hosts. Among them was Prince Turki, who was not only a close acquaintance of Osama bin Laden but had enthusiastically embraced Mr bin Laden's original call for Arab fighters to join the war against the Russians in 1980.

Prince Turki had first promoted the Wahhabi Sunni Muslim Taliban - reared in the ignorance of the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan - as adherents to the al-Saud family sect and a counter-balance to the Shia Muslim Hazara tribe of Afghanistan, which was supported by Iran. Wahhabism, a form of "pure" Islam first preached in the 18th century by Abdul Wahab - whose daughter's marriage to an al-Saud sealed the alliance between the theological zealot and the future rulers of Saudi Arabia - enforced strict sharia religious law, which was applied with obsessional relish by the Pashtun-speaking Taliban.

The Saudis had few doubts about supporting them. Mr bin Laden's flight from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1995 placed him under Taliban, and therefore Saudi, control.

There are many accounts of the Arab hunt for game birds - bustards in this case - around Kandahar and of the Arab princes' generosity to the Taliban. According to the Pakistani journalist Ahmad Rashid, whose 20-year study of Afghanistan, Taliban, is probably the most authoritative source on the subject, the head of the Pakistani Jema'a Ulema Islami (Group of Islamic Religious Scholars), Maulana Faz-lur Rehman, organised the Arabs' trip.

Within 18 months, Prince Turki had returned to Kandahar, this time to provide millions of dollars, vehicles and petrol for the Taliban assault on Kabul - the battle that finally drove the feuding and largely secular mujahedin guerrillas out of the city and led to the imposition of the ruthless religious laws that within months destroyed culture, entertainment, science and women's rights in most of Afghanistan. The involvement of two Saudi companies in a gas pipeline project across the country provided further reason for the Saudis to pursue their friendship.

The Saudi religious leaders, the ulema, had insisted that the Royal Family should support the Taliban after they themselves had been forced to approve the presence of half a million US troops in the land of Mecca and Medina five years earlier. The ulema, including Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, the Grand Mufti and chairman of the Council of Senior Preachers, demanded Saudi support for the Taliban and preached in favour of its rule in Afghanistan in the madrassahs (religious schools) and mosques across Saudi Arabia.

In April 1997, Mullah Rabbani, the Taliban leader, arrived in Riyadh to announce that "Saudi Arabia is the centre of the Muslim world [and] we would like to have Saudi assistance. King Fahd expressed happiness at the good measures [sic] taken by the Taliban and over the imposition of Sharia [law] in our country." According to Mr Rashid, the Saudis were now extremely reluctant to demand the return of Mr bin Laden.

Ironically, the Iranians, who have always opposed the Taliban and their regime, had by 1996 found themselves in a position remarkably similar to that in which the US finds itself today. The Taliban had given sanctuary to Ahl-e-Sunnah Wal Jamaar, head of an opposition "terrorist" group that had been recruiting among Iranians around Khorasan, many of them from Iran's Baluchi, Turkmen and Afghan minorities. The Taliban gave the Iranians the same reply as they have done in response to demands for Mr bin Laden's expulsion: he is a Muslim "guest" and cannot be asked to leave.

The state visit by Mohammad Khatami, the Iranian President, to Saudi Arabia in May 1999 doomed the Saudi- Taliban relationship. The Saudis had grown to distrust the Taliban's other prop, Pakistan, and were appalled at the massacre of Iranian diplomats by the Taliban in Mazar-I-Sharif in 1998. When Prince Turki paid one more visit to Kabul last year to demand the expulsion of Mr bin Laden, he was brusquely told to leave.

But the ghost of Wahhabism continued to haunt Afghanistan. In Saudi Arabia, there had long been rumours that members of the Royal Family were in the habit of "marrying" a new wife each year and discarding an older wife to make room for her. In Kabul, the Taliban are now reported to have adopted similar mores. Several families have said that squads of armed Taliban men have turned up at their door to take a daughter for an arranged marriage - to a husband who will then divorce another of his wives. Whether the habit was picked up from the Saudis, the kingdom has already done its best to make a final break with the Taliban. By cutting diplomatic ties with Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia is hoping the world will forget how culpable it was in the whole Taliban catastrophe.

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/9/414.htm