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Al-Qaeda thrives in al-Suwaidi
THE slum where an Irish cameraman was killed and a British BBC reporter was critically wounded on Sunday is only a short drive from the bright neon lights, towering skyscrapers, gated royal palaces and walled residential compounds of Riyadh. But, as the impoverished epicentre of Saudi Arabia’s new Islamic insurgency, it is a world away from the wealthy capital’s veneer of 21st century modernity.
Purple, meet prose.
The southern Al-Suwaidi district has a reputation as a bastion of strict Wahhabism even among the other residents of the ultraconservative Islamic kingdom. It attracts a stream of villagers idiots from the surrounding countryside in search of a better life in the city.

The more than half-a-million people already crammed into the district live in a massive entanglement of narrow lanes, pot-holed roads and open sewers, and suffer frequent power and water outages. Since they are the people most attracted by Al-Qaeda’s call to rid the kingdom of corruption and decadence, the slum has predictably become a fertile breeding ground for Islamic extremism.

It is also a perfect environment for the kind of guerilla warfare that Al-Qaeda’s leader in Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin, called for just two days before last week’s attacks in Khobar, which left 22 people dead.But until now, the radicals had, by necessity, taken their fight from the slums and into the cities.

Recognising its potential for providing recruits to the cause of Osama bin Laden, reform-minded de facto leader Crown Prince Abdullah made a tour of Al-Suwaidi last November. On live TV, he admitted to a socioeconomic problem that many rich Saudis and conservative members of the royal family would still prefer not to acknowledge, even privately.
"This place sucks. No way I'd want my harem living here."
Nevertheless, Saudis know how untrustworthy are the promises of reform from the Al-Saud ruling family, and slum dwellers contrast their own lives with the opulence and indulgence of the Saudi princes and ’infidel’ Westerners just a few kilometres away.

Although Al-Suwaidi, like other slums on the edge of all of the kingdom’s new urban centres, effectively becomes a police no-go area after dark, in the last eight months it has been the scene of at least two armed clashes between the Saudi security forces and suspected militants.

On Sunday, Mr Gardner was on his way with his cameraman to film the family home of Al-Rayyes when they were attacked. Al-Arabiya television showed footage of Mr Gardner sitting on the tarmac with multiple bullet wounds. According to a police officer, he pleaded for his life while shouting to onlookers to help him. As shocking as the bloodstains on his white pullover was the fact that local residents appeared to have merely looked on, apparently unmoved by the sight of this ’infidel’ in such distress.
Wasn't a big deal to 'em, was it?

Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-06-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=35012