"This is Jihad"
Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 8:04:04 pm PDT
When Westerners are murdered in the name of Islam, Saudis smile and nod approval. When Saudis are murdered in the name of Islam, suddenly it’s a shocking and unsettling crime: Saudis Support a Jihad in Iraq, Not Back Home.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, April 22 — On Wednesday morning, just hours before a suicide bomber demolished a Saudi police building in downtown Riyadh, the family of a young man was accepting congratulations for his death in the jihad over the border in Iraq, the one that enjoys no small support here.
“He went to Iraq seeking martyrdom because of the recent events there,” Abdullah al-Enezi said of his younger brother Majid, who was training to be a computer technician.
“America’s unjust policy toward the Muslims is the main reason,” Mr. Enezi said by telephone from the family home in Al Kharj, a town just south of Riyadh. “Everyone feels this humiliation; he’s not alone, there are so many young men who wish they could cross over into Iraq to join the jihad, but they can’t. Thank God he was blessed with the ability to go.”
In Saudi Arabia, a strategic ally of the United States, violence against the occupation in Iraq is seen by many as jihad, or a holy struggle, but virtually no one accepts violence as jihad when it unrolls here at home, in the heart of what is supposed to be the most Muslim of countries.
In Iraq, attacks by American troops serve as evidence to some that the United States occupation of a Muslim land must be reversed. Requests for God to avenge American actions pour down from mosque minarets, and some women university students sport Osama bin Laden T-shirts under their enveloping abayas to show their approval for his calls to resist the United States.
But many Saudis consider the attack here on Wednesday a shocking and unsettling crime, especially since the attackers chose for their first major government target an office building that virtually every adult male must visit to collect a license or car plates.
A group calling itself the Brigade of the Two Holy Mosques posted an unverifiable claim of responsibility on two Web sites on Thursday, bragging — in language that closely echoed Al Qaeda’s — that the attack rained devastation on the “criminal, apostate” Saudi government and warning of further strikes. Some viewed the claim as dubious because it did not name the suicide bomber.
The toll rose to five overnight, apart from the bomber, after a police captain died, the Interior Ministry announced. Saudi television also showed a pitched gunfight between security forces and militants in a residential neighborhood in the coastal city of Jidda in which three militants were reported killed.
“May God curse you, you vermin, you people of filth and not jihad,” said a posting on one of the same Web sites where the responsibility claim was posted, adding, in case anyone missed the point, a picture of coffins draped in American flags over the caption, “This is jihad.”
