Posted on 06/13/2004 4:50:10 PM PDT by saquin
AMERICAN defence contractors were beginning to leave Saudi Arabia last night after al-Qaeda terrorists began picking them off with a series of precisely planned murders and their first kidnapping of a Westerner.
British staff working with the Saudi military asked their employers if they could take immediate holidays with their families as militants threatened to take more hostages.
The Foreign Office told all of its non-essential staff and diplomats’ families to leave the country but stopped short of ordering a full-scale exodus of all 25,000 British expatriates.
British Airways has banned its aircraft crews from staying overnight in Saudi Arabia.
The growing panic of the expatriate communities was heightened last night by reports — denied by the Saudi police — that a Westerner’s body had been found in the centre of Riyadh.
The militants stepped up their campaign to drive Westerners from the kingdom by showing a video on an Islamic website of last week’s murder of Robert Jacobs, another US defence worker.
Mr Jacobs, 63, was ambushed as he parked his car outside his villa.
The film shows him pleading for mercy as gunmen shoot him ten times in the head. One of his attackers is then seen appearing to behead the victim.
Paul M. Johnson, a 49-year-old US Apache military helicopter engineer, was kidnapped on Saturday.
Al-Qaeda supporters used the same website — “Sawt al Jihad” (Voice of Jihad) — to boast that they had kidnapped Mr Johnson, and showed his identity documents.
Many Western families were debating last night whether it had become too dangerous to remain in the country.
Worried families told The Times that they were asking their employers if they could begin their summer holidays immediately.
Some Britons went further and resigned from their jobs at the weekend, although they face having to work long notice periods before Saudi officials will return their visas and allow them to leave.
The expatriate community was particularly alarmed that the terrorists ambushed their victims outside their homes — raising suspicions that Saudi work colleagues are passing addresses and other personal details to al-Qaeda cells.
“You don’t know who to trust any more,” one British defence contractor said.
“You look at Saudis you have worked with for years and those guarding our housing compound in Riyadh and you now wonder who is tipping off the terrorists.
“All the attacks in the past week point heavily to the terrorists having inside information. They knew exactly where their targets lived and when they would be home. This place becomes more unbearable by the day.”
The Saudi authorities have conceded that some of their own officials may have been implicated in last week’s attack on a television crew, which left Frank Gardner, the BBC Security Correspondent, seriously wounded.
His cameraman, Simon Cumbers, was chased for a mile on foot before his executors shot him at point-blank range.
The terrorists are clearly using the internet to intensify their psychological warfare and to broadcast its horrors uncensored around the world.
One Western diplomat in Saudi Arabia said last night: “Clearly the terrorists are using the internet as another weapon to terrify expatriates into leaving.”
The claim to have kidnapped Mr Johnson was made by the “al-Qaeda organisation in the Arabian peninsula”, which said it was “avenging US mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib”.
Les Walker, one of the six Britons held for more than two years in Saudi Arabia after being wrongly accused of a spate of bombings, knew the kidnap victim.
He described Mr Johnson as “a larger than life American”. Mr Walker said: “He is a physically big man, with a liking for gold jewellery and proud of his nationality, who was liked by his colleagues who all knew of his military background.”
Mr Johnson was a Vietnam war veteran who married a Thai-born nurse in Riyadh.
Hours after the kidnapping, a group of gunmen in the same al-Malaz district shot dead an American aeronautical engineer, Kenneth Scroggs, as he parked outside his front door.
The Lebanese hostage crisis of the 1980s turned Beirut into a no-go area and when Islamic militants in Iraq began kidnapping Westerners it forced many international firms — who up until then had braved the violence — to evacuate their staff.
The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said last night that American officials were doing all they could to to help Saudi authorities stave off the al-Qaeda threat and to trace Mr Johnson.
American defence contractors have been told that they have most to fear as the last three al-Qaeda victims were all working with the Saudi military.
...
The Saudi authorities have conceded that some of their own officials may have been implicated in last week’s attack on a television crew, which left Frank Gardner, the BBC Security Correspondent, seriously wounded.
Our "friends" the Saudis need to be added to the Axis of Evil..
This isn't effin' military service for cryin' out loud. There is no reason for these damn ragheads to try to prevent their departure when they are the ones responsible for failing to provide their safety. F the ragheads.
It's now time for every non-Arab, and for every non-Muslim to leave the ME.
Soon, it will also be time for every Arab and for every Muslim to leave the US, too.
Allahu and Adios, and Good Riddance.
Our "friends" the Saudis need to be added to the list of vermin eliminated from the face of the earth by U.S. Military action.
IMHO, Once enough Westerner military and security personnel leave, those ideologically aligned with the Wahhabi/Sulafi/Al Quaeda clerics within the Saud power structure are preparing a coup. The Westernized group of the House of Saud will decide if it will be bloody or bloodless, the Wahhabi group of the House of Saud have decided it's the formers' blood being negotiated.
Without westerners to repair the infrastructure, how long will it take for SA to collapse back into the middle ages?
Nice warplanes they have...but who will fix them? Not muslims, their mechanics are incompetant, as is their entire military command sctructure.
About as long as it take the loss of oil output to drive the US and the industrialized world into economic recession or even depression.
And we can thank the enviro-nazis and their Dem freinds in Congress for preventing us from having ANWR oil to rescue us.
They aren't workers, they're prisoners ... or slaves.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.