1979: Remembering 'The Siege Of Mecca' (It was one of the events that gave rise to al-Qaida)

Yaroslav Trofimov, a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, talks about the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque at Mecca in Saudi Arabia. It is the holiest site in Islam, and gunmen held it for two weeks. It was one of the events that gave rise to al-Qaida, and Yaroslav wrote about it in his book The Siege of Mecca.

Thirty years ago, hundreds of Islamic extremists walked into the Grand Mosque in Mecca. They slipped weapons into the holiest site in Islam, and they started one of the events of 1979 that still affects the Muslim world today.

We've been discussing some of those events this week: Iran's revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the hanging of a Pakistani leader. The 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca was less well known and less understood, but no less significant.

It was a blow to the Saudi monarchy and an influence on the thinking of a young man named Osama bin Laden. Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov wrote a book about a tragedy that began as a day of celebration.

Mr. YAROSLAV TROFIMOV (Reporter, Wall Street Journal): About 100,000 people appeared in the Grand Mosque of Mecca for the dawn prayer. What they didn't know was that all of them would become hostages within minutes of the prayer beginning. A group of jihadis, several hundred jihadis, from Saudi Arabia, from Egypt, but also some Americans and Canadians - converts to Islam - had entered the mosque with weapons, overpowered the guards, shut down the gates and proclaimed the arrival of the savior, the Mahdi, that would cleanse the Muslim world from its impurities brought in by the Westerners.

INSKEEP: When you say 100,000 people taken hostage in one place, I'm trying to think of the American equivalent. It would be like somebody seized control of the Rose Bowl.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Exactly. It's an enormous space, which is surrounded by a colonnade and a wall. And so there was just physically no way out. It looked like a stadium, in a way. And so the parallel of the Rose Bowl is very accurate.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, the Saudi army took a while to realize what's going on. The problem was that the Kaaba at the Grand Mosque is a place so sacred to Muslims everywhere in the world, that it's forbidden to bear arms there. It's forbidden, according to the Muslim Hadith, the Muslim tradition. They didn't kill a bird there.

So, the Saudi military really was - the soldiers were really reluctant to even point the weapons towards troubles unless there was an authorization, a fatwa, from the leading Muslim clerics. And it took a while for the Saudi royal family to secure that.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Some of them smuggled them in coffins, because it's a practice to bring in your dead relatives to receive a blessing in the Grand Mosque before the burial. Others were able to bribe the guards of the mosque and to drive a few pickup trucks into the basement of the mosque, taking advantage of the fact that there was construction work there at the time, carried out by no one else by the bin Laden construction company, which built…

Mr. TROFIMOV: Absolutely. The construction company of Osama bin Laden's father. And, in fact, when the Saudi government had to storm the compound later, they had to rely on the blueprints and the maps provided by the bin Laden family.

Mr. TROFIMOV: It took about two weeks for the Saudi Interior Ministry and special forces and the regular army and the national guard to seize both the above-ground structures of the Grand Mosque and the labyrinth that is underneath. There were about a thousand rooms connected with corridors in the basement, called the kabu(ph).

And there were hundreds, maybe more than a thousand casualties. A large part of the structure was severely damaged. Saudi government had to use tanks, artillery. At the very end, they had to bring in the help of the French special forces. And the French special forces brought this poison gas that was pumped in the basement of the Grand Mosque, flushing out the last rebels.

INSKEEP: You know, I want to mention: I wasn't very old at all then in 1979, but I remember some of the events we've been talking about. I remember the invasion of Afghanistan. I remember the Iranian Revolution. Why do you suppose it would be that I, as an ordinary American, don't have very much memory - any memory, really, at all - of this dramatic seizure of 100,000 hostages at a pilgrimage site that affects Muslims around the world?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, first of all, this was the age before Al-Jazeera, before cable television, before satellite films, and non-Muslims are forbidden from even visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. So the outside world didn't really know what was going on for well over a day after this started.

Saudi Arabia instantly cut international phone communications, closed the borders. And the first news of something going wrong in Mecca came out in a press statement at the State Department in Washington, infuriating the Saudis who had hoped that the blackout of this news would last long enough for them to take control of the mosque again.

Now, at the time, nobody knew about the existence of this Sunni jihadi fundamentalist ideology that later evolved into what is known today as al-Qaida. In fact, the assumption in Washington at the time was that the Shiites, the Iranian Shiites, had taken over the mosque and is also part of the Iranian revolutionary expansion to the rest of the Muslim world.

The State Department pointed the finger at Ayatollah Khomeini. What happened, of course, is that Ayatollah Khomeini, within hours, went on the radio saying, no, it's the Americans and the Jews, the hated Zionists who have taken over the holiest of holies of Islam. And he was believed by millions of Muslims across the Middle East.

In Pakistan, within hours, a vast crowd assembled in front of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, stormed it, burned it down, killing a number of Americans and Pakistani personnel at the embassy. Demonstrations were held throughout the Muslim world, many of them violent.

INSKEEP: After your exhaustive investigation of this, you concluded the real culprits were Sunni Muslim fundamentalists. And can you draw a fairly straight line from those Sunni Muslim fundamentalists to the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists who form the leadership of al-Qaida today?

Mr. TROFIMOV: There is a very direct connection. First of all, this was the first time that the two components of al-Qaida today - the Wahabi zealots from Saudi Arabia and the jihadi extremists, the outgrowth of the Islam Brotherhood in Egypt - have come together. Just as today's al-Qaida is lead by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, a veteran of the jihadist groups there, so was this movement in Mecca. The senior leaders there were Egyptians.

INSKEEP: At this point, Osama bin Laden would've been a very rich young man, unknown to the world.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Exactly. He was just leaving college at the time. And he later remembered these times. And when he was reminiscing about this time, he said that he was shocked to see the tanks rolling into the holiest shrines of Islam, and he had thought that the Saudi government was behaving criminally by this by desecrating the shrine instead of just starving out the rebels.

And for him, this was the moment when his loyalty to the Saudi regime, which has done so much for his father and his family, began to crumble.

INSKEEP: Yaroslav Trofimov is the author of "The Siege of Mecca," and he's helping us understand one of the events from 1979 - 30 years ago - that still reverberate for us today. Thanks very much.

What gave rise to Al-Qaeda was the US giving Afghanistan’s Al-Qaeda weapons, money and training in the 1980s.

The US gave weapons, money, and training to Afganistan's Mujahadin, an organization fighting against the Russians occupying Afghanistan during that time and one from which Al-Qaeda arose years later.

True or False: Osama bin Laden was a member of the Saudi Royal family.

Even without the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and US funding of the opposition, we would still have to deal with the pre-existing curse of Islamic terrorism.

I agree as to the malign effects of giving military training to Arab Muslim radicals to fight in Afghanistan, but Muslim donors and countries provided much of the funding, equipment, and training. Some of them, like bin Laden, declined support from and contact with the CIA, and the Pakistanis insisted on a strong measure of control over who was helped by the US. They steered a great deal of US aid to the more radical elements.

On balance, winning the Cold War by defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan mattered far more even at the price of spurring the further development of Islamic terrorism. Our post Cold War holiday from history under Bill Clinton though was the greater and proximate cause of the neglect and inattention that led to 9/11.

On balance, winning the Cold War by defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan mattered far more even at the price of spurring the further development of Islamic terrorism.

Once you realize that Afghanistan had almost zero to do with the end of the Cold War - and in fact may have prolonged it then funding the Islamist stupidest thing the West ever did since the idiot Crusaders allowed the jihadi Mameluks to pass through Aleppo and attack the anti-Muslim Mongols.

The Mongols wanted to do a deal with the Western Crusaders to destroy the Muslims but the Crusaders feared the devil they did not know and made a deal with the jihadis. Once the jihadists won against the Mongols they turned on the Crusaders and wiped them out from the Middle East. History repeats itself (Russians being the Mongols this time and the USA being the dumb Crusaders in the Middle East).

For decades, the communist USSR was an existential threat to the West in that it had a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, massive conventional forces, and a global system of subversion and alliances, with a coordinated strategy for victory in the Cold War. Even as late as the mid-1980s, the Soviets actively contemplated a preemptive nuclear first strike on the US.

The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan had a substantial role in ending the USSR in that it shook the confidence of the leadership and discredited the regime with the Soviet public. And after Afghanistan proved that the Soviet conscript army could not subdue tribesmen living in mud huts, that same army became a doubtful instrument to enforce Soviet rule in occupied Eastern Europe. An empire may long survive even though hated and thought to have internal weaknesses, but its end is in sight when its weakness is revealed.

While Europe and the US have far more to lose, Islam is a more immediate threat to Russia. And while Putin may be the big man in the Kremlin for the rest of his life, he is not immortal. Worse, the Putin regime has no solution against Islamic aggression except to ally with pliable Muslim thugs and dictators; and as Putin's vitality declines due to age, a Brezhnev style era of corrupt stagnation seems inevitable.

Meanwhile, the US and the West are showing signs of rallying against Islamic terrorism. The American public especially seems to be nearing the limit of its acceptance of Muslim aggressiveness. And, with the illusion of Muslim democracy having worn thin, sterner measures seem likely to be restoted to.

The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan had a substantial role in ending the USSR in that it shook the confidence of the leadership and discredited the regime with the Soviet public.

Perception is not reality. The USSR and the eastern bloc ended because their system did not work and it was already on its last legs. It was already being predicted it would end in the 70s. If we had done zero in Afghanistan the USSR would have fallen in the exact same way - maybe even sooner because a war in Afghanistan kept the old regime from admitting defeat sooner.

Alternate history scenario: We would have been better off if Afghanistan was given to the USSR (it was already ruled by a home grown commie regime that was having trouble with the rurals) in return for allowing the USA a free hand in Iran to invade it and to return the Shah's regime. The American people were all set to go to war over the hostages.

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.