Saudis Use Islamic Law to Deny US Assistance

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Fahd Returns Home, Accepts Stance Against US Bases

6 October: King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz returned home from his

enforced exile in Geneva last Thursday, September 27, mending

the rift in the Saudi royal house by lining up with his half-brother,

Crown Prince Abdullah's refusal to grant Washington the use of

military bases for attacking any Muslim power. 

By giving in, the king may have saved the royal regime from

being torn apart on the issue. But he put paid to the moderate

Arab support the United States had hoped would be ranged

behind its war on terror. The crisis brought US defense secretary

Donald Rumsfeld hurrying over to Riyadh – to no avail.

(The Bush administration responded to this major blow to its

war effort by turning to Moscow and the former Soviet Central

Asian republics, as DEBKAfilerevealed last week.)

So dense was the cloud of secrecy the princes imposed over the

feud that the king's departure for Geneva with all his family and a

vast entourage of princes of senior rank, some of them

ministers, took place unannounced on September 19 - as

revealed exclusively in DEBKAfile on September 22.

Before this crisis, the Americans took it for granted that the

Prince Sultan air base near Riyadh was available as their

command and control center for running their anti-terror war in

the region. They had the king's consent. His abrupt departure left

Abdullah, who opposed the king on the issue, calling the shots.

Defense Minister Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz, the king's full

brother and third in the royal hierarchy, tried to mediate the

dispute. According to DEBKAfile's sources, he pointed warningly

to the flourishing alliance between Washington and Moscow,

highlighted by Russia's permission to grant the Americans the

use of military bases in the former Soviet Muslim republics of

Central Asia as staging posts for their offensive against the

Taliban and bin Laden. The Saudi bases had therefore been

quickly replaced and its clout in Washington diminished.

But Crown Prince Abdullah, who effectively runs the kingdom

because of Fahd's poor health, stood firm. In the end he

prevailed. Now, the Saudi royal house is reunited around a

five-year old religious edict, or fatwa, recycled by the Saudi Grand

Mufti Abdullah Aziz Bin Abdullah, at the Crown Prince's request.

DEBKAfile's Saudi experts explain how this edict, helped by

acrobatic exegesis, was turned into a prohibition against Saudi

bases serving the US military operation against Afghanistan or

any other Muslim power, the Taliban and Iraq implicitly included.

For the first time, Saudi-US collaboration in the war against

terrorism is forbidden on religious grounds.

The key fatwa specifically forbids any Muslim to accept

assistance from a non-Muslim authority in the conduct of

investigations into security occurrences involving Muslims. Since

the Saudis on religious grounds are not allowed to share

intelligence on bin Laden and the Taliban with the non-Muslim

United States, neither may Riyadh accept US evidence of his

complicity in the attacks on the United States. Since such

evidence is unacceptable, so too is any military action stemming

from it.

 

But the Saudi rationale is not purely religious.

Members of the government, including foreign minister Saud

Al-Faisal and army chiefs, argued that once the Americans were

caught up on two military fronts, they would focus on Afghanistan

at the expense of the anti-Iraq front, leaving Saudi Arabia

exposed to punishment at Saddam's hands.

On the whole, the Saudis do not regard the Taliban in the same

light as the Americans.

According to DEBKAfile 's Saudi experts, the Afghan ruling party

are seen as the only Sunni military force capable of holding the

Iranian-backed Shi'ite Hizbollah militants in check. As such, they

deserve Saudi backing and their alliance with Bin Laden and Al

Quaeda, who oppose the Saudi royal family, is deemed a

deviation, not a crime. According to Saudi calculations, this

deviation can be corrected by the Taliban handing the master

terrorist over to Saudi Arabia or holding his operation down to

directives from Riyadh.

To sacrifice their Taliban asset for the sake of eradicating bin

Laden, as the Americans demand, is an unacceptable option for

Riyadh.

Defense secretary Rumsfeld's whirlwind tour also took him to

Cairo in an effort to swing the largest Arab country round to

support for America's military operation.

DEBKAfile's Cairo sources report he had just received the bad

news of a major anti-US upheaval among the senior ranks of

President Hosni Mubarak's advisers. His most markedly

pro-American aides, foreign minister Ahmed Maher and special

adviser Osama al-Baz, were pushed down the totem pole, while

former foreign minister and current Arab League secretary the

pan-Arab Amr Moussa  was elevated over their heads.

Immediately after the September 11 attacks in the United States,

Moussa formulated three conditions that effectively blocked off

Arab League support for the American campaign:

-  No Arab nation may attack - or threaten to attack - any other

Arab or Muslim state.

-  Any action against terrorists must be preceded by a precise

definition of the term terrorism and its practical manifestations.

- The Arab world must follow its own interests, which are not

necessarily identical to those of the United States.

In Washington, the Saudi fatwa and Amr Mousa's three

conditions sounded the death knell for America's hopes of Arab

support in its war against Afghanistan and bin Laden.