The terrorist, who lost the battle, but won the war

It was five o'clock in the morning on November 20, 1979. The ageing Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca was preparing for the day's prayer meeting. 

Meanwhile, the mosque's courtyard, where the audience could follow the day's ceremony, was slowly filling up. Many had spent the night on brought blankets in several of the mosque's thousands of rooms. But just as the Imam approached the microphone, he was pushed aside, and shots rang out in the mosque.

Then a tall thin man with dark half-length hair and a wildly growing beard called out:

"Fellow Muslims, we announce today the coming of the Mahdi … who shall reign with justice and fairness on Earth after it has been filled with injustice and oppression."

The tall, thin man was a terrorist, and his co-conspirators, hiding  among the worshipers, suddenly revealed the guns they had hidden under their suits. 

Sources:
weatherspark.com, BBC, data.worldbank.org, Bowen, W. H. (2014). The History of Saudi Arabia (2 ed.), Manea, E. (2008). The Arab State and Women's Rights: The Case of Saudi Arabia. The Limits of the Possible, Al-Rasheed, M. (2013). A Most Masculine State. Gender, politics and religion in Saudi Arabia, Sater, j. (2009). Human rights in Saudi Arabia. In S. Maisel, & J. Shoup III, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab States Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Arab States, Sallam, A., & Hunter, M. (2013). Where is Saudi Arabian society heading? Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice,(Moaddel, 2006), Foley, S. (2010). The Arab Gulf States: Beyond Oil and Islam, www.alhakam.org, Vejen til 11. september af Lawrence Wright, www.globalsecurity.org, www.britannica.com, www.npr.org, Yaroslav Trofimov: The siege of Mecca (2007),  Krämer, Gudrun (2000). "Good Counsel to the King: The Islamist Opposition in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco". In Joseph Kostiner. Middle East Monarchies: The Challenge of Modernity, en.yabiladi.com, www.arabnews.com

Music used in this episode:
Egypt: provided by SoundPhenomenon / Pond5
Desert voices by ArtSlop_Flodur: https://pixabay.com/no/music/verden-desert-voices-11468/
Sudanese Desert provided by ExCantibusGaudium / Pond5
Voice of Arabia provided by SoundPhenomenon / Pond5
Arabic Sadness: https://pixabay.com/music/world-arabic-sadness-13404/ by https://pixabay.com/users/sergequadrado-24990007/
Arabic Ethnic Oriental African Adventure:  provided by eitanepsteinmusic / Pond5
Dramatic Suspense: https://pixabay.com/music/suspense-dramatic-suspense-116798/ by https://pixabay.com/users/ashot-danielyan-composer-27049680/
 Anuch – Our champion - Music from #Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io/t/anuch/our-champion

Produced and narrated by Natasja Engholm
Male voices by Jon Lob
Creative input by Lars Hvidberg, www.whiteberg.dk 

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Transcript

It was five o'clock in the morning on November 20, 1979. The ageing Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca was preparing for the day's prayer meeting. The mosque was and is one of the holiest places in Islam, and this morning the occasion for the sermon was the annual Haji pilgrimage, which Muslims from all over the world make a pilgrimage. Although it was early in the morning, the temperature of around 14 degrees Celcius in the otherwise hot desert state's holiest city was comfortable for the many present. Imam Aj-Su-bil splashed water on his bearded face, fastened a beige cloak over his shoulders and muttered some prayers.
Meanwhile, the mosque's courtyard, where the audience could follow the day's ceremony, was slowly filling up. Many had spent the night on brought blankets in several of the mosque's thousands of rooms. Others had brought mattresses, suitcases or even wooden coffins with deceased relatives whom, according to tradition, they hoped would receive blessings in these holiest settings. But just as the Imam approached the microphone, he was pushed aside, and shots rang out in the mosque.

Then a tall thin man with dark half-length hair and a wildly growing beard called out:
"Fellow Muslims, we announce today the coming of the Mahdi … who shall reign with justice and fairness on Earth after it has been filled with injustice and oppression."
The tall, thin man was a terrorist, and his co-conspirators, hiding  among the worshipers, suddenly revealed the guns they had hidden under their suits. The lids of the coffins, which usually contained the deceased, were found to be filled with Kalashnikovs, ammunition belts and an assortment of pistols. They quickly locked the gates of the mosque. The many pilgrims were trapped inside what would become a 15-day nightmare for them and the Saudi regime. Ironically, these Islamist terrorists would ultimately lose the battle in the short run. Still, with their act of terrorism, they achieved the goal of an even more fundamentalist and radicalised Saudi society decades into the future, especially for women. They were exposed to the hypocrisy of the Saudi royal family, but also how religion can be misused and misinterpreted for whatever purpose is most useful in the situation. Even if it was in one of Islam's holiest places, where weapons and violence were strictly prohibited.


You are listening to TerrorTalks - a podcast about some of the most spectacular terrorist attacks in history. In this podcast, I tell the stories of the terrorists, their victims and the consequences for the survivors and society. About people who will sacrifice their own lives or the lives of others for a political, economic, religious or social goal. Who was behind it, who they wanted to hit, and why.
My name is Natasja Engholm, and I am a Danish journalist with a Master's in Middle Eastern Studies based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Unfortunately, terror has come close to home a few times in my life. The massacre on 69 people on the small island Utøya in Norway happened half an hour's drive from where some of my close family lives. 
A good friend was only a meter away from one of the suicide bombers on the London Underground in 2005. He miraculously escaped with two burst eardrums. And finally, I worked in Afghanistan some time ago, where a major terrorist attack on a local cafe claimed the lives of 21 people. Among them was the owner, who had served me cake on my birthday the year before. 
Fortunately, I have never been in the middle of a terrorist attack myself. However, these experiences have awakened my curiosity, fascination and, not least, a fear that most people probably know about: that it will happen to me someday. That it comes close.
Before you start listening, I must warn you that the podcast contains descriptions and details that can be violent and unsuitable for especially small children and people affected by hearing about murder and violence.

All episodes are exciting for me to make, but this episode has been very special. When I studied Middle Eastern Studies, I focused almost exclusively on the six Gulf monarchies: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Many probably know these as the oil states. I interned at the Times of Oman and wrote a thesis on women's rights in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In particular, I found the contrast between the modernisation of the Gulf monarchies' societies, the maintenance of patriarchy in the family, and the conservative way of life fascinating.
And it is precisely this complexity of new and old in Saudi society that we need to know to understand the background of today's episode. Therefore, I am making a brief outline of the foundation and history of modern Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, which is the largest country on the Arabian Peninsula, was until then inhabited by various Bedouin tribes, of which the Al-Saud family was just one of them. The Saudi state and monarchy as we know it today are not even 100 years old. In comparison, Denmark, according to the sources, was founded as a unified kingdom around 1100 years ago.
In addition to a long history, most Danes share many common values: Most of us celebrate Christian traditions, we have built a democracy that rests on principles we largely agree on, and most importantly, we agree that we are Danes. It is not something we necessarily think about in everyday life, but these feelings and values make us a nation, not just a country or a state. It takes time to build up, and it can be challenging to create all this in just 100 years.

The Al-Saud family had tried several times to establish a unified Saudi state, the first time in 1744. Here, the leader Muhammed ibn Saud entered a holy alliance with the religious preacher Muhammed ibn Saud Abd al-Wahhab. Al-Wahhab gave its name to the famous and strict interpretation of Islam, known today as Wahhabism or Salafism. One of Muhammed ibn Saud's most significant challenges was that the other tribes incorporated into Saudi Arabia did not have a shared history and national identity, as we have mentioned in Denmark. He could give Muhammad ibn Saud a project that benefited them both: a strict interpretation of Islam that most tribes agreed upon and could share in common. Muhammad ibn Saud got his political legitimacy, i.e. the basis for forming the state of Saudi Arabia, while Al-Wahhab got the opportunity to implement his religious project.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded on September 23, 1932, when Abd Al-Aziz, Muhammad ibn Saud's descendant, proclaimed its foundation and became king. However, for various reasons, the project only succeeded almost 200 years later. 1938 the first oil was discovered, modernising society in record time.
In a few years, Saudi Arabia had developed from a poor, conservative Bedouin society to a superficially modern society on par with many Western countries. The problem was that the traditional culture and mentality did not quite keep up with the contemporary framework. It was far from everyone enthusiastic about the rapid restructuring of society.
In 1979, the year of the terrorist attack on the Great Mosque, the conservative family patterns of Bedouin life in the past were still alive and well. Marriages were arranged, more or less under family coercion, and the women stayed home and had an average of 7 children. In addition, the historical alliance between al-Wahhab and Muhammad Ibn Saud was also one of the obstacles to modernising the patriarchy.

Many Saudis were still adherents of the conservative way of life and were strongly dissatisfied with the country's modernisation. A modernisation for which they blamed the royal family. It was this dissatisfaction that, on the morning of November 20, 1979, had led to a group of terrorists - according to several sources, as many as 600 people - attacking the Great Mosque in Mecca. The ringleaders of the attack were Ju-haj-man Al-Otaybi and Mohammed Al-Krathani, and they and their followers had now arrived at the Great Mosque to rid it of the evil of the world. They took the microphone from the Imam and rejected the Saudi royal family and its religious establishment as illegitimate. In a dream, Ju-haj-man Al-Otaybi had seen that his friend Mohammad Qahtani was al-Mahdi, a saviour figure who, according to Isla mic eschatology, would appear at the world's end and restore divine order and justice.

" Now everyone present must come forward to swear the oath of allegiance to the Marhdi ", said Juhayman Al-Otaybi.
Mohammed Al-Qhatani now appeared near the Kaaba carrying an automatic weapon, as the prophecy of the Mahdi had foretold. The Kabaa is a square black stone that the pilgrims seek to kiss or touch as part of their rituals. Then Juhayman Al-Otaybi's men first swore allegiance to him, and then they began forcing the hostages to follow suit.
The Imam Aj-Su-bil, who had been thrown from the pulpit, had escaped in the confusion and mingled with the crowd. Here he managed to run to his office, where he called the president of the affairs of the two holy mosques. He breathlessly explained what was happening and held up the phone so the president could hear the gunshots in the background. After the conversation, it dawned on the Imam that the terrorists were letting the foreign pilgrims leave the mosque while detaining the Saudis, so he tried to escape after four hours. Unlike many others, he managed to escape.

Before we go any further, I will try to give my listeners a picture of what the Great Mosque looks like and explain why it is so important. The great mosque named Masjid al-Haram (masjidulharam) is located in Mecca, the city where the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation from God. It is considered by Muslims to be the holiest place on earth and is the place towards which they turn when they pray five times a day. This is where all Muslims must make the haa-gi pilgrimage they can at least once in their life if they can, and it is also a minor pilgrimage that can be made at any time of the year. The Great Mosque is also believed to be among the first mosques from around the 7th century, although different sources give different estimates of its age.
The mosque is enormous and has been expanded throughout history to accommodate many pilgrims during the holidays. If I have to describe it, it looks a bit like a football stadium when you see pictures of it from above. The mosque's buildings all around have flat roofs, just as you see them over many stands, and in the middle is a vast courtyard that could easily be a football pitch. In fact, the total area of the mosque is the same size as five football pitches. It is labyrinth-like below ground in the basement and has over 200 chambers. In the courtyard's centre stands the Kabaa, a square black stone that the pilgrims seek to kiss or touch. And then, a significant rule is fascinating in connection with this story: It is strictly forbidden to carry weapons in the mosque, and so is any use of violence. Even the guards were then, in 1979, only armed with sticks. It made a violent attack on one of the holiest places in Islam unthinkable - not least by someone who claimed to be a true believer.

This lack of guards and protection was one of the things that the terrorists took advantage of. It seems hypocritical both to me and probably to your listeners, but in the minds of the terrorists, the end justified the means. Another thing they used to their advantage was that, over many years, the mosque had undergone extensive renovation and expansion to accommodate the ever-increasing number of worshippers. This renovation was essentially complete, but on the Islamic New Year's Eve of November 20, 1979, there was still some work to be done - and it became the temporary smoke screen of construction work that the terrorists could exploit. A funny detail in this context is that the Saudi Bin Laden group was behind the renovation, whose owner was the father of a certain Osama Bin Laden. The man who, 20 years later, was one of the main men behind the attack in the USA on September 11.

We are now back in the mosque during the attack on November 20, 1979. Fear and confusion reigned here. As mentioned, Imam Aj-Su-bil had managed to escape, and several worshipers of Saudi origin were allowed to leave the mosque. The terrorists forced the hostages into the mosque's many rooms and corridors so that the courtyard, which had shortly before been buzzing with life and expectations, was now as quiet as the grave. A silence that was broken only occasionally by the sound of gunfire between terrorists and Saudi police, who had begun to arrive sporadically. However, a few hours into the attack, there was still uncertainty about who the terrorists were, so a coordinated effort by the authorities had not yet been established. The hostages who had managed to escape had no way of assessing and reporting the number of terrorists who were everywhere in the vast, labyrinthine area of the mosque. However, they agreed that the terrorists were well-armed and had prepared for a long siege with ample ammunition and food.

Several civilian hostages and relatives of the terrorists had also sought safety in the basement. Many terrorists had brought their families with them, and several women, including Muhammad al-Qahtani's wife and two sisters, were now trying to comfort their frightened children. Elderly and sick pilgrims sat exhausted on the carpeted floor. An area of the basement was converted into a field hospital. Here lay wounded hostages and terrorists with high fevers, slowly dying of infections that could easily be treated with antibiotics. While the terrorists still had plenty of supplies, the hostages had to survive on a highly meagre ration consisting of a dried date morning and evening.

It wasn't until about three hours after the terrorists had taken control that the National Guard and the army began to arrive at the mosque little by little. However, it didn't take many minutes for them to find out just how dangerous an enemy they were facing. The first officer, who approached in a jeep, was wounded by a sniper, and shortly afterwards, eight others were killed and 36 wounded. Not even curious civilians gathered on the hills near the mosque escaped the terrorists' bullets. They shot at citizens who tried to remove the bodies of the dead from the road, and a random young boy was killed by gunfire. Nor did the terrorists use hostages to shield their positions in towers and minarets.

It was now late evening on the first day of the siege when the head of the intelligence service, Prince Tdurki, arrived from the Tunisian capital. Together with Crown Prince Fahd, he participated in a summit of the Arab League, a collaboration between several countries in the Middle East. It had not helped the hostage situation that virtually none of the leading members of the Saudi royal family had been present in the country. The head of the National Guard, Prince Abdullah, was in Morocco. In addition to the king himself, defence minister Prince Sultan and interior minister Prince Naif were responsible for solving the crisis.
Prince Turki drove 70 kilometres from the airport to Mecca city and arrived at Hotel Shoubrra south of the mosque's King Abdul Arziz entrance. Here he was supposed to meet with the other royal family members and discuss what they should do. Prince Turki got out of the car and locked the door. Then he walked up to the hotel and held out his hand to open the door. Just then, a bullet flew past him and shattered the glass in the door. A sniper shot from one of the 89-meter-high minarets at the prince, who miraculously escaped unharmed and rushed in through the broken glass door.

The royal family faced an enemy who was well armed, well prepared, well trained, and had thousands of hostages in his clutches. Several had studied at the Great Mosque and knew every inch of the labyrinth. Second, the terrorists had the physical advantage of placing snipers in high places, with a clear view and shooting opportunities for anyone approaching the mosque. And then there was the third and perhaps biggest obstacle: the Prophet had been evident in his announcement about the mosque. The use of violence within the walls was strictly prohibited.

"The ruling Al-Saud dynasty had lost its legitimacy because it was corrupt, ostentatious and had destroyed Saudi culture by an aggressive policy of Westernization" .
We now step back a few years from the attack in 1979. It was in the mid-seventies, a few years before the attack on the Great Mosque. The tall, lanky guy with a big beard looked out over the gathering of attendees as he almost muttered mocking words at the Saudi royal family. Then he took one of the Saudi banknotes and tore it up. The reason was that it had a picture of the king printed on it. People in the mosque were shocked because they were not used to such open criticism of the rulers of a dictatorship that was notorious for beheading its critics.

The tall, lanky fellow was Juhayman Al-Otaybi, the man who, on the morning of November 20, 1979, pushed the Imam away from the pulpit of the Great Mosque. Juhayman Al-Otaybi and his growing crowd of followers were strongly critical of the influence of Western faiths and the development in Saudi society of what they believed to be true Islam. He was against women in the workforce, television, the indecent short shorts worn by footballers, and therefore also pictures of the royal family on banknotes. As many may remember from the Danish Muhammad cartoons, according to Islam, it is forbidden to reproduce Allah and Muhammad. This is due to the fear that people will start worshipping other than God. Similarly, Juhayman Otaybi and his followers interpreted the depiction of the Saudi king as idolatry.

But who was this charismatic Juhayman Al-Otaybi? He was born in 1936 into the influential Otaybi family in al-Qassim province in the centrally located region of Nash. Here is also the Saudi capital Rriyad and the area are known as one of the most conservative with a strict interpretation of Islam. It was also here that al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, was born.

Juhayman Al-Otaybi's father had fought alongside Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abd Al-Aziz. Several of his family members were members of the Akhwan, a traditional religious militia in Saudi Arabia that helped Abd Al-Aziz rise to power. Later, several of Juhayman Al-Otaybi's relatives, including his father and grandfather, participated in a rebellion against the king because they believed that the Saudi royals had betrayed the original religious principles of the Saudi state.

So it was in this deeply religious and conservative environment that Juhayman Al-Otaybi grew up. He finished school after the 4th grade without being able to write Arabic fluently, but he loved reading religious scriptures. When he was 19 years old, in 1955, he enlisted in the Saudi National Guard, which, ironically, was based on the former rebel militia Arkhwan. Here he stayed for 18 years until 1973, 6 years before he attacked the Great Mosque.

In 1977, 2 years before the attack on the mosque, Al-Otaybi was in Medina, where he became the leader of a group of young recruits in the local Salafist group in Danish called the Salafi Group, which commands the right and forbids the wrong. Here he developed his own religious theories, which were extreme even by Saudi standards. Older members of the group travelled to Medina to confront Al-Otaybi about this development, which in turn accused the more senior members of being in the pocket of the authorities. It ended with Juhayman Al-Otaybi creating a new group he called al-Ikhwan – descendants of Ik hwan.
In the summer of 1978, just over a year before the attack on the mosque, Al-Otaybi and about 100 of his followers were arrested for demonstrating against the royal house. While in prison, he met Al-Otaybi Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani, and it was now that his radicalised ideas really began to take shape.

Not much material is available about the background of the proclaimed Mahdi, Mohammed Al Qahtani. In fact, I don't even know his birth year, but he was in his 20s when he met Juhayman Al-Otaybi, so I guess they were the same age. Al Qahtani had unusually fair skin for a Middle Eastern man; he had long, straight hair and honey-coloured eyes. He came from a small Bedouin village in the southern province of Asir, one of Saudi Arabia's poorest parts.
Unlike Juhayman, he was well-read and had almost completed four years of university studies. Before being admitted to the university, Mohammad Al Qahtani worked as an administrative employee in a hospital in the capital Riyadh. Here one-day, money had disappeared, and suspicion had fallen on Qahtani, who actually turned out to be innocent. But before the actual perpetrator was caught with the money on him, al Qahtani was tortured, and his fingernails were removed, among other things. An experience which naturally made him distrustful of the authorities.

Al-Otaybi and Qahtani's radicalised thoughts, sermons to like-minded people, and small symbolic acts like tearing up banknotes with images of the king on them began to form a concrete plan for an attack on the monarchy. Their goal was to liberate the Great Mosque from the infidel rulers and liberate all Muslims with the manifestation of the returning Mahdi. The idea of the Mahdi - a saviour - is not mentioned in the Quran but is a concept some Muslims have cultivated for centuries. According to some traditions, Muhammad predicted that God would one day send a Mahdi to lead the Muslim world and establish the ideal society after a clash with the forces of evil at the end of the world. Juhayman noted that before all this, great strife would arise, and Muslims would leave the religion. For him, the development of Saudi society was clearly symbolic of this.

Together, the two friends began attracting young theology students fascinated by the eloquent Al-Otaybi. Together, the aim was to introduce an Islamic theocracy, i.e. a government based on religion, where political power rests with, for example, a priestly government. And unlike the original Ikhwans, those who had fought by Ibn Saud's side in establishing Saudi Arabia, Otaybi's new group of al-Ikhwans now wanted to overthrow the regime and radically change society. Iran is an excellent example of this.

Weapons were smuggled into the coffins of the dead, which relatives had brought to receive the final blessing in the Great Mosque. Even if there had been guards at the mosque, they would not have dared to search the coffins before the dead man's family. It was simply disrespectful. There were troops in the National Guard, Otaybi's old employer, who sympathised with the rebels and helped smuggle weapons, ammunition, gas masks and provisions into the mosque area several weeks before the attack. In addition, Otaybi's group was sponsored by wealthy sympathisers and was, therefore well, armed and trained. In exchange for a bribe, members of the Grand Mosque guard allowed Juhayman and his men to drive three vehicles up the access road that bears the same name as the man who 20 years later was behind 9/11. Weapons and supplies were then hidden in hundreds of small spaces underground, which were used as cells.

However, one of the followers, a teenage boy named Sultan al-Khamis, was slightly confused because the Koran and the hadiths forbade fighting in the mosque.
"If we do not bring weapons, this army will not come to Mecca",
replied Juhayman with a laugh.

"And in any case, the weaponry will be purely defensive. We will not shoot until they shoot first ".


The phone rang with one of the top scholars in Saudi Arabia, the blind Al-Aziz Bin Baz. The Great Mosque was under attack, and it was soon clear that the terrorists belonged to a Salafist Wahhabi movement. Bin Baz and several of his colleagues had helped start a movement. He and several other leading scholars probably got their sweet Arabic tea down their throats from the message they received.

A full 30 years before the attack on the Great Mosque, Bin Baz, as a young theology student and preacher, had issued several fatwas against the presence of, in his own words, "wicked Westerners" in the country. He ordered that all Jews and Christians be thrown out. He had been jailed by the Saudi founder Abdelziz, who enjoyed the money of the wealthy American oil magnates but was later pardoned. Because the king needed the Wahhabists. Now Bin Baz was part of the religious state in the regime he had previously criticised. And the very same Wahhabi movement, which he had been a part of and in recent years had shrugged off and misjudged as harmless, had now attacked the mosque.

In the years leading up to the attack, Juhayman and his group were on the security services' radar. Individuals were occasionally taken in for questioning by the authorities because they were considered to be potentially disruptive to society. But during the questioning, they declared and signed assurances that they would not continue with the preaching. And once they were released, they returned to their radicalised activities.
Indeed, both Bin Baz and much of the religious establishment did not necessarily disagree with Juhayman. But as one of them pointed out at a meeting with Juhayman in 1977
"The Saudi royal family was the best of two evils, especially when communism was rising in many places".

Communism also represented atheism, which in the eyes of many Muslims, was worse than having another faith. A conservative, fundamentalist government was too moderate in the eyes of Juhayman and his followers. But now, the very Juhayman they had sympathised with and declared harmless was in the great mosque and posed a threat to the regime they were a part of.

The royal family had to summon these religious rulers who sympathised with the terrorists. They had to discuss and consider whether it was possible to issue a fatwa, i.e. religious permission from an authority within Islam. Most of the 30 ulema members of the supreme council arrived at King Khaled's palace when they heard the news of the attack. They were flown in from various parts of Saudi Arabia, and soon the palace floors echoed with the sloshing leather sandals on the feet of the religious scholars. After they had all sat down in the gold-upholstered armchairs and exchanged polite greetings, they reviewed the situation.

Could it really be the Mahdi who had arrived? Was the hadith true? However, too much did not agree with the hadith that described his resurrection. Where, for example, was the group of 70,000 Jews and Christians from the Iranian city of Isfahan who were to die? And the hadith also referred to the walls of the Syrian capital Damascus - but everyone knew that Damascus was no longer surrounded by walls. There was no mention of the Mahdi in the Qur'an, and religious scholars also disagreed among themselves about the passages in the hadiths that mention the Mahdi. No, although it was a difficult decision. And although many of the scholars might even sympathise with Juhayman's ideology, they issued a fatwa that allowed the Saudi government to attack the terrorists within the mosque's walls. The situation was desperate. Friday prayers were not held in the mosque on the third day, November 23, for the first time in several centuries.

Juhayman and his men blocked the corridors that connected the mosque's many underground chambers with mattresses. Then they wrapped wet headgear around their faces. It was now November 24, and the attack lasted for 4 days. The regime had won a small victory when they finally drove the terrorists from their posts in the minarets. From here, Juhayman and his people retreated with a group of hostages and prisoners from the Saudi forces to the more than 225 interconnected chambers underground. Now the Saudi soldiers tried a new tactic. To get the terrorists out of the chambers, they threw tear gas down there. That tactic backfired. Instead of making the terrorists escape from the basement, they suffered a humiliating defeat. The gas rose back towards the surface and caused problems for the attacking security forces. During the first week, the National Guard and the army suffered heavy losses in their attempts to recapture the mosque. It was humiliating and exhibited how vulnerable the royal family was to rebellions like this.
However, cracks had also begun to appear in the terrorists' morale. Rumours began to circulate that the Mahdi was dead. When Juhayman was confronted with this, he became enraged.

"You know well that the Mahdi cannot be killed. He is not dead. He may have been captured, but he is not dead," 
he screamed at the poor lad who dared to confront him with this claim.

We now jump forward a little in time. The calendar now read December 2, 1979, and 12 days had passed since the attack began. 12 days of loss and humiliation for the Saudi royal family, and 12 days when the Great Mosque had been in the hands of the terrorists. Over the years, the Saudi regime had established a close relationship with the French government. Prince Turki, the head of the Saudi intelligence service, now intended to take advantage of that relationship. The king finally had to admit that he needed outside help.
"Discreet, professional help would be much appreciated",
said the Saudi prince in a telephone conversation with the head of the French spy service. Shortly afterwards, three French advisers from the special forces of the French gendarmes were flown into Saudi Arabia. They carried a potentially lethal gas called CB, which would cause respiratory distress and death if inhaled for too long. Because the advisers were not themselves Muslims, they could not enter Mecca. Instead, the French trained the Saudi soldiers to use it and equipped them with gas masks and protective suits.
On the 13th day, Saudi soldiers drilled holes in the mosque's floor and threw gas canisters attached to explosive charges into the basement chambers. Due to the labyrinthine way the cellars were arranged, it took another 18 hours before the last terrorists who had not been killed or escaped were captured.

In one of the chambers, about 20 men were lying and sitting. Their heads were caked with soot, and their ragged robes were besmeared with blood and vomit. Some of them shivered. But one of them, a man with long, matted hair and a shaggy beard, looked up at the soldiers grimly.
"What is your name?" 
the leader of the soldiers, Abu Sultan, asked the man.
"Ju-hai-man", he answered softly.
Abu Sultan knew the name from interrogations of captured terrorists and knew he had caught the biggest fish. He also knew he had to get Juhayman unseen by the many vengeful soldiers outside. They had lost so many of their comrades and would lynch Juhayman if given the chance. He had Juhayman smuggled into an ambulance, which delivered him to the Mecca Hotel, where the leading princes were now gathered.
On the way, the officer asked Abu Sultan with disgust in his voice:
"How could you do all this? How could you?"
Showing no emotion, Juhayman murmured:
"This was God's will".

On December 4, 1979, at 01:30, almost exactly 15 days after the terrorists' conquest, Interior Minister Prins Naif could finally announce that the siege was over.
Like all other terrorist attacks, this attack was senseless and brought a lot of death and destruction. The fighting had officially claimed the lives of 255 pilgrims, Saudi troops and terrorists, while 560 were injured. However, other sources believe that the number was higher. One of the dead was the Mahdi, Mohammad Al-Qahtani, whom the soldiers found when they searched the mosque's rubble. It is still unclear how he died. The mosque was also devastated, with demolished gates and walls, traces of bullets and shells, broken pillars, and rubble everywhere. Even copies of the Holy Quran were torn, set on fire, and scattered throughout the basement. Several witnesses claimed that the pages were used to burn the faces of the dead terrorists to prevent identification. In what many Muslims would probably claim was a true divine miracle, the Kabaa, the square shrine in the middle of the courtyard, remained utterly unscathed.

Slowly the people of Mecca returned to their homes. For both the locals and the rest of Saudi Arabia's inhabitants, it may have been the end of a nightmare, but it was, on the other hand, the beginning of a new one that would last many years into the future.
First, there was an account to settle. Of the official 260 terrorists, 117 were dead, and many of those who had survived were soon to suffer the same fate. On January 9, 1980, a little over a month after the liberation of the Grand Mosque, the Saudi regime announced that 63 terrorists had been executed by public beheadings in eight different cities. Among those executed, most were Saudi nationals, but there were also Egyptians, Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Sudanese and an Iraqi. In addition, 19 terrorists had their death sentences reduced to prison terms, while several women were sentenced to two years in prison. Their leader, Juhayman Al-Qataybi, was executed in Mecca on January 9, 1980.

However, religious extremism did not become an occasion for self-examination by the royal family in the way that we in the West might have expected. In the terrorist attack on Utøya in Norway, which I tell about in a later episode, a commemorative plaque was put up with the words:

"When a man can cause so much pain - think how much love we can create together."
In Saudi Arabia, the backlash to the attack was to add to the terrorists for fear of creating new terrorists and rebellion against the royal family. They gave the religious authorities and conservatives even more power over the next decade. Already at the same meeting in which they issued the religious fatwa, which was completely unheard of and almost unforgivably allowed the use of violence in Islam's holiest surroundings, the top religious decided to tighten up.
The attack was erased from the Saudi history books. The solution to religious rebellion was to introduce more religion, and as in much other nation-building, women became both symbols of and victims of this. Photos of women in newspapers and on television were banned, and cinemas and music stores were closed. Curricula were changed so that many more lessons in religious studies were introduced, and subjects such as non-Islamic history were removed.
Khaled Almaeena, a former editor at Arab New who was working for Saudi Arabian Airlines at the time, witnessed the siege and has no doubt that it changed the mood in Saudi Arabia.
"Juhayman lost the battle but won the war. I used to go to the cinema with my mother. Women were not told to cover up. In those days, you had Saudi singers, women also, and then you had Saudi TV and radio shows, women and men, and things were going well. After the siege, all that changed. They stopped women from appearing on TV — my wife used to read the news on TV. You could not even get the famous Lebanese singers Fairouz or Samira Tewfik to come on TV, and this was a big shock for a country that was used to music."
And it was only going to get worse. The religious police started harassing people, interfering in our lives and asking questions. It was like the Spanish Inquisition. A shadow fell over the land. Only at the end of the 1990s did Saudi Arabia begin to introduce more and more reforms for women, such as the ban on forced marriages and the right to vote for women in local elections. In 2017, the ban on driving in the last country in the world was finally lifted.

In a 2018 interview, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman acknowledged that for decades after the events of 1979, the form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia had been unnecessarily strict and intolerant.

To the CBS News "60 Minutes" program, he said
" This is not the real Saudi Arabia. I would ask your viewers to use their smartphones to find out. Google Saudi Arabia in the 70s and 60s, and they will see the real Saudi Arabia in the pictures. We were victims, especially my generation, who suffered greatly from this. Before the siege of Mecca rocked the Muslim world, we were living a very normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries."
However, we must remember that even before the terrorist attack, Saudi Arabia was a conservative and fundamentalist dictatorship by Western standards. So usually, well, it's probably a matter of definitions. How the Saudi regime handled the attack on Islam's shrine also repelled many people. Their arrogance and incompetence and the way they subsequently pretended to the population that nothing had happened caused the loyalty of many residents to weaken. More and more American military came to bases in the country, which in the long term led to the radicalisation of new jihadists who wanted to fight locally and internationally. One of these first jihadists who went to Afghanistan to fight the communist Russians was a shy 26-year-old Saudi named Osama Bin Laden. A name that came to everyone's lips 22 years later and gained significance in modern world history. But we will return to that in a later episode.

You have listened to TerrorTalks, a podcast about terror and radicalization. This episode was written, produced and narrated by me, Natasja Engholm, while Jon Lobb voiced the men in the story. Also, a big thank you to consultant and journalist Lars Hvidberg, who contributed with sparring and wise thoughts. Today's episode has greatly benefited from the information in the book The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov. You will find the episode's sources in the show notes where ever you listen to your podcast. I would also appreciate it if you would give me a positive rating. 
Tune in to the next episode, where 15 people died in a bomb attack on a small pub in Northern Ireland. And where the focus was directed at the wrong terrorists. You can also follow TerrorTalk's social media on Instagram and Facebook, where you can see pictures from today's story.