RIYADH: The identification of Saudi militant Ibrahim Hassan Al-Asiri as the leading suspect in a plot to send parcel bombs to the US highlights the key role that Saudis play in Al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch.
Alleged Al-Qaeda bomb maker Asiri is just one of dozens of hard-core Saudis who fled a crackdown on Islamic militants in their own country in 2005-2006 and joined up with the Al-Qaeda cause in Yemen.
They were joined by 11 former detainees from the US Guantanamo military prison who were repatriated to Saudi Arabia but then fled after passing through the country’s militant rehabilitation program.
The exodus of the Saudi militants, many with field-tested fighting and technical skills, led directly to the announcement of the unification of the Saudi and Yemen Al-Qaeda branches into Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in January 2009, according to analysts.
"Yemen became a destination for Saudi jihadis and AQAP was born as a coalition of Saudi and Yemeni jihadis," said Islamist movements expert Murad Batal Al-Shishani in a March paper for the US-based Jamestown Foundation.
AQAP’s leader is a Yemeni, former Osama bin Laden secretary Nasser Al-Wahayshi, but his number two is one of the Guantanamo returnees, Said Al-Shihri.
The Saudi crackdown came after Al-Qaeda launched a campaign of assassinations and bombings across the country from 2003 to 2006, shocking the Saudi leadership.
They jailed thousands of suspected militants, but possibly hundreds escaped abroad.
"The success of the Saudi counterterrorism program up to 2006 ensured that the Al-Qaeda threat was displaced to Yemen," Alistair Harris of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in a report on AQAP in May.
After the merger, the group declared the Saudi royal family a primary target, and has followed up on that threat.
Asiri’s own brother carried out a failed suicide bombing targeting Saudi counter-terror chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in August 2009.
That bomb was believed to have been a precursor to the "underwear bomb" a Nigerian militant tried to set off on a passenger jet flying into Detroit, Michigan on December 25 last year — an attempt claimed by AQAP.
In October 2009, two Saudis from AQAP were killed inside Saudi Arabia after smuggling a carload of weapons, ammunition and suicide bomb vests over the border.
And on March 25 this year, Saudi authorities arrested 113 suspected Al-Qaeda militants inside the country and said they had links to AQAP.
Pinning down AQAP’s size and the extent of the role of Saudis is difficult.
Harris estimated there are 300 to 500 core AQAP members.
Shishani estimated that Yemenis constituted 56 percent of the group’s members, while Saudis made up 37 percent.
In another way to gauge the Saudi contingency’s strength, the Yemen interior ministry has listed 104 Yemenis and 91 Saudis as wanted AQAP members.
On Saudi Arabia’s February 2009 list of 85 most-wanted militant suspects, at least 26 were believed to be in Yemen at the time.
Like Asiri with his bomb-making acumen, the Saudis bring to AQAP skills used in various types of attack and, for a number of them, field training in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Carnegie endowment expert Chris Boucek said that a number of the 26 who went to Yemen had experience plotting attacks against crucial oil installations.
Shishani points out that the large number of Saudis in AQAP who come from along the Yemeni border strengthens AQAP’s ability to operate around and across the border, because the southern Saudis maintain often strong clan and fraternal ties with northern Yemenis.
But the same web of family and other traditional ties also help Saudi security services spy on AQAP and produce tips like the one that exposed the parcel bombs this week before they did any damage.
