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Chief anti-terror official engages extremists to turn them away from militancy.
It is an approach rooted in Prince Muhammad’s conviction that many militants have been brainwashed by a “deviant” ideology and can be won back with enough attention and incentives, including financial ones. As he told Robert Lacey, author of Inside the Kingdom, “these young people have been sick. We view their problem as a virus in the brain.”
Prince Muhammad’s mission is similar to one that also gripped his grandfather, Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdul Aziz bin Saud: Vanquishing extremists from the puritanical strain of Islam known as Wahhabism who view the House of Saud as insufficiently Muslim.
Religious extremism has been a perennial threat to Saudi Arabia’s ruling family ever since it joined forces with the Wahhabi sect almost three centuries ago. The fateful pact has given the House of Saud its legitimacy as rulers of the world’s largest oil-producing nation as well as Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
But in the post-9/11 world, the Saudi ruling family is being forced again to confront Wahhabi extremists who view the royals and their allies, principally the United States, as enemies of Islam. For the House of Saud, it is a momentous struggle to defeat those who used Islam to justify Al Qaeda’s 2001 terror attacks on the United States and suicide bombings in the kingdom that left 164 dead.
Unlike his grandfather, who led camel-mounted Bedouins with machine guns to defeat his Wahhabi foes in the 1929 Battle of Sibila, U.S.-educated Prince Muhammad is employing a multi-faceted approach.
Besides personal outreach to jihadis and their families, the antiterror campaign includes an innovative rehabilitation program for detained extremists, traditional hard-nosed police work, tough punishment and a relentless media campaign against what the government terms “deviant” Islamic ideas.
In addition, Saudi security forces caught flat-footed by the outbreak of Al Qaeda’s violent campaign in 2003, today are far better equipped, trained and organized, diplomats said.
Although the campaign has come under fire from human rights groups and democratic activists, it appears to have dismantled Al Qaeda’s domestic network, restoring internal peace — at least for now, according to foreign diplomats and experts on the kingdom.
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