With the price of a barrel of oil soaring on world markets, the Saudis are going to be awash with petrodollars to finance the Jihad being waged against us?
TIMESONLINE: It was an occasion for tears and celebration as the Knights of Martyrdom proclaimed on video: "Our brother Turki fell during the rays of dawn, covered in blood after he was hit by the bullets of the infidels, following in the path of his brother." The flowery language could not disguise the brutal truth that a Saudi family had lost two sons fighting for Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The elder brother, Khaled, had been a deputy commander of a crack jihadist "special forces" unit. After his "glorious" death, Turki took his place.
"He was deeply affected by the martyrdom of his brother," the Knights said. "He became more ambitious and more passionate about defending the land of Islam and dying as a martyr, like his brother."
Turki’s fervent wish was granted earlier this year, but another Saudi national who travelled to Iraq had second thoughts. He was a graduate from a respectable family of teachers and professors who was recruited in a Saudi Arabian mosque and sent to Iraq with $1,000 in travel expenses and the telephone number of a smuggler who could get him across the Syrian border.
Britain has the unenviable role, at the US’s urging, of trying to sound out a compromise with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
In Iraq he was ordered to blow himself up in a tanker on a bridge in Ramadi, but he panicked before he could press the detonator. He was arrested by Iraqi police. In a second lorry, another foreign fighter followed orders and died.
King Abdullah was surprised during his two-day state visit to Britain last week by the barrage of criticism directed at the Saudi kingdom. Officials were in "considerable shock", one former British diplomat said.
Back home the king is regarded as a modest reformer who has cracked down on home-grown terrorism and loosened a few relatively minor restrictions on his subjects’ personal freedom.
With oil prices surging, Saudi Arabia is growing in prosperity and embracing some modern trappings. Bibles and crucifixes are still banned, but internet access is spreading and there are plans for "Mile High Tower", the world’s tallest skyscraper, in Jeddah. As a key ally of the West, the king had every reason to expect a warm welcome.
Yet wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror networks. "If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia," said Stuart Levey, the US Treasury official in charge of tracking terror financing. Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror: The desert kingdom supplies the cash and the killers By Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter, Washington
Mark Alexander
