Saudi Arabia: seeking security (catch all)

[davidbfpo]

A WaPo journalist visits a Saudi jail for terrorists undergoing rehab:http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...wpmk=MK0000203

How effective is this?

Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the powerful Ministry of Interior, whose Mabahith secret police run the five high-security prisons....Turki said that about 20 percent of those who have gone through the rehabilitation program have returned to terrorism-related activities. Many rights activists think the failure rate is higher than Saudi officials admit.

Note in 2013 (Post 28) this was the failure rate:

The percentage of those who rejoin the deviant minority does not exceed 10%.

So if we accept officialdom's statement the programme now has higher failure rate!

[davidbfpo]

An overview of KSA after the Yemeni operation, by a British SME, Alastair Crooke:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alasta...b_7163776.html

[davidbfpo]

Not my title, but that in The Daily Telegraph and a short piece by:

Nawaf Obaid is a Visiting Fellow and Associate Instructor at Harvard Kennedy School and a former strategic affairs advisor to the Saudi government.

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...uperpower.html

Hardvard bio:http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/...waf_obaid.html

To date the interventioin in the Yemen hardly appears positive, ah well the Saudis will learn (again) and of course few nations have offered to shed their blood.

[davidbfpo]

Another article by Nawaf Obaid (bio in previous post) and is hardly reassuring:

Saudi Arabia has for past several years been laying the groundwork for a civil nuclear program with no PMDs (possible military dimensions). However, there is a strong possibility that the Kingdom might begin to engage in contingency planning for a defensive nuclear program with PMDs. This planning represents an emerging Saudi nuclear defence doctrine.

(Later) None should doubt that the Saudi scientific community possesses the know-how and technical infrastructure to realize this nuclear defense doctrine

Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/gene...r-weapons.html

Somehow I doubt KSA has such a national capability, given its track record in importing talent in the securitys ector and elsewhere. More likely the talent will be imported, from Pakistan in particular.

[davidbfpo]

A succint briefing from The Soufan Group and BLUF:

The Saudi Arabian government announced that it has arrested 431 individuals, most over the last month, on charges associated with the Islamic State • Few countries are as sensitive to instability concerns as Saudi Arabia, and the country faces a serious domestic threat of Islamic State cells
• Following a steady procession of suicide bombings and shootings, Saudi Arabia is trying to disrupt the Islamic State’s momentum inside the country
• The number of Saudi nationals who have traveled to join the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq pales in relation to the potential recruiting pool of radicalized young Saudis who might prefer to fight at home.

Link:http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbrie...state-at-home/


I wonder if anyone in KSA has pointed out that in the Yemen the KSA is acting in apparent concert with AQAP?

[davidbfpo]

From a short paper by the Washington DC based Wilson Center:

The Yemeni civil war is making for strange bedfellows. Who would have predicted that Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda might become allies despite the terrorist group’s near success in assassinating the current Saudi crown prince six years ago? Who would have thought the Kingdom would turn to the Muslim Brotherhood for help even though the Saudis have condemned it as a terrorist group at home? But this is what is happening in Yemen as the struggle between factions, seen by rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran as proxies of each other, relentlessly grinds on with no end in sight. These Saudi alliances may be mainly tactical and of short duration, but they are straining Saudi relations with the United States, which regards al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as the most dangerous terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland. They are also angering Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who looks upon the Brotherhood as an existential threat and the main source of the escalating terrorist insurgency he faces.

Link:http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publicat...-allies-yemen?

[CrowBat]

...just because Oblabla is holding half the report on 9/11 locked due to Saudi involvement, means not it's really 'surprising' the Saudis are cooperating with al-Qaida, Moslem Brotherhood etc., especially so in Yemen.

If anybody 'imported' Wahhabism into that country, then it was the Saudis, and that with all force, and every Dollar they could spend for that purpose, already since early 1990s.

Much more worrying is the fact that the Saudis are dumb enough to believe they could hold the powers they have unleashed there 'under control'.

...and that nobody in the West cares about this.

Greetings from 'new' Saudi allies in Yemen:

Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen, which officials have called the terror group's most dangerous affiliate, has issued two threatening new communiques praising recent lone-wolf style attacks against the West and calling for more of them.

"We urge you to strike America in its own home and beyond," says a letter attributed to Ibrahim al-Asiri, the master bomb-maker with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
...

Hey... when one thinks of it... since Saudi Arabia is a US ally, the AQAP is now de-facto US ally too, or isn't it...?!?