Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...civilians; many prefer to believe that the attacks were the work of the CIA or the Mossad, and that the 15 hijackers were unwitting players in someone else's plot. "They were just bodies," a senior government official says. Spend an evening in Jidda, the hometown of Osama bin Laden, where young Saudis today flock to American chain restaurants and shopping malls to loiter away the stifling summer nights, and you rarely hear bin Laden's name. "They find it silly when people talk about al-Qaeda," says journalist Mohammed al-Kheriji, 28, as he sips a latte...
...while Saudis remain uninterested--or perhaps they're in a state of denial--in the level of Saudi participation in Sept. 11, the country seethes with open loathing for the U.S. and sympathy for bin Laden's cause. Signs of anti-Western militancy are rife throughout this vast kingdom, from the capital, Riyadh--where in June separate car bombs blew up a British banker outside his home and nearly killed an American expatriate--to Abha, a remote mountain city in the southern province of Asir, where four of the hijackers were raised and locals still celebrate all "the Fifteen...
...recent weeks Saudi militants have resumed their campaign against one of the original sources of bin Laden's wrath: the 6,000 American troops stationed on Saudi soil. In June, after U.S. investigators discovered the spent casing of a Russian-made surface-to-air missile lying in the desert near the Prince Sultan air base, Saudi intelligence arrested 11 Saudi members of an al-Qaeda cell for plotting to shoot down U.S. jets that use the facility and for preparing attacks against other American targets in the kingdom. It was the first official acknowledgment since Sept. 11 that the organization...
...whose influence in the Muslim world is based on its stewardship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. The al-Saud family has held on to power by placating the kingdom's religious establishment, which is dominated by descendants of the 18th century Muslim cleric Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab. To defuse the religious leaders' hostility to modernization, the Sauds gave the Wahhabists broad power to dispense their forbidding brand of Islam in the country's mosques and schools and to regulate daily life in the kingdom. During the five daily prayer times, official morality squads roam streets...
Many Saudis resent Western attempts to blame Wahhabism for Sept. 11; they say the Saudis who ultimately joined bin Laden's brigade learned their trade not in Saudi Arabia but by fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan--a war supported and funded in part by Washington. But some Saudi elites have begun to argue that something is basically rotten in their homeland. Says a Saudi journalist: "Wahhabism breeds extremism. It was building up, and bin Laden used it. The government should have said, 'Enough is enough...