Word: khobar
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...Mohammed Farhat Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia
Every two years since 1996--when 19 U.S. servicemen were killed and hundreds injured in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, and the Department of Defense concluded it needed to acquire better protection for the troops--the Pentagon has invited hundreds of select private-security firms to display their state-of-the-art gear at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va. The three-day show, called the Force Protection and Equipment Demonstration (FPED), is unique in that the vendors have to put up or shut up: they have to prove that their products actually work as advertised...
...voices of moderation, al-Hamad says, have almost no public spaces in the kingdom--no broadcast networks, no radio stations and few mosques--in which to voice their views. The extremists, meanwhile, feel no such constraints. The day before an attack by al-Qaeda militants on a compound in Khobar in late May that killed 22 people, the imam at the mosque in Medina dismissed terrorism as a "summer cloud" before ending with a typical rant against the Jews: "O vanquisher of the infidels, defeat them, shake them up, destroy them!" The failure of the Saudis to rein in such...
...These findings follow a Commission staff report, released in June, which suggested that al-Qaeda may have collaborated with Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, a key American military barracks in Saudi Arabia. Previously, the attack had been attributed only to Hezbollah, with Iranian support. A U.S. indictment of bin Laden filed in 1998 for the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa said al-Qaeda "forged alliances . . . with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly...
...when the day-to-day ruler of the Kingdom blames the Khobar attack on foreign elements - "Zionists" being his rather bizarre choice - the coded message to the Saudi public is that the confrontation has no connection with the dynamics of Saudi society, and that the security forces are confining their crackdown to known criminals rather than the far wider element that may sympathize with the ideological outlook of the gunmen. Such mixed message inevitably impacts on the thinking of the Saudi security forces, and Western diplomats suggest there may even be a measure of sympathy for or collusion with...