Word: saudi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Sept. 30, 1988, shortly after Friday noon prayers, four young Shi'ite men were beheaded by royal decree in the Saudi town of Dammam. They had been convicted of blowing up fuel storage tanks at the Sadaf petrochemical facility in Jubail. The capture of the Shi'ites ended a six-month investigation that imposed virtual martial law around the coastal towns of Tarut and Qatif -- the strategic, oil-rich area of Saudi Arabia's Eastern province, where most of the country's 300,000 Shi'ites live...
...aftershocks from the Jubail blast and firestorm are still being felt. Fearful of sabotage, Saudi Aramco, the country's national oil company, has since refused to hire any new Shi'ite workers, who until recently made up 40% of its work force. The company has traditionally been the only major employer in the Eastern province willing to employ Shi'ites and thus has served as an important path of upward mobility. "Shi'ite leaders are trying to convince the powers that be that ((Jubail)) was the act of a few individuals," says a U.S. official. "Unfortunately, the whole community...
...unrest led the Saudi government to begin a major public-works program in the Shi'ite region, which has always produced the lion's share of modern Saudi Arabia's oil wealth and received little in return. The situation further improved in 1985 when the brutal administration in the province of the bin Jaluwi family was replaced by Mohammed bin Fahd, a former businessman and a . son of the King. Still, Ashura continues to be a time when grievances surface: demonstrations were put down violently again in late 1985. Just last year scores of Shi'ites mourning the death...
Clandestine Iraqi radio broadcasts have recently begun calling on the Shi'ites to rise up -- so far, to no avail. "The Iraqis have very good intelligence," says one U.S. official. "They've already focused on the discrimination at Saudi Aramco." Says another official: "The Shi'a have a grievance, and if they are ignored, it will probably grow...
...plan being called in Pentagon circles "the Half War" goes into effect. Some 700 U.S. aircraft flying from Saudi Arabia and carriers in the Persian Gulf turn a 75-mile-wide area of Iraq north of the Kuwait border into what some Air Force officers call a "parking lot" -- an area that has been completely leveled. F-117A fighter-bombers take out Iraqi antiaircraft missiles. Tomahawk cruise missiles from the battleship Wisconsin hit communications centers, truck junctions, munitions depots. B-52 bombers blast targets with highly accurate missiles. Most important, a variety of weapons * throw a suffocating "electronic blanket" over...