Mind Over Martyr

How to Deradicalize Islamist Extremists

January/February 2010
Jessica Stern
JESSICA STERN is Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

Is it possible to deradicalize terrorists and their potential recruits? Saudi Arabia, a pioneer in rehabilitation efforts, claims that it is. Since 2004, more than 4,000 militants have gone through Saudi Arabia's programs, and the graduates have been reintegrated into mainstream society much more successfully than ordinary criminals. Governments elsewhere in the Middle East and throughout Europe and Southeast Asia have launched similar programs for neo-Nazis, far-right militants, narcoterrorists, and Islamist terrorists, encouraging them to abandon their radical ideology or renounce their violent means or both.

The U.S. government would do well to better understand the successes and failures of such efforts, especially those that target Islamist terrorists. This is important, first, because, as General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has noted, the United States "cannot kill [its] way to victory" in the struggle against al Qaeda and related groups. Although military action, especially covert military action, is an essential part of the strategy against the Islamist terrorist movement, the United States' main goal should be to stop the movement from growing. Terrorists do not fight on traditional battlefields; they fight among civilians, which increases the risks of collateral damage. Indeed, Islamist terrorists provoke the governments they oppose into responding in ways that seem to prove that these governments want to humiliate or harm Muslims. Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and "extraordinary rendition" have become for Muslim youth symbols of the United States' belligerence and hypocrisy.

Second, the effectiveness of deradicalization programs aimed at detained terrorists have direct and immediate effects on U.S. national security. This is especially true regarding the detainees at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Because it is difficult to gather evidence that is usable in court, some truly bad actors, along with some not so bad ones who have been held unfairly, will inevitably be released. Effective deradicalization programs could help make such individuals less dangerous. Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was repatriated to Kuwait in 2005 on the order of a U.S. judge and was acquitted of terrorism charges by a Kuwaiti court, subsequently carried out a suicide bombing on Iraqi security forces in Mosul that killed 13 Iraqis. Had he received the kind of reintegration assistance and follow-up (including surveillance) now available in Saudi Arabia after his release, he might not have traveled to Iraq.

Third, the success, or failure, of terrorism-prevention programs outside the United States is important to Americans. For one thing, people who carry European passports can enter the United States relatively easily, and so the presence of terrorists in Europe can threaten U.S. national security. For another, terrorism-prevention programs presently under way in, for example, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, could be models for at-risk groups in the United States, such as the Somali community in Minnesota, from which some young men have been recruited to fight alongside al Shabab, the radical Islamist organization that controls southern Somalia and claims to be aligned with al Qaeda. These men do not seem to be plotting attacks in the West, but it is important to think now about how to integrate Somalis into American society more fully in order to reduce the chances that they will carry out attacks in the United States.

The fight against al Qaeda and related groups is not over: Saudi Arabia's deputy interior minister was nearly killed by a terrorist posing as a repentant militant in August 2009; in September, U.S. government officials interrupted a plot in New York and Denver that they believed was the most significant since 9/11; and in October, the French police arrested a nuclear physicist employed at the CERN accelerator, near Geneva, who reportedly had suggested French targets to members of the Algerian terrorist group al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But in the long term, the most important factor in limiting terrorism will be success at curtailing recruitment to and retention in extremist movements.

Now is the moment to try. Counterterrorism efforts have significantly eroded al Qaeda's strength in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia since the "war on terror" began in 2001. U.S. Predator strikes in Pakistan have killed top al Qaeda leaders, disrupting essential communications between the group's core and its affiliates and new recruits. Testifying before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last September, Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said that such activities were "potentially disrupting plots that are under way" and "leaving leadership vacuums that are increasingly difficult to fill."

Even though anti-American sentiment remains strong, especially in Pakistan, al Qaeda's popularity is waning. Polls continue to show that many people in Muslim-majority states doubt that the true aim of U.S. counterterrorism efforts is self-protection. A 2007 study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes of public opinion in Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, and Pakistan, for instance, found that majorities in each of the four countries believed that Washington's primary goal was to dominate the Middle East and weaken and divide the Islamic world. According to another PIPA poll, conducted last spring, anti-American sentiment remained high in Pakistan, where over 80 percent of respondents viewed the Predator strikes as unjustified. Crucially, the report also noted "a sea change" in popular attitudes toward al Qaeda and other religious militants: over 80 percent of the Pakistanis polled said they thought these groups were national security threats -- representing more than a 40-percentage-point rise since 2007. Al Qaeda's reputation as the brave vanguard against Western oppression has been tarnished by the tens of thousands of Muslim civilians killed in Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, and elsewhere since the "war on terror" began. Several Islamist leaders who once supported al Qaeda, including Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the organization's ideological godfather, have publicly turned against it, as have many ordinary Muslims. If the deradicalization of Islamist extremists is ever going to work, now is probably the time to try.

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT IDEOLOGY

I first got involved in deradicalization efforts in 2005, soon after the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist militant. The city of Rotterdam recruited me to help develop a new concept of citizenship that would include Dutch natives as well as immigrants and their children; the city government worried that the idea of jihad had become a fad among not only Muslim youth but also recent converts to Islam. In 2007, a company under contract with Task Force 134, the task force in charge of U.S.-run detention centers in Iraq, asked me to help develop a deradicalization program for the 26,000 Iraqis held at Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper (Camp Bucca has since been closed). Last winter, together with a group of current and former U.S. government officials and analysts, I visited Riyadh's Care Rehabilitation Center, an institution that reintegrates convicted terrorists into Saudi society through religious reeducation, psychological counseling, and assistance finding a job. And in the spring of 2009, I visited a youth center supported by the Muslim Contact Unit, part of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police in London, which works with leaders of the Muslim community there, including Islamists, to isolate and counter supporters of terrorist violence.

These experiences made one thing clear: any rehabilitation effort must be based on a clear understanding of what drives people to terrorism in the first place. Terrorist movements often arise in reaction to an injustice, real or imagined, that they feel must be corrected. Yet ideology is rarely the only, or even the most important, factor in an individual's decision to join the cause. The reasons that people become terrorists are as varied as the reasons that others choose their professions: market conditions, social networks, education, individual preferences. Just as the passion for justice and law that drives a lawyer at first may not be what keeps him working at a law firm, a terrorist's motivations for remaining in, or leaving, his "job" change over time. Deradicalization programs need to take account -- and advantage -- of these variations and shifts in motivations.

Interestingly, terrorists who claim to be driven by religious ideology are often ignorant about Islam. Our hosts in Riyadh told us that the vast majority of the deradicalization program's "beneficiaries," as its administrators call participants, had received little formal education and had only a limited understanding of Islam. In the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, second- and third-generation Muslim youth are rebelling against the kind of "soft" Islam practiced by their parents and promoted in local mosques. They favor what they think is the "purer" Islam, uncorrupted by Western culture, which is touted on some Web sites and by self-appointed imams from the Middle East who are barely educated themselves. For example, the Netherlands-based terrorist cell known as the Hofstad Group designed what one police officer described as a "do-it-yourself" version of Islam based on interpretations of takfiri ideology (takfir is the practice of accusing other Muslims of apostasy) culled from the Internet and the teachings of a drug dealer turned cleric.

Such true believers are good candidates for the kind of ideological reeducation undertaken by Task Force 134 in Iraq and by the prison-based deradicalization program in Saudi Arabia. A Saudi official told the group of us who visited the Care Rehabilitation Center in Riyadh last winter that the main reason for terrorism was ignorance about the true nature of Islam. Clerics at the center teach that only the legitimate rulers of Islamic states, not individuals such as Osama bin Laden, can declare a holy war. They preach against takfir and the selective reading of religious texts to justify violence. One participant in the program told us, "Now I understand that I cannot make decisions by reading a single verse. I have to read the whole chapter."

PREJUDICE AND PRIDE

In Europe, Muslim youth describe themselves, often accurately, as victims of prejudice in the workplace and in society more generally. Surveys carried out in 2006 by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (now subsumed by the Fundamental Rights Agency), an EU body, showed that minorities and immigrants in the European Union experience greater levels of unemployment, are overrepresented in the least desirable jobs, and receive lower wages. After the van Gogh murder, the native Dutch, who are famously proud of their tolerance, grew visibly less so: they started complaining about rising rates of criminality among Dutch Moroccan youth and the rhetoric of radical imams who preach that homosexuality is a sickness or a sin. Rightly perceiving that this growing prejudice against Muslims could become a source of social conflict, local governments and nongovernmental organizations put in place various programs to integrate young immigrants into broader Dutch society.

Group dynamics are as important as social grievances. Young people are sometimes attracted to terrorist movements through social connections, music, fashion, or lifestyle and only later come to understand fully the groups' violent ideologies and goals. Al Shabab, spurred by a member who calls himself Abu Mansour al-Amriki, and other groups affiliated with al Qaeda have begun using anti-American hip-hop -- "jihad rap" -- in their recruitment videos; the British rap group Blakstone and the defunct but still popular American band Soldiers of Allah promote violence against kafir (nonbelievers). The first- and second-generation Muslim children I interviewed for a study of the sources of radicalization in the Netherlands seemed to think that talking about jihad was cool, in the same way that listening to gangster rap is in some youth circles. Most of these children will not turn to violence, but once youth join an extremist group, the group itself can become an essential part of their identity, maybe even their only community. And so deradicalization requires finding new sources of social support for them. The Saudi program takes great pains to reintegrate participants into their families and the communities they belonged to before their radicalization by encouraging family visits and getting the community involved in their follow-up after they are released. The program rightly assumes that group dynamics are key to both radicalization and deradicalization.

Then there is economics. For some, jihad is just a job. According to studies by the economist Alan Krueger, now the U.S. Treasury Department's assistant secretary for economic policy, and Alberto Abadie, a professor of public policy at Harvard, there is no direct correlation between low GDP and terrorism. Nonetheless, poor people in countries with high levels of unemployment are more vulnerable to recruitment. Of the 25,000 insurgents and terrorist suspects detained in Iraq as of 2007, nearly all were previously underemployed and 78 percent were unemployed, according to Major General Douglas Stone, the commander of Task Force 134 at the time. Because these insurgents took up the "job" of fighting a military occupation, typically targeting soldiers rather than civilians, at least some of them could conceivably be rehabilitated once foreign troops leave Iraq.

According to Christopher Boucek, an expert on Saudi Arabia and Yemen at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Advisory Committee, which helps run the deradicalization program in Saudi Arabia, has reported that most detainees are men in their 20s from large lower- or middle-class families; only three percent come from high-income backgrounds. Boucek says that according to Saudi officials, 25 percent of the detained terrorists who had participated in jihad had prior criminal records, approximately half of them for drug-related offenses; only five percent were prayer leaders or had other formal religious roles. For such individuals, job training and career counseling may be the best deradicalization strategy -- or at least a strategy as important as religious reeducation.

ALL IN THE HEAD

Psychology also matters. One element worth examining in particular is the potential impact of sexual abuse on radicalization. Much has been written about the role of radical madrasahs in creating terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere, some of it in these pages. Outside of the Pakistani press, however, little note is made of the routine rape of boys at such schools. Also troubling is the rape of boys by warlords, the Afghan National Army, or the police in Afghanistan. Such abuses are commonplace on Thursdays, also known as "man-loving day," because Friday prayers are considered to absolve sinners of all wrongdoing. David Whetham, a specialist in military ethics at King's College London, reports that security checkpoints set up by the Afghan police and military have been used by some personnel to troll for attractive young men and boys on Thursday nights. The local population has been forced to accept these episodes as par for the course: they cannot imagine defying the all-powerful Afghan commanders. Could such sexual traumas be a form of humiliation that contributes to contemporary Islamist terrorism?

Similarly, one need not spend many days in Gaza before understanding that fear and humiliation, constants of daily life there, play at least some role in certain Palestinians' decisions to become martyr-murderers. If terrorism can be a source of validation, then surely helping adherents come to terms with the humiliation they have experienced could help bring them back into the fold. To that end, the Saudi rehabilitation program includes classes in self-esteem.

Aside from the question of preexisting personal trauma, consider the impact of a terrorist's lifestyle on his psychology. Exposure to violence, especially for those who become fighters, can cause lasting, haunting changes in the body and the mind. Terrorists are "at war," at least from their perspective, and they, too, may be at risk of posttraumatic stress disorder. Moreover, those who have been detained may have been subjected to torture and left with even more serious psychological wounds. The Guantánamo detainees sent back to Saudi Arabia have posed a particular problem for the Saudi government, for example. One graduate of the facility in Riyadh told me privately that although he was taking psychotropic medications, which helped, he was still suffering from terrible nightmares and feeling hypervigilant. (He claimed to have been tortured with electrodes in Afghanistan, prior to being moved to Guantánamo.) It will be critically important to incorporate some of what the medical community learns about posttraumatic stress disorder. This is not because terrorists deserve sympathy -- they do not -- but because understanding their state of mind is necessary to limiting the risk that they will return to violence.

Some individuals join terrorist movements out of conviction but evolve over time into professional killers. Once that happens, the emotional, or material, benefits of belonging can overtake the spiritual benefits of believing. This suggests that some terrorists might develop enduring reasons -- perhaps even a compulsion -- to pursue violence. Such individuals should be detained preventively and the key thrown away, as some governments do with sexual predators. But in cases in which the law precludes indefinite detention, governments may be forced to release suspects. In those instances, officials will have to choose whether to ignore the threat posed by these people or work with other governments to develop tools to reduce the chance that they will resume being terrorists. Regarding lower-level operatives, governments must consider risky tradeoffs. On the one hand, how great is the chance that graduates of deradicalization programs will return to terrorism or other forms of violent crime? On the other hand, are incarcerated terrorists recruiting in prison among the ordinary criminals or the guards, or can preventive detention, or the prison itself, become a symbol of injustice to potential recruits?

REHABILITATION AND RECIDIVISM

After participating in a 1974 survey of 231 case studies of rehabilitation programs for criminals in prisons, the sociologist Robert Martinson wrote that "with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism." This observation sparked a "nothing works" movement throughout the United States. Academics continued to study the rehabilitation of criminals, however, and there is now a fairly broad consensus that some measures do work. The most successful rehabilitation models focus on the motivations of individual offenders. The ideal approach includes three components: prison-based rehabilitation programs, services to help released prisoners reintegrate into society, and postrelease services. The community's involvement in the postrelease services, in particular, is essential to reducing recidivism rates.

Terrorists are different from ordinary criminals in many ways, of course, but it is worth noting that according to the Saudi government, its deradicalization program -- which relies on prison-based rehabilitation programs, transitional services, and postrelease services -- has been extraordinarily successful. The Saudi government has not disclosed the total number of people who have completed its program, but as of 2009, 11 graduates had ended up on the country's most-wanted terrorist list. Still, according to official statistics, the rate of recidivism is 10-20 percent, far lower than that for ordinary criminals. In order to gain a more complete understanding of what works, and what does not, in deradicalization efforts, it will be important for the Saudi government to give outsiders greater access to the program and to statistics regarding it.

That said, some of the Saudi program's main features, and thus its results, may be difficult to replicate elsewhere. The project is extremely expensive; it is constantly being updated, based on input from the staff and participants. It includes psychological counseling, vocational training, art therapy, sports, and religious reeducation. Former Guantánamo detainees who graduate from the program are given housing, a car, money for a wedding -- even assistance in finding a wife, if necessary. They receive help with career placement for themselves and their families. There is an extensive postrelease program as well, which involves extensive surveillance. The guiding philosophy behind these efforts, the program's leaders explained, is that jihadists are victims, not villains, and they need tailored assistance -- a view probably unacceptable in many countries.

Could aspects of the program nonetheless be replicated elsewhere? The U.S. government has been trying to persuade the Saudi government to assist in reintegrating into mainstream society 97 Yemeni terrorist suspects who remained in Guantánamo as of October 2009. According to Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, these Yemenis "include many of the worst of the worst." Repatriating them to Yemen, Wittes adds, is not an attractive option because of the fragility of the Yemeni state and its notoriously leaky jails: ten terrorist suspects escaped in 2003; in 2006, 23 suspects did. And because the Saudi program depends on relatives to police the behavior of the detainees once they are released, Boucek, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes the U.S. proposal to send the Yemenis to the Saudi program as "a catastrophically bad idea," unless the detainees grew up or have relatives in Saudi Arabia. Boucek favors giving U.S. assistance for a new program in Yemen that would be modeled in part on the one in Saudi Arabia.

GANGPLANK

Both radicalization and deradicalization typically involve several steps, including changes in values and changes in behavior. The changes in values do not necessarily precede the changes in behavior, John Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, has found. Individuals often join extremist groups in the same way that they might join gangs -- through social connections, to gain a sense of belonging -- and only later do they acquire extremist views. The literature on gangs, for its part, suggests that the most productive time to intervene in this process is before an individual joins the group.

It is based on this understanding that, alongside their deradicalization projects, several governments are devising programs to forestall radicalization altogether. Youth programs developed by the Institute for Multicultural Development (also known as FORUM), in the Netherlands, help adolescents and young adults in the country resist radicalization and recruitment into terrorist groups by encouraging them to "express their possible disappointments and (justified) feelings of exclusion in peaceful and democratic ways and turn their genuine concerns into positive social action." FORUM focuses on "problem neighborhoods," namely, ethnic neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment.

The Saudi government also runs a terrorism-prevention program, which monitors religious leaders, schoolteachers, and Web sites. It recently arrested five individuals for promoting militant activities on the Internet and recruiting individuals to travel abroad for what the government called "inappropriate purposes." Meanwhile, it also supports a nongovernmental organization called the Sakinah Campaign (sakinah means "tranquility"), which helps Internet users who have visited extremist sites interact with legitimate Islamic scholars online, with a view to steering them away from radicalism.

Such projects may serve as models or at least as a source of inspiration for similar efforts elsewhere. Washington should study them, even though the United States has so far been relatively immune from the kind of homegrown Islamist terrorism that has afflicted Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and other European countries. This may be because American Muslims tend to be more fully integrated into American society and tend to be better educated and have higher-paying jobs than the average American. In the last few years, however, a small number of Somali immigrants who had settled as refugees in the United States, especially in Minnesota, have joined al Shabab in Somalia. (One of them is the first known American to become a suicide bomber.) These immigrants have less in common with other American Muslims and more resemble Pakistanis in the United Kingdom and Moroccans in the Netherlands, who face discrimination in school and on the job market. Unlike previous waves of Muslim immigrants to the United States, these Somalis arrived with little knowledge of English or the United States. Partly as a result, they have had difficulty assimilating into American society: according to the most recent census, Somali Americans have the highest unemployment rate among East African diasporas in the United States and the lowest rate of college graduation.

U.S. officials devising social programs for Somali American youth can learn not only from previous anti-gang efforts in the United States but also from the experiences of European governments and their efforts to lure lower-achieving immigrant youth away from gangs and terrorist groups. As part of these efforts, it makes a great deal of sense to back anti-jihadi Muslim activists. But that is also a risky move. Antifundamentalist groups that get official backing risk being perceived not just as opposing violence but also as opposing Islam. The Quilliam Foundation, an anti-extremism think tank in the United Kingdom that was started by two former members of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, has received nearly one million pounds from the British government -- and has lost credibility among ordinary Muslims.

But there are hopeful signs: Hanif Qadir, together with his brother and a former member of a local gang, created the Active Change Foundation in 2003, an organization that runs a youth center and a gym in Waltham Forest, a culturally diverse and gang-infested borough of northern London, and is supported by the Metropolitan Police. Qadir told me that he had been recruited by al Qaeda in 2002 and was on his way to Afghanistan expecting to fight when he changed his mind after hearing that volunteers were being used as "cannon fodder." Now, he explained to me, he encourages youth to express their rage about the mistreatment of Muslims in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere and channel it into peaceful political action. Having been involved in its gangs or violent extremist groups themselves, he and the other program leaders know the community well. The foundation's ambition, as it puts it, is to "work behind the 'wall of silence'" with people who are marginalized by mainstream British society.

Terrorism continues to pose a significant threat to civilians around the world. If every terrorist could be killed or captured and then kept locked up indefinitely, the world would be a safer place. But there are limitations to this approach. Often, the only evidence implicating captured terrorists is not usable in court, and some terrorists will inevitably be released if they are returned to their countries of origin. The destructive ideology that animates the al Qaeda movement is spreading around the globe, including, in some cases, to small-town America. Homegrown zealots, motivated by al Qaeda's distorted interpretation of Islam, may not yet be capable of carrying out 9/11-style strikes, but they could nonetheless terrorize a nation.

Terrorism spreads, in part, through bad ideas. The most dangerous and seductive bad idea spreading around the globe today is a distorted and destructive interpretation of Islam, which asserts that killing innocents is a way to worship God. Part of the solution must come from within Islam and from Islamic scholars, who can refute this ideology with arguments based on theology and ethics. But bad ideas are only part of the problem. Terrorists prey on vulnerable populations -- people who feel humiliated and victimized or who find their identities by joining extremist movements. Governments' arsenals against terrorism must include tools to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable populations. These tools should look more like anti-gang programs and public diplomacy than war.

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Yemen's fight with rebels a regional concern - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

Sunni-Shiite tensions grow as Saudis allege Iran's involvement

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 14, 2009

MAZRAQ, YEMEN -- Along the jagged, oatmeal-colored mountains of northern Yemen, civil war has transformed the windswept landscape into a canvas of human misery, bolstering al-Qaeda's efforts to create a haven in the Middle East's poorest nation.

It is a war largely hidden from the rest of the world the past five years, and it pits the Hawthi rebels, who are Shiites, against Yemen's government. In recent days, however, it has also drawn in Saudi Arabia. Yemen and Saudi Arabia, both ruled by Sunnis, accuse Shiite Iran of backing the rebels, raising the specter of a proxy war that could elevate sectarian tensions in this oil-rich region.

The fighting could have serious implications for the U.S. anti-terrorism effort in a failing nation where al-Qaeda is gaining strength, Western diplomats and Yemeni analysts say. The war is drawing attention and scarce resources away from efforts to combat poverty, a secessionist movement in the south and piracy along the nation's shores. A prolonged conflict, they say, could further weaken Yemen's government and deepen societal fissures, allowing al-Qaeda militants to thrive.

"The longer the war in the north continues and the longer the problems in the south continue without resolution, the more we pave the road for al-Qaeda," said Yahya Abu Asbu, a Foreign Ministry official and deputy secretary general of the Yemeni Socialist Party. "Yemen will become more dangerous than Somalia."

Ruling party officials concede that the war is siphoning resources from other pressing problems, but they say their priority is to crush the rebellion.

"You cannot say the Hawthis are less dangerous than al-Qaeda," said Yasser Ahmed Bin Salim al-Awadi, who heads the government's ruling bloc in parliament. "Al-Qaeda is not doing something like what the Hawthis are doing now."

The war has forced more than 175,000 Yemenis to flee their homes; many more remain trapped in areas gripped by violence.

Ali Abdu and his family are among the war's newest victims.

They escaped to Saudi Arabia two months ago. But last week, the Hawthi rebels crossed into Saudi Arabia and attacked a Saudi patrol. The kingdom retaliated by bombing rebel positions in Yemen, but also forced Abdu and hundreds of other desperate refugees back across the border.

Evading bombs and bullets, the family reached Mazraq, a crowded refugee camp less than five miles from the front lines.

"It is our destiny," said Abdu, 45, with no hint of emotion. He paused, then added: "Only Allah knows why they are fighting."

The clans

The Hawthis, who believe in the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam, ruled northern Yemen as a religious imamate for nearly a millennium before being overthrown in a 1962 coup. Ever since, Yemen's rulers have been wary of them and other Zaydi clans. The Zaydis make up more than a quarter of Yemen's population and constitute a majority in the north.

The rebels accuse the government of trying to dilute their religion by installing Sunni fundamentalists in mosques and official positions in some Zaydi areas. The government maintains that Hawthis seek to bring back the Zaydi imamate.

The conflict began in 2004 with a few hundred rebel fighters. It has grown into a full-fledged insurgency that Yemen's undisciplined military has struggled to contain, despite its deployment of military units and resources to the north. Last year, the fighting reached the outskirts of Sanaa, the capital.

In the town of Mazraq on Thursday, the market was crowded with disheveled Yemeni soldiers in ragtag uniforms. Many carried aging Kalashnikov rifles and rode in the back of pickup trucks, chewing khat, a mildly narcotic leaf popular in Yemen.

Yemeni officials expressed confidence that they could crush the rebellion, now that the Saudis were pushing from the north. The kingdom is deeply concerned about having a hostile Shiite region on its southern border.

The rebels say they staged the border attack, which killed a Saudi soldier, because of Saudi support for Yemen. Hawthi rebel commanders have denied Iran is supporting them. Iran, too, has denied arming or financing the rebels. Yemen and Saudi Arabia have not provided credible evidence of Iranian support, Western diplomats and analysts say.

Still, Saudi Arabia's entry into the conflict has touched a nerve with Iran. This week, Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, declared that no nation should "interfere" in Yemen's internal affairs, a veiled snipe at Saudi Arabia. Some analysts say if Saudi Arabia continues to attack the rebels, Iran might decide to back the Hawthis, if it hasn't already, as a way to gain leverage over Riyadh.

"Iran believes the biggest obstacle to its growing influence in the region is Saudi Arabia," said Najib Ghallab, a political researcher at Sanaa University. "To weaken Saudi influence, Iran believes Yemen is the starting point."

Sectarian differences

Many Yemenis say al-Qaeda is already taking advantage of the government's focus on the north. An al-Qaeda ambush this month in the east that killed five security officials raised questions over whether the thinly stretched government can control the entire country. "In this environment, security is weak and the government is busy with wars. This is the environment al-Qaeda wants."

Some officials allege that the Hawthis are allied with the Sunni militants of al-Qaeda, but they provide no evidence. Most analysts view it as an attempt by a weak government to generate support from the United States and other Western powers that fear Yemen is descending into chaos. The Hawthis have long been deeply antagonistic toward hard-line Sunni fundamentalists, making any alliance with al-Qaeda unlikely.

Critics of the government declare that the war can be ended quickly through negotiations. They accuse Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, of engaging in war to bolster his military authority, weaken political rivals and milk more economic and military aid from Western powers.

Awadi dismissed such suggestions. "It's not in the government's interest to make war in the hope it will bring more instability."

As the conflict rages, sectarian and tribal animosities are deepening. In the camp, some refugees said Hawthis had forced Sunnis from their villages.

"They were the first to be exposed to any dangers," Ahmed Garela Al-Balawi, 43, a Zaydi Shiite who fled Haidan, a Hawthi stronghold, said last week.

In Sanaa, government forces have detained Shiites thought to support the Hawthis, human rights activists say. Shiites have been banned from sensitive jobs and were ordered to hand in weapons, said Hassan Zaid, the Shiite leader of the al-Haq party, which supported the Hawthis. His party has since been dissolved.

Awadi doesn't dispute taking action against Hawthi supporters, but he said there were no sectarian motives.

Outside the camp, Ahmed Davish, 37, shooed away flies buzzing around his face. He and his family had arrived five days earlier -- also forced from Saudi Arabia.

In the previous years of war, Davish, who is Sunni, returned to his village of Raza to live side by side again with Shiites. This time, "it's very difficult to return," he said. "You should be a Hawthi, or you will be killed."

Saudi Forces Bomb Yemeni Rebels on Southern Border - WSJ.com

By MOHAMMED ALY SERGIE, SUMMER SAID and MARGARET COKER

RIYADH -- Saudi Arabia launched bombing raids Thursday against Yemeni rebels along the border between the two countries, marking a significant escalation in efforts to stamp out an insurgency that Yemen has struggled to contain.

The raids followed the killing of a Saudi soldier when a border patrol was fired on by "infiltrators" Wednesday, according to Saudi state media. The Saudis warned of a fierce retaliation.

Yemen began a military offensive this summer, called Operation Scorched Earth, against the rebel group, known as the Houthi. The flare-up of a five-year-old conflict has raised fears that al Qaeda members who have found refuge in Yemen could take advantage of instability on the rugged, porous border to attack Saudi Arabia.

The Houthi, which isn't connected to al Qaeda, is fighting for autonomy against what it calls an ineffectual and corrupt central Yemen government. The government calls the uprising treasonous. Members of the group, which is named for its founder, practice an offshoot of Shiite Islam, instead of the Sunni Islam that most Yemenis adhere to.

Saudi Arabia is a strong supporter of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and a major donor to its impoverished southern neighbor. A top Saudi official recently reiterated Riyadh's commitment to ensuring Yemen's internal security.

The mobilization of Saudi forces is a rare event for the country, which boasts one of the most high-tech and largest military forces in the region.

Details of the Saudi military response Thursday were difficult to confirm. The territory involved is remote and mountainous. The Saudi government declined to comment on the military action or confirm details.

Residents in the Saudi town of Jizan, about 50 miles from the Yemeni border, reported hearing squadrons of fighter planes roaring toward the border before daybreak Thursday. The sorties continued until the end of the day, said one resident, who said he also saw Saudi infantry troops moving toward the border.

Saudi forces evacuated some towns north of Yemen's border which armed infiltrators had occupied Tuesday, carried out airstrikes in Saudi territory and took control of the area, the official Saudi Press Agency reported early Friday.

Rebel leaders told the Associated Press that Saudi bombs had hit their positions well inside Yemeni territory and caused numerous civilian casualties.

The Saudi television network Al Arabiya, which has a reporter on the Saudi-Yemen border, reported that the Saudi military was bombing rebel positions along the border as well as inside Yemen. The network said at least 40 rebels had been killed. That number was impossible to verify, as were reports of civilian casualties.

A doctor working at King Fahd Hospital in Jizan said Thursday night that staff there had been told to prepare for military casualties. Hospital workers had already treated numerous Saudi soldiers who had been wounded in the incursion earlier in the week, he said.

Yemeni diplomats denied that Saudi forces had entered Yemeni airspace or moved across the border into Yemen. "The Houthi insurgents continue to disseminate false information to deflect media attention from their collapsing morals and foothold," said Mohammed Albasha, a spokesman for the Embassy of the Republic of Yemen in Washington.

During this summer's battles, both the army and the rebels accused outside capitals of interceding on their enemy's behalf. Yemen claims Iran is helping arm the rebels, and the rebels say Riyadh has helped the central government.

The rebels deny getting any help from Tehran, which has offered to mediate in the conflict. A Yemeni Interior Ministry official said that the Saudis had never intervened militarily in Yemen.

The five-year-old conflict between the Houthi rebels and the Yemeni government has uprooted more than 150,000 Yemeni civilians from their homes and added to a deteriorating security situation in the country.

Besides dealing with the rebels in the north and a separatist threat in the south, the government is struggling to contain al Qaeda militants who are establishing havens in lawless parts of the country.

Saudi officials say the Houthi insurgency distracts the Yemeni president from what they see as the more important task of disrupting those jihadi groups.

Saudis have kicked out or jailed most of their homegrown al Qaeda and are watching the Yemen border closely to keep militant cells there out of the kingdom. This summer, a Yemen-based al Qaeda militant attempted to assassinate the Saudi deputy interior minister, a member of the ruling family.

In Yemen, War Centers on Authority, Not Terrain - NYTimes.com

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By ROBERT F. WORTH

SANA, Yemen — For almost seven weeks, Khasan Muhammad Abdullah and his family cowered in their house in northern Yemen while a war raged outside and their food slowly ran out. He could hear government fighter jets screaming across the sky, and he knew the Houthi rebels by their distinctive logos and headbands. But he could not understand what the two sides were fighting about.

“What do they want, what are they thinking?” Mr. Abdullah said wearily, sitting on a friend’s floor here a week after escaping the war zone, along Yemen’s remote northwestern border with Saudi Arabia.

Those questions are being asked across the Arab world and beyond. More than two months of fierce fighting have left thousands dead. Whole villages have been pounded to rubble. The conflict has forced tens of thousands to flee their homes, fueling a humanitarian crisis and worsening the chaos that has already made Yemen a new haven for Al Qaeda and other militant groups.

Yet this mysterious war seems to have more to do with the crumbling authority of the Yemeni state than with any single cause. The Houthi rebels, after all, are a small group who have never issued any clear set of demands. They have been fighting the government on and off since 2004, and it is not clear why President Ali Abdullah Saleh decided in August to force an all-out war.

Many in Yemen’s own government say the conflict is less about controlling terrain — always a tenuous prospect in this tribally splintered country — than about Mr. Saleh’s struggle to reassert his military powers, in the face of widening insurgencies and intensifying political rivalry in the capital.

“Saleh started this war mainly because he wants his son to succeed him, and many in the military and government do not accept this,” said one high-ranking Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, echoing an analysis that is often heard here. “With a war, people rally around him, even the United States, because they fear chaos in Yemen if he falls.”

Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, dismissed that view as idle speculation. He said the Houthis had forced the government’s hand by terrorizing the population in the north, assassinating local leaders and rearming, in violation of a cease-fire reached last year. He added that the war had a regional and sectarian dimension: the Houthis belong to an offshoot of Shiite Islam known as Zaydism, and he said they received support from Shiites across the region, including in Iran. (The Houthis have denied all this in their official statements.) Yemen is mostly Sunni.

“There were some efforts by the government to mediate, but finally we felt we had to take action,” Mr. Qirbi said during an interview in his office.

Much about the war remains uncertain, because the Yemeni government has strictly barred journalists and independent observers from entering Saada Province, the center of the fighting.

Yet it is clear that the conflict has spread across much of Yemen’s lawless north, swamping the few aid groups operating there. As many as 150,000 people are now homeless, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Many more remain trapped in Saada, where aid groups have no access at all, and supplies of food, water and fuel are growing scarcer. The area is also flooded with weapons, which are so uncontrollable that the government used a major arms dealer as an intermediary with the Houthis.

Those who have escaped the war zone say the crisis is worsening.

“If we had not fled our house, we would have been finished,” said Mr. Abdullah, a lame and beaten-looking 60-year-old who left his home in late September. “The house was in the middle of the fighting. We came with the clothes on our backs, nothing else.”

On the road south, Mr. Abdullah and others said, they were surrounded by other desperate families seeking safety. Some are staying in temporary camps where aid groups are supplying food and water, but even those camps are being rapidly overwhelmed. Many donors have been reluctant to give money, in part because of concerns about poor access and government corruption, according to aid officials in Sana, the capital.

It also seems clear that the Houthis’ influence has steadily grown since the conflict first broke out in 2004, largely because of the government’s mistakes. The Houthis began as a small band of mountain insurgents loyal to Hussein al-Houthi, a former member of the Yemeni Parliament. They belong to a quasi-aristocratic subgroup of Zaydis who claim to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and who ruled the country for much of the past thousand years until 1962.

The government’s bombing raids, and its use of thuggish tribesman as a proxy force, infuriated the local population in Saada. They began fighting alongside the Houthis after Mr. Houthi was killed in 2004, and the battlefield extended to neighboring provinces. Even more civilians have been killed in the latest round of fighting. An airstrike last month left more than 80 people dead in the Harf Sufyan area, most of them reportedly women and children.

The fighting in Saada has also provoked tribal and sectarian animosities that threaten to further destabilize the region. The Houthis formed in part to fight back against the influence of hard-line Sunni Islamists, who received support from neighboring Saudi Arabia. The Yemeni government has often used these extremists (usually known as Salafists) as proxy warriors against the Houthis.

“The government never respects your human rights unless you are a Salafist,” said Neshwan Yahya Ahmed, another exile from Saada now living in miserable conditions in a crowded house on the edge of Sana.

Mr. Ahmed, who gave his age as 38 or 39, said he had fought in a government-organized “popular army” against the Houthis, who had arrested and released him four times. Although he seemed hostile to the Houthis, he also deeply resented the government’s policy of using sectarian and tribal animosities to further its goals.

Several Saada residents, and aid workers who have spent time there, said the Houthis had extended their influence over the past year in part because they had worked hard to resolve local tribal conflicts. This effort, they say, stands in stark contrast with the government’s policies, which have long involved setting tribal and political groups against one another.

In addition to its scorched-earth campaign against the Houthis, Yemen’s government is facing other serious challenges. A southern secessionist movement that has been brewing for years flared up into open violence earlier this year and gained the support of one of Mr. Saleh’s important allies. Al Qaeda has regrouped in Yemen and is using the country as a base for attacks throughout the region.

“Many Yemenis fear that this war will continue until the army is really tired,” said Majid al-Fahed, the director of a private group called the Civic Democratic Foundation, who spent time in Saada late last month. “Then who will defend the rest of the country?”

U.S. Sees Saudi Program as an Option for Yemeni Detainees - washingtonpost.com

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By Sudarsan Raghavan and Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Four years after Khalid al-Jehani's release from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the 34-year-old Saudi lives a peaceful life in this sprawling coastal city. He has a car, a job and a well-furnished apartment -- courtesy of the Saudi government.

The rehabilitation of militants such as Jehani has convinced the Obama administration that Saudi Arabia is the ideal place to send dozens of Yemenis being held at Guantanamo. For months, U.S. officials have applied pressure on Riyadh. But Saudi officials say their success with former detainees such as Jehani lies in members of his family and tribe, who keep constant watch over him, and cannot be duplicated with those whose social networks and roots lie outside Saudi Arabia.

"If I try to do something bad, my family will tell the government about me," said Jehani, who joined a radical Islamist movement in the Philippines and trained al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. "How can you trust that will happen with a family living in Yemen?"

As President Obama's promised January deadline to close Guantanamo approaches, the fate of 97 Yemenis remains the administration's biggest obstacle to closing the facility and forging a new detention policy. They are the largest community left at Guantanamo, roughly half of the prisoners who remain there, and are viewed as among the most radicalized, with deep jihadist roots inside Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland.

Yemen is ruled by a weak central government battling an insurgency in the north, secessionists in the south and a growing al-Qaeda presence. The Obama administration is unwilling to send the detainees there because it has no faith in Yemeni security guarantees. Only 15 Yemenis have been sent back to Yemen in the past seven years, even as hundreds of Saudi and Afghan detainees have gone home.

Most countries that have agreed to resettle detainees from other countries are willing to take only those who have been cleared for release by the courts or by a Justice Department-led review team and who cannot be returned to their home countries because of fears of torture or other abuse.

The Yemenis do not meet those criteria. The majority of them have not been cleared for release. Moreover, the United States is reluctant to repatriate the 26 Yemenis who have been cleared, citing security concerns. That heightens suspicions among Saudi officials, as well as among European nations, that the Yemeni detainees constitute a risk they do not want to take.

Despite the impasse, U.S. officials hope to send the majority of the Yemenis to Saudi Arabia. They would be the only detainees, other than Saudis, sent there. "The talks with the Saudi and Yemeni governments over the disposition of the Yemeni detainees have been productive and are ongoing," an administration official said.

Publicly, Saudi officials have said they will accept the Yemenis only if they come willingly. Privately, Saudi officials interviewed here say they would like to find a different solution. If Saudi Arabia were to accept the Yemenis -- a decision that most observers say will require the blessing of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz -- it risks becoming a greater al-Qaeda target. The kingdom also has close ties to Yemen's government, which would probably consider the detainees' transfer to Saudi Arabia a public embarrassment. Yemen has publicly declared that it wants its detainees to return home.

If the Yemenis participated and then rejoined al-Qaeda, it would be a severe blow to the program as well as to the kingdom's pride.

"It's a no-win situation for the Saudis. They can't rehabilitate these guys, and they don't want to become America's jailor," said Christopher Boucek, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has studied the rehabilitation program.

Ties That Bind

When detainees from Guantanamo land in Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a high-ranking member of the Saudi ruling family and head of the kingdom's counterterrorism operations, personally informs their families that their sons have returned home.

A mix of religious, psychological and social programs wean participants off extremist ideology. At least 1,500 detainees have been released from the six-month-long program. Of the 120 detainees from Guantanamo, 108 have graduated; more than 80 percent remain active participants in the rehabilitation efforts and have not rejoined al-Qaeda, Saudi officials said. Nearly 20 percent have escaped abroad, disappeared or been rearrested.

Human rights groups have criticized the program, saying people have been detained without being charged. Earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that it was hard to measure the program's success. It has released "mostly minor offenders," and "many of the more hardened terrorists do not undergo rehabilitation," he said, according to a declassified document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that was obtained and released by the Federation of American Scientists.

Upon a detainee's release, family and tribal leaders sign guarantees vouching that he will not return to terrorism. At stake is their honor and family name -- essential in Saudi society. Security officials keep in close contact but rely heavily on the family to alert them to any potential problems. Financial assistance flows freely -- for education, jobs and marriage. Jehani said the government even paid for his wife's fertility treatment.

"When you get married and have children, you are busy," said Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, who heads the counter-radicalization unit at the Saudi Interior Ministry. "You value the meaning of life, and you understand the culture of death more."

At the rehabilitation center last weekend, teachers learned that the baby son of one graduate, a former Guantanamo detainee, had died. Ahmed Gelan, the program coordinator, immediately called him to offer condolences -- and assistance.

"If we don't help the family, al-Qaeda will," said Hameed al-Shaygi, a sociologist at the center.

Shaygi said the system could never be as effective with the Yemeni detainees. Only about 20 of the Yemenis have some familial ties inside Saudi Arabia, and it is unclear how strong those are. "How will their families work with us?" Shaygi asked. Also, Yemenis and Saudis practice different strains of Sunni Islam. The vast majority of Saudis are in a higher economic class than Yemenis, which could lead to resentment.

"We will have a Riyadh-namo," Shaygi concluded. "We will become a target of al-Qaeda. Saudis will be seen as continuing what the Americans are doing."

High Stakes All Around

Saudi officials say they are most concerned about the Yemenis after graduation. In February, the government released a list of 85 most-wanted Saudi terrorists. At least 11 were graduates of the program; most had fled abroad, including at least two across the kingdom's porous southern border into Yemen.

They included Saeed al-Shehri, who became the second-ranking leader of al-Qaeda's wing in Yemen, and Mohammed Awfi, who became an al-Qaeda field commander. "You cannot guarantee results," said Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman. "What we are doing is like a last-chance effort. We can't put them behind bars since we have nothing against them."

Six weeks ago, a Saudi militant -- No. 40 on the most-wanted list -- nearly assassinated Prince Nayef after crossing over from Yemen with a bomb hidden in his body. "The Saudis have no way of controlling them once they leave for Yemen," Boucek said. "But the world will hold the Saudis responsible."

The stakes are high for the Obama administration, too. Barring a deal with Saudi Arabia, most of the Yemenis could end up in some system of prolonged detention, justified by the administration under the laws of war. And if Guantanamo is closed, they could end up in a prison camp on U.S. soil, probably on a military base, ensuring more political headaches for Obama.

Still, Saudi Arabia has a vested interest in ensuring the Yemenis don't rejoin al-Qaeda. One scenario, said Boucek, is that Saudi Arabia might be willing to host the Yemenis for a few months to buy the U.S. and Yemeni governments time to find a solution.

In interviews, some Saudi and Western officials said a possible solution is for the United States, Saudi Arabia and others to build a rehabilitation program in Yemen. But with Yemen plagued by official corruption and domestic turbulence, many are skeptical.

"Will this succeed with all the Yemenis? Maybe not," Jehani said. "Even in Saudi Arabia, it has not succeeded 100 percent."

Finn reported from Washington.

In Saudi Arabia, a Campus Built as a 'Beacon of Tolerance' - washingtonpost.com

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High-Tech University Draws the Ire of Hard-Line Clerics for Freedoms It Provides to Women

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 9, 2009

THUWAL, Saudi Arabia -- On this gleaming high-tech campus edged by the Red Sea, May Qurashi crossed a barrier the other day. She played a game on PlayStation with some male fellow students. Her best friend, Sarah al-Aqeel, is also reaching for the forbidden. She's getting her driver's license.

Under Saudi Arabia's strict constraints, Saudi women like Qurashi and Aqeel may neither mingle with men nor drive. But at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened last month on this sprawling site 50 miles north of Jiddah, men and women take classes together. Women are not required to wear traditional black head-to-toe abayas or veil their faces -- and they can get behind a steering wheel.

"I don't think religion should have anything to do with higher education," said Qurashi, a 23-year-old biological engineering graduate student.

The research university is the latest, and so far most significant, endeavor by a Persian Gulf nation to diversify its economy and help wean the region from its dependence on oil wealth. Saudi officials describe the multibillion-dollar postgraduate institution as the spear in the kingdom's efforts to transform itself into a global scientific center rivaling those in the United States, Europe and Asia.

But the kingdom's powerful religious establishment is increasingly voicing criticism of the university. On Web sites, clerics have blasted the school's coeducational policy as a violation of sharia, or Islamic law. Last week, a member of the influential Supreme Committee of Islamic Scholars, a government-sanctioned body, called for a probe into the curriculum and its compatibility with sharia law, local newspapers reported.

"Mixing is a great sin and a great evil," Saad bin Nasser al-Shithri was quoted as saying in the al-Watan newspaper. "When men mix with women, their hearts burn, and they will be diverted from their main goal," which he said is "education."

His comments sparked outrage from influential advocates of modernization. "It's the sort of thinking that, if not for the King, would have kept this country wandering the desert on the backs of camels in search of water and pasture," the al-Iqtisadiya newspaper editorialized.

In an unprecedented action, reformist King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz issued a royal decree over the weekend removing Shithri from his post, according to the official Saudi Press Agency and Western diplomats.

Many Saudis and Western analysts view the university as a test of Abdullah's ability to challenge hard-line Islamic clerics and expand freedoms, including rights for women, in the Middle East's most religiously austere country. In a speech last month inaugurating the university, the king, 85, declared that "faith and science cannot compete except in unhealthy souls" and that "scientific centers that embrace all peoples are the first lines of defense against extremists." He said he hoped the university, known as KAUST, would become "a beacon of tolerance."

"I interact a lot with men. We hang out together. We go to classes together," said Qurashi, her moon-shaped face framed by a black abaya. "But I'm a Muslim woman. I want friendship and nothing more. If I can stick to my religion and my normal values, then what's wrong with that?"

Challenging Barriers

Three years ago, Abdullah ordered executives of the Saudi national oil company, Aramco, to build the university, fulfilling a 25-year-old vision. The kingdom was in the midst of an economic crisis, and the monarch realized that his country could no longer rely solely on oil, said Nadhmi al-Nasr, the university's interim vice president and a senior Aramco executive.

Today, the campus is a scientist's dream. It houses one of the world's faster supercomputers. A three-dimensional virtual reality room takes visitors into an archaeological dig or a coral reef. Ultra-high-resolution photography allows the study of mountain rock formations.

Research centers focus on vital areas such as finding alternative forms of energy and sources of potable water. Solar energy partially powers the campus; electric vehicles provide public transport. Fortune 500 companies such as Dow Chemical fund research. The goal, university officials said, is to effectively collaborate with industry to create a new generation of researchers, inventors and entrepreneurs.

"We'll be exporting electricity to Europe and Asia one day," Nasr said.

There are 71 professors, many from the United States, and 817 students from 61 countries. Nearly 400 students began classes last month; the rest will arrive next year. Saudi students, including 20 women, make up 15 percent of the student body.

To attract top scientists and postgraduate students, the university -- which is run by an independent board of trustees -- offered generous tax-free salaries, large houses, a golf course and a yacht club. They also set out to overcome the country's societal restrictions.

Ahmad al-Khowaiter, the interim vice president for economic development and an Aramco executive, said that the intention was not "to break social boundaries." Nevertheless, interviews conducted on the campus over three days suggest that many students and faculty members hope to contribute to a broadening of academic freedom and women's rights in the country.

One workshop held on campus recently explored the challenges facing Saudi women in the higher educational system. A higher percentage of Saudi women than men graduate from college with a degree. But they are restricted to attending all-female institutions, and social and cultural barriers stop many from entering scientific research and other postgraduate programs. They are often directed to the study of humanities and the arts -- science is viewed as a "male" profession -- and are expected to raise families. After graduation, they have trouble finding good jobs, and women in leadership roles are rare in companies, universities and government.

Nasr told the mostly female audience that the university wants to ensure that female academics are among its leaders. "I hope in my lifetime I will see a Saudi female become president of KAUST," he said.

The audience, which included Qurashi and Aqeel, exploded with applause.

Jasmeen Merzaban, a biochemistry professor and one of five women on the faculty, said she hoped the university will help change perceptions of women. "We have the knowledge and power that we can move forward and be just as good as our male colleagues," she said.

But on many Saudi Web sites and chat rooms, the reaction is mixed. A video posted on YouTube shows a Saudi KAUST employee in white tribal garments gyrating his hips on a table after the university's inauguration, as men and women cheer and dance along. By Thursday, the video had been viewed more than 67,000 times and drawn 129 comments.

"God have mercy on the employee. He wasn't raised properly. He should be punished," wrote one person.

"The purest place on earth is not segregated, and that is the holy mosque in Mecca," a university supporter responded.

Some question whether the Saudi educational system will modernize and improve enough to funnel more qualified students to the university -- or whether KAUST will remain mostly a facility for foreigners.

"It remains to be seen whether the university will be an island of freedom in an ocean of repression, or whether it can help spread freedoms to other parts of the kingdom," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

Choosing Lines to Cross

Not everyone in Aqeel's family supports her decision to study in a coed environment. Two brothers, she said, advised her parents to order her to veil her face on campus -- as she does when she walks with them.

She refused. "I'm not doing anything wrong," she said with a newfound boldness.

Now she eats lunch and dinner with her male classmates. She studies with them. A Canadian male classmate is teaching her how to play the piano. But when she goes to parties, she doesn't dance.

"We have red lines we shouldn't cross," she said.

In Failed Strike on Saudi Prince, A New Fear of Al-Qaeda's Tactics - washingtonpost.com

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By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- The bomb was hidden inside the al-Qaeda assassin's body, and he arrived on his target's personal plane.

The target was Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a senior member of Saudi Arabia's ruling family and head of the kingdom's counterterrorism operations. The bomber, who had crossed the border from Yemen, passed at least two security checks, then detonated himself less than a yard away from the prince. Somehow, the prince survived.

But the attack, on Aug. 27 during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has sent tremors through Saudi Arabian and Western intelligence circles. The attack, the first serious assassination attempt against a member of the Saudi ruling family in decades, raised new concerns about al-Qaeda's tactics, strength, and its use of neighboring Yemen as a haven and training ground.

It also raised doubts about Saudi Arabia's program for combating terrorism, which focuses on rehabilitating militants and getting them to renounce al-Qaeda.

"It's an unbelievable stroke of luck that Prince Mohammed was little injured as he was," said a Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the topic's sensitive nature. "The whole Saudi approach to counter terrorism would have been challenged had he died."

Local reports described the attack unfolding during a traditional Ramadan gathering at the prince's palace in the coastal city of Jiddah. In interviews in the capital in recent days, Saudi Interior Ministry officials and Western diplomats provided information about the attack and the circumstances leading up to the prince's encounter with the al-Qaeda militant. Some details were reported by National Public Radio on Tuesday.

The assailant was Abdullah Hassan Tali Assiri, and he was No. 40 on a list of 85 terrorists that the Saudi government considered most dangerous. He was a Saudi but was based in Yemen, where al-Qaeda has been gaining strength. Saudi and Western officials said the attack was planned and launched from Yemen.

Al-Qaeda preyed on Mohammed's "soft approach" to combating terrorism. The prince is widely known to give personal assurances to militants and treat them with dignity if they renounce al-Qaeda. Those who enter an extremist rehabilitation program are given cars, houses and jobs upon graduation. When Saudi security forces kill terrorism suspects in raids, Prince Mohammed has been known to call the families to console them, according to Western diplomats and Saudi officials.

So it was no surprise that when Assiri contacted the prince, he was receptive.

Assiri informed the prince that he needed to meet him urgently, according to Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Gen. Turki al Mansour. There were others who also wanted to renounce al-Qaeda and turn themselves in, Assiri told the prince.

The prince, said Mansour, brought up the case of Mohammed al-Awfi, a Saudi jihadist and former inmate at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who fled to Yemen after returning to the kingdom. But this year, Awfi gave himself up to Saudi authorities, and he now lives comfortably with his family in Riyadh. The prince told Assiri that he and any others who renounce militancy would be treated just as Awfi was, Mansour said.

But Assiri insisted on seeing the prince.

On the evening of Aug. 27, the prince sent his plane to the southern Saudi border city of Najran, where Assiri, who had crossed from Yemen, was waiting. He was taken by the prince's personal bodyguards to his house. Some officials said Assiri was never subjected to a security check.

At some point in the evening, Assiri handed his cellphone to the prince. Some of his comrades, he told the prince, wanted to hear his assurances that they would be treated well. That was the signal that the prince was standing close to Assiri. The bomb, which according to Western diplomats and local news reports was probably hidden inside Assiri's rectum, was triggered by the cellphone. Assiri was ripped apart -- pictures of his body were published in local newspapers and on Web sites.

The prince suffered minor injuries. Saudi television later showed King Abdullah, who is the prince's uncle, visiting him in the hospital and asking how the bomber could have gotten so close. "It was a mistake," Prince Mohammed replied, according to the broadcast.

Yemeni’s Case Shows Hurdles to Leaving Guantánamo - NYTimes.com

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By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — To understand how hard it is proving for President Obama to close the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, consider the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, Internee Security No. 692. His long-delayed departure last week leaves 97 Yemenis at the complex in Cuba, by far the largest remaining group.

It was seven years ago that Mr. Ahmed, then 18, was swept up by Pakistani security forces in a raid on a Faisalabad guesthouse and taken to the prison. It was five months ago that a federal judge, after reviewing all the government’s classified evidence, ruled that his incarceration had never been justified and ordered the government to get to work “forthwith” on his release.

But Obama administration officials were worried. Even if Mr. Ahmed was not dangerous in 2002, they said, Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States. If he returned to his troubled homeland of Yemen, the officials feared, he might fall in with the growing contingent of Al Qaeda there, one more Guantánamo survivor to star in their propaganda videotapes.

So American officials first sought to route him to a rehabilitation program for militants in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis would take him only if he wanted to go — and he did not.

Last weekend, as Judge Gladys Kessler of United States District Court in Washington appeared to be losing patience with the delay in complying with her May 11 release order, an American military jet finally delivered Mr. Ahmed to the Yemeni capital, Sana. “Seven years are gone from his life and can never be gotten back,” said the brother, Wagdi Ahmed, a surgeon’s assistant in the port city of Aden, speaking through a translator. “The feeling of the family is his detention at Guantánamo was not rightful. But nonetheless, we just say, praise God.”

Alla Ahmed, now 26, was expected to spend a week or more in the custody of Yemeni security officials, who were questioning him about other Yemenis at Guantánamo and about his views and plans. Then, his brother said, he will join his family in Aden and decide whether to look for work or try to resume his education.

Mr. Ahmed is the first Yemeni to depart Guantánamo since Mr. Obama’s promise, the day after his inauguration, to close the prison complex in Cuba within a year — a deadline that aides now say may not be met. Since Yemenis now make up nearly half of the 220 remaining prisoners, an exit route for them is critical.

For Mr. Obama, Guantánamo has become both a security challenge and a political headache. A group of retired generals and admirals who stood behind him when he signed the closing order were back in Washington last week to make sure the administration did not renege on its pledge. Meanwhile, the House approved a nonbinding recommendation that no Guantánamo detainee be brought to American soil, even for trial.

The public file on Mr. Ahmed suggests a highly ambiguous case that typifies many at Guantánamo. He told a review board that he had traveled to Pakistan to study “religion and science” — but he said one reason he wanted to attend an Islamic university was that religious schools accepted students with lower grade point averages.

The guesthouse where he was captured was used by both students and terrorist operatives. Four fellow prisoners later reported having seen him fighting or undergoing training in Afghanistan, but Judge Kessler found their accounts unpersuasive, flawed by inconsistencies, contradictions and mental illness.

She rejected the government’s so-called mosaic theory, which asserted that the pattern of indications of terrorist ties added up to a strong case. “If the individual pieces of a mosaic are inherently flawed,” she wrote, “then the mosaic will split apart.” Ultimately, the government may not have had much faith in its own case, since it chose not to appeal Judge Kessler’s order.

Brent N. Rushforth, a lawyer in Washington who represents Mr. Ahmed, said his client never supported terrorism and was known as “the sweet kid” to other prisoners. “Alla has never exhibited any bitterness,” he said.

Yemen, with a population of 24 million, is a fragile state plagued by a separatist insurgency and a growing presence from the group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. American officials say the government is weak and does not control parts of the country; the escape of 23 terrorism suspects in 2006 shook confidence in Yemen’s counterterrorism capabilities. That is why, even as 117 Saudis and 197 Afghans have left Guantánamo, only 16 Yemenis have been transferred.

Yemeni authorities say that none of those have joined terrorist groups, and that Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, who spent nearly seven years at Guantánamo and whose legal challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling, is leading a quiet life as a cabby in Sana.

But given the instability, some experts say, the administration is right not to simply send most of the Yemenis home. “Right now, there’s no comprehensive program to integrate these guys back into Yemeni society,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

John O. Brennan, a presidential adviser on counterterrorism and a former C.I.A. station chief in Saudi Arabia, has made repeated trips there and to Yemen, trying to persuade the Saudis to accept a large number of Yemenis in their rehabilitation program. But Saudi officials have balked, in part because of the negative publicity when 11 of the program’s graduates turned up on a Saudi list of most-wanted terrorists in February.

American officials still have a high opinion of the Saudi program. But Mr. Boucek said it depended on the involvement of relatives, who participated with the former militants and helped police their behavior.

That means that the Saudi program might work for the roughly 20 Yemenis at Guantánamo who grew up in Saudi Arabia or have relatives there. For the rest, he said, the Saudi program is “a catastrophically bad idea.”

American and Yemeni officials are now discussing how Yemen might build its own version of the Saudi program.

“It won’t be quick, and it will cost some money,” Mr. Boucek said. “But I think it may be the best choice among a bunch of not very good alternatives.”