April 5, 2003
BURAYDAH, Saudi Arabia -- The war in Iraq is gaining new converts every day in this austere desert town of date palm farms and minarets. If hundreds of young men here haven't left for Baghdad to fight the Americans, it is only because they haven't the means to get there.
"Here, 60 people I know have already gone to Iraq, and more will go if they can. Not only me. Everyone in my age and group," said a 17-year-old student who would give only his first name, Badr.
"It's a wish that everyone has," he said Friday, "to go defend the Arabs and Muslims in Iraq."
A few blocks away, a 25-year-old government worker said that he stood ready to fight on the side of the Muslims in Iraq if Saudi Arabia opens its border crossing.
"Yes, I will go," said the man, who also provided only his given name, Mansour. "I will go not to protect the rule of Saddam Hussein. I will go to protect Muslims and the Iraqi people."
Saudi Arabia, although opposed to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, has quietly aided the war effort by allowing missile overflights and permitting American forces to base their search and rescue teams near the Iraqi border and to coordinate the air war from a large base south of Riyadh, the capital.
But this is a different Saudi Arabia. In what is probably the world's most conservative Muslim country, this town deep in the central desert makes Riyadh, which lies about 200 miles to the southeast, seem European. This is Saudi Arabia's Koran belt, where women are rarely seen, mosques stand in the middle of every block and clerics are unusually passionate and vocal.
As television images of the war settle over an increasingly uneasy Arab public, the growing sense of anger and frustration is felt especially keenly in places such as Buraydah, which was a center of disquiet over the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Although the nation's religious officials have been muted in their commentary on the war, here the noonday air was screeching with dozens of sermons.
At the Al Rajkhi mosque in the heart of the city, hundreds of men listened to Sheik Suleiman Alwan's booming voice as he condemned the war:
"Since the 11th of September, the Americans have been fishing in murky water. They called Muslims barbarians, Tatars. They called them every ugly name they could think of.
"But look at them now, what they're doing. The American Army and government -- are they doing any better? Are the blood and the organs of Iraqi people less precious, or are they children of a different God?
"America and their allies, hell is their destination for the crimes they have committed," Alwan said, calling them "invaders and colonists."
Buraydah, a city of 300,000 on a desert plain that stretches for hundreds of miles around it, has produced some of Saudi Arabia's most radical clerics.
Only a few blocks away from the Al Rajkhi mosque lives Sheik Suleiman Awda, who gained fame throughout the Muslim world -- and a prison sentence -- for his sermons opposing Saudi Arabia's cooperation with the United States during the Gulf War.
Alwan, who gave Friday's sermon, is said by Saudi opposition groups to have had ties to Abdulaziz Alomari, one of the 15 Sept. 11 hijackers who hailed from Saudi Arabia. Alomari is believed to have been one of Alwan's brightest students at Imam Mohammed bin Saud Islamic University in the Qasim district, where Buraydah is located.
Islamic leaders in Saudi Arabia say they fear the level of frustration is rising dangerously with each day of the war. Some of that can be seen in the faces of young men who say they are ready to oppose American forces in Iraq -- much like past generations of moujahedeen, including Osama bin Laden, who traveled from the kingdom to faraway wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
"I described the situation to one of my colleagues two days ago: It looks like a volcano that is about to erupt," said Mohsen Awajy, an Islamist lawyer who spent four years in prison and lost his job as a professor when he criticized the Saudi government after the Gulf War.
"Nobody can predict the time of this eruption, and nobody is wanting this eruption to take place, because everybody's going to be harmed at the end of the day," he said.
"But as long as this invasion is being led by the USA on Iraqi soil, as long as the governments are not giving the people any chance to express their feeling, to absorb this feeling, it's a natural phenomenon. It has to be formulated in some sort of action."
Awajy said he had been told that more than 50 Saudis from the town of Sakakah in the north had crossed into Iraq and arrived in Baghdad.
Hussein's government claims that several thousand Arab volunteers have streamed into Iraq from Syria, Jordan and other countries since the war began.
Jamal Khashoggi, editor of Saudi Arabia's Al Watan newspaper, who has written about Afghanistan and the Muslim world's holy wars, said it would be difficult for would-be warriors to leave the kingdom now, with the border crossing into Iraq closed and scrutiny at airports.
Khashoggi's newspaper on Friday carried a column by Awda declaring that the situation in Iraq is too complicated to be considered a holy war, or jihad, campaign.
"I see regularly some people wanting to go for jihad in Iraq. As God is my witness, I never intended this to be an excuse, but advice: I ask God to cool the heart of the faithful brethren. God's punishment [to the Americans] will be greater than anything we can ever do," Awda said.
"If many [fighters] go, it could be a burden instead of a help," he added.
"Maybe the enemy will see a great honor in catching a non-Iraqi fighting there and use them for their own propaganda. This needs a lot of time and patience until the picture is clear."
But in Buraydah, the picture is already clear enough.
"The signs of victory are on the horizon," said Mohammed Abdullah, an 18-year-old student. "If they open the road, a lot will go."
Badr, the 17-year-old, said his older brother was arrested in 1991 after coming back from Iraq, having volunteered to fight against the Americans during the Gulf War. He remains in prison.
Now, Badr fears arrest if he is stopped at the border -- but not death if he crosses.
"That's the reason we go," he said. "There's no two-way ticket to martyrdom."