Haven't gotten lucky enough yet. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4747488.stm Saudi security forces have foiled an apparent suicide car bomb attack on a major oil production facility in the eastern town of Abqaiq. http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2006/02/terrorist s_atta.html http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2006/03/alqaida_i n_saud_1.html
Al-Qaida in Saudi Resurfaces with Martyrdom Video of Abqaiq Mastermind Fahd al-Farraj
[WS:] With all due respect, I think it is a red herring. You need a much bigger bang than a bunch of yahoos blowing themselves up in a truck. The amounts of explosives used in a suicide mission might be enough to bring down a single structure and cause a lot of civilian damage, but I think it is drop in a bucket vis a vis a large industrial facility consisting of multiple steel reinforced structures spread over a large area. Suicide bombing might cause some damage to a large oil processing facility but that would hardly knock out the entire facility.
When you think about it, the tactic currently used by Hizbollah - firing multiple missiles, would be much more effective against oil refinery than a suicide mission, especially if carried out from a relatively short distance. Such an attack not only has more chances of a successful hit than a single suicide mission - but allows hitting multiple targets at the same time - which would be difficult to accomplish by a suicide mission.
What puzzles me is that if Hizbollah have many of such missiles at its disposal - as evidenced by the recent hostilities between Israel and Lebanon - then there is nothing that would prevent al Quaeda from acquiring them. These are basically WW2 era weapons - cheap, easy to manufacture, and plentiful. They can be concealed in trucks or ships, but they have a long enough range to fire them from a distance that reduces chances of early interception. I am not a military expert, but it stands to reason that a mission involving, say, 20 truck or ship mounted launchers (a small operation by Hizbollah standards) could knock out the entire oil processing facility - even if half of the attackers were intercepted before launching their missiles.
If I can think about this kind of attack, so can al Quaeda planners, who are not only much more knowledgeable about such matters, but also known for going on a limb to attack other targets, such as planes. Since blowing up a major oil processing facility would give them a much greater bang for their buck than blowing up a plane or two (a mission with a high risk of failure) - an inquiring mind would like to know why they are not doing it. It certainly is not due to insufficient technical capacity, which implies that the real reason is the lack of will. But this begs another question - why is not there a will to carry such an attack? Could it be that one does not bite the hand that feeds him?
Wojtek