BY MAURICE WILLIAMS

A truck bomb exploded June 25 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, demolishing an apartment complex that housed 2,900 U.S. military personnel and some soldiers from France and Britain. At least 19 U.S. soldiers were killed and more than 300 people wounded in the bombing, which left a crater 35 feet deep and 85 feet wide. Washington said all the casualties were U.S. personnel, but Saudi officials stated that about 150 of those wounded were Saudi.

The explosion occurred less than one month after the Saudi government beheaded four men convicted for the November 1995 car bombing of a U.S. military compound in Riyadh, the capital city. Five U.S. citizens and two people from India died from that blast. Saudi militants had warned they would attack Washington's military centers if the executions were carried out, reported the New York Times.

The explosion was among the most deadly assaults on U.S. military personnel in the Middle East since the 1983 bombing of a U.S. barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 Marines. The November explosion was the first attack against U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in the 50 years Washington has organized military cooperation with the regime there.

"The attack appears to reflect the growing resentment... toward U.S. and other foreign military forces whose presence in Saudi Arabia has expanded greatly since the Gulf War," said an article in the June 26 Wall Street Journal. Some 5,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in the country. During the U.S.-led military assault on the Iraqi people in 1991, most of the air attacks were launched from the base in Dhahran, an oil center on the Persian Gulf coast.

Dhahran is the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force 4404th Air Wing, which enforces the ban on flights by Iraqi aircraft over southern Iraq that was imposed by Washington after the Persian Gulf slaughter. U.S. F-15 and F-16 fighter jets and British Tornado bombers operate out of the Dhahran facility, and U.S. soldiers man a battery of Patriot surface-to-air missiles and a communications battalion there.

"We will pursue this," declared U.S. president William Clinton just before he headed to Lyons, France, for a summit meeting of the Group of Seven (G-7). "Those who did this must not go unpunished."

Officials of several other G-7 members - France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom - also issued statements condemning "terrorism." British prime minister John Major stated, "We have had all too much of this sort of experience.... It might well have happened on the same sort of scale in Manchester a few days ago," he added, referring to the June 15 bombing by the Irish Republican Army in that city.

The Saudi regime has been plagued by rising unemployment and growing financial and political instability. Opposition to Riyadh's ties to imperialism and to the corruption and hypocrisy of the royal family has stepped up. Many militants from Saudi Arabia who fought the Soviet army in Afghanistan during the late 1980s have challenged the legitimacy of the U.S.-backed regime in Riyadh. Three of the four men executed in May had participated in the Afghan war, according to the Washington Post. One said he fought on the side of the Bosnian army in Yugoslavia.

In March, Saudi border guards stopped a car packed with 85 pounds of explosives trying to enter the country from Jordan. Prince Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, warned on national television in April that the country was vulnerable to further attacks. Washington, with high stakes in maintaining stability, has beefed up the Saudi military to quell any serious challenge to the regime. Aramco, the state-owned oil company, and the world's largest oil producer, has its headquarters in Dhahran.

In other developments in the region, Palestinian fighters ambushed an Israeli army patrol along the border between the West Bank and Jordan June 26, killing three soldiers and wounding two.  
 
 
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