The siege and battle, which pitted four hostage-takers against numerous Saudi police and commandos, occurred one year after Washington announced the withdrawal of all but 400 of its 5,000 troops from the country. Saudi Arabia, which sits atop one-quarter of the globe’s known oil deposits and is the biggest exporter of oil in the world, lies on the southern border of Iraq.

In a pointed statement June 1, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell said, “I have confidence in the ability of the Saudi Arabians to continue to provide a secure flow of oil products.” He added, “I expect them to use all the resources at their disposal to go after” such opposition forces.

The episode began May 29 when a group of men claiming affiliation to the al-Qaeda network attacked an office building and housing area used by foreign oil companies, taking a number of hostages. Police besieged the attackers for 25 hours before Saudi officers unleashed an airborne commando raid. By the end of the firefight, 22 oil company employees lay dead, 25 were wounded, and three of the four attackers had escaped. Saudi government officials said they had taken the wounded leader of the rebel unit into custody.

Eight of the dead were from India, three each from the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, two from Sri Lanka, and one each from Egypt, Italy, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Some on the scene raised doubts about the ability of the Saudi security forces to deal with such attacks. A Saudi computer technician told the New York Times, “We are all really upset about how these people left, how they just ran away from that compound.”

The Wall Street Journal quoted a U.S. executive in Saudi Arabia, who said that “people have lost their confidence in the Saudis’ ability to protect them…. The bad guys seem to be able to attack at will.”

This was the 11th case of “violence linked to extremism” in Saudi Arabia since last May, said the Associated Press. Previous incidents have included car bombing attacks on housing compounds for foreign workers and clashes between police and anti-government fighters.

Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the Saudi government “bears part of the blame for the latest terrorist attack in that country,” reported the Voice of America radio program. The government funds Islamic schools that teach “dangerous lessons,” he said, adding that “out of these schools come young Saudis who join these militant organizations and who have very little regard for the American-Saudi relationship.”

According to 2003 figures, 5.5 million technicians and other professionals and workers from abroad live in Saudi Arabia out of a total population of 24 million. Officials of the state oil company, Saudi Aramco, claim that 99 percent of their managers in 2002 were Saudi-born, and that only 6 percent of the company’s 54,500-strong workforce were from the United States or western European countries.

While a protracted economic crisis has forced a shift in the Saudi economy to more dependence on native-born labor, imperialist capital and foreign-born employees still play a major part in the economy. Washington and London have dominated Saudi Arabia’s oil industry from its inception.

U.S. military strength in the Middle East has been built up over the past 15 years and received a new boost with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. U.S. forces are now in the center of a region that includes Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, along with a number of other major oil exporters. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration has stated that in 20 years the Arab-Persian Gulf will supply between one-half and two-thirds of oil on the world market.

Speaking in May 2003, U.S. deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz said that the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime meant that “by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al-Qaeda.”

The pressures on the Saudi rulers at the time were reflected in divisions within the Saudi monarchy over whether to explicitly back Washington’s military push in the Middle East, or to take their distance from it. Those divisions, and the impact of the recent “terrorist” attacks, provide the U.S. rulers with openings to advance their military and economic presence in the oil-rich region.  
 
 
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