Al Qaeda and the police continue to battle it out in Saudi Arabia. After a failed al Qaeda attack on an American consulate on December 6th, Saudi police were able to identify the dead terrorists and round up more al Qaeda supporters. On December 29th, al Qaeda struck again, with car bomb attacks against the Interior Ministry (which is the main enemy of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia) and a security forces training camp. These attacks killed two terrorists and wounded twenty bystanders. Later that night, tracked down seven more people involved in the twin car bomb attacks, and killed them in a gun battle. Osama bin Laden, from his hiding place somewhere along the Pakistani-Afghan border, has sent out audio and video tapes urging on the al Qaeda faithful. Bin Laden barely mentions attacks on the infidels (non-Moslems) any more. All attention is on the terrorist heartland, and al Qaeda's desperate battle for survival. Things are not going well for al Qaeda. The invasion of Iraq brought the war on terror back to its homeland. Nearly all al Qaeda operations since then have been in the Middle East, and most of the victims have been fellow Arabs.
Middle Eastern governments have been forced to confront the terror that grew up in their backyard. This was particularly true of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Persian Gulf countries. Before 911, Persian Gulf countries were pretty tolerant of al Qaeda. If you kept quiet, you could do just about anything you wanted. Wealthy, and religious, Saudis, were generous contributors to Islamic terrorists. The Saudi government encouraged religious charities to fund religious schools overseas, and in these schools, a fundamentalist Islam was taught, a form of Islam that praised the use of violence against infidels. Even after 911, al Qaeda was popular with many Moslems, especially in the principal al Qaeda recruiting grounds of the Middle East. No more. Forced to defend their heartland, al Qaeda is killing mostly fellow Moslems these days. Moslems, especially Arabs, can no longer ignore al Qaeda violence, mainly because it is happening in their midst.