By Fred Burton
On Feb. 24, al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia attacked a key oil facility at Abqaiq with suicide bombers in explosive-laden pickup trucks. Two members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard were killed, as were the attackers, who were reportedly on the Saudi Interior Ministry's most-wanted list. Although both bombs functioned, neither explosion caused serious damage to the critical portions of the facility.
On March 1, Saudi security forces surrounded a neighborhood in Riyadh and, in a shootout, killed five al Qaeda operatives including Fahd Faraj Al-Joweir, who was also high on the wanted list. Ammunition magazines, tools, explosives components and other items linked to the Abqaiq attack were captured after the shootout. Although al Qaeda claimed the Abqaiq attack as a victory, the jihadist group paid a high price for it.
Much has been made of the fact that the attack was foiled, and aside from a brief rise in the worldwide price of oil, attention to the strike and what it signifies has died down surprisingly quickly. This reaction might be premature.
While al Qaeda and related groups have largely refrained from attacking energy infrastructure, that prohibition is clearly off with the Abqaiq attack. In assessing the threat to the region's energy infrastructure, three variables need to be considered:
- First, what are the ideology and intent of the regional al Qaeda presence?
- Second, what are al Qaeda's regional capabilities, both in itself and compared to the local security forces?
- Third, what are the critical nodes of the region's energy infrastructure?
By understanding where the three elements of desire, capability and vulnerability meet, a clearer assessment can be made of the risks to the energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf.
Desire
Until recently, al Qaeda has steered clear of attacking the oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia or nearby nations. While al Qaeda knew that hitting oil-related targets would hurt the regimes the most, its hands were tied for several reasons. First, attacking the oil infrastructure threatened to undermine al Qaeda's ability to garner local support, as oil revenue not only keeps the governments in power, but also is the main source of cash throughout their economies.
Al Qaeda did not want give the Saudi regime the chance to drum up more support against the jihadists by saying that the militants represented a threat to the nation's well-being. Nor did the jihadists want to seriously harm their financial supporters, some of whom benefit from the regional oil trade.
In addition, al Qaeda sees oil as the future patrimony of the Islamist state it hopes to establish in the kingdom -- and seriously damaging the infrastructure would be problematic if the group attains its overall goal.
At its core, Al Qaeda has two objectives in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the entire Arabian Peninsula. First, it seeks to rid the country of Western military and economic presence. With that accomplished, it can move to its second objective: toppling the Saudi and other local monarchies and replacing them with religious regimes.
The initial attacks in Saudi Arabia, then, were most often against Western operations and personnel. Examples of this were the May 2003 attack on a Western housing complex in Riyadh, the May 2004 Yanbu attack and the June 2004 kidnapping and subsequent beheading of Lockheed Martin employee Paul Johnson. These attacks caused a temporary problem for Riyadh as Western oil workers sent their families home or took extended leaves themselves.
But Riyadh's counterstrike significantly degraded the local al Qaeda branch's operational capabilities. The group lost half a dozen key commanders, and important operatives were removed in successive raids by Saudi security forces. Al Qaeda then shifted its focus to striking at the Saudi regime directly, rather than through proxy targets. In December 2004, al Qaeda militants attacked the Ministry of the Interior building, but this only led to another series of counterstrikes by Saudi forces.
Having suffered several major consecutive losses, the jihadists have decided that they can no longer afford to avoid hitting oil-related targets; hence the attack on the Abqaiq facility.
Given that the attack was against a processing facility, desperation likely forced al Qaeda to become creative and find a way to be able to claim it is attacking the Saudi regime and the West -- which are "looting" the oil -- without destroying the oil itself. Furthermore, this means that the jihadists probably have secured alternative, non-oil-related sources of funding, which further emboldened them to attack oil-related targets.
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