Mecca 1979: The mosque siege that changed the course of Saudi history | Part-2
Mark Hambley, a political officer at the US embassy in Jeddah and one of the few Westerners who were aware of the situation, says this assault was brave but naïve. “They were immediately shot down,” he says. “The sharp-shooters had very good weapons, very good calibre Belgian rifles.”
It became clear that the insurgents had planned their attack in detail and would not be easy to dislodge. A security cordon was established around the Grand Mosque, and special forces, paratroopers and armoured units were called in.
Religious student Abdel Moneim Sultan, who was trapped inside, says clashes intensified from after noon on the second day. ”I saw artillery fire directed towards the minarets, and I saw helicopters hovering constantly in the air, and I also saw military airplanes,” he remembers.
The Grand Mosque is a vast building consisting mainly of galleries and corridors, hundreds of meters long, surrounding the Kaaba’s courtyard, and built on two floors. During the next two days, the Saudi units launched frontal assaults in an effort to gain entrance. But the rebels repelled wave after wave of attacks, despite being heavily outgunned and outnumbered.
Abdel Moneim Sultan recalls that Juhayman appeared supremely confident and relaxed when they met near the Kaaba that day. “He slept for half an hour or 45 minutes resting his head on my leg, while his wife stood by. She never left his side,” he says.
The rebels lit fires with carpets and rubber tires to generate heavy clouds of smoke, then they hid behind columns before stepping out of the dark to ambush emerging Saudi troops. The building was turned into a killing zone, and the casualties quickly rose into the hundreds.
“This was a man-to-man confrontation, within a limited space,” says Maj Mohammad al-Nufai, the commander of the Ministry of Interior’s special forces. “A combat situation with bullets whizzing by, left and right – it’s something unbelievable.”
A fatwa issued by the Kingdom’s main clerics, assembled by King Khaled, cleared the Saudi military to use any degree of force to expel the rebels. Anti-tank guided missiles and heavy guns were then employed to dislodge the rebels from the minarets, and armoured personnel carriers were sent in to breach the gates.
The rebels were galvanised by the Mahdi. “I saw him with two minor injuries under his eyes and his thowb (his dress) was riddled with holes from gunshots,” says Abdel Moneim Sultan. “He believed that he could expose himself anywhere out of the conviction that he was immortal – he was the Mahdi, after all.”
But Qahtani’s belief in his own invulnerability was unfounded and he was soon struck by gunfire.
“When he was hit, people started to shout: ‘The Mahdi is injured, the Mahdi is injured!’ Some tried to run towards him to rescue him, but the heavy fire prevented them from doing this, and they had to retreat,” the anonymous witness says.
They told Juhayman that the Mahdi had been hit, but he declared to his followers: “Do not believe them. They are deserters!”
It was only on the sixth day of fighting that the Saudi security forces managed to take control of the courtyard of the mosque and the buildings surrounding it. But the remaining rebels merely retreated to a labyrinth of hundreds of rooms and cells underneath, convinced by Juhayman that the Mahdi was still alive, somewhere in the building.
Their situation was now dire, though. “The smells surrounded us from the dead or the injuries that had rotted,” says the anonymous witness. “In the beginning, water was available, but later on they started to ration supplies. Then the dates ran out so they started eating balls of raw dough… It was a terrifying atmosphere. It was like you were in a horror movie.”
Although the Saudi government issued one communiqué after the other announcing victory, the absence of prayers broadcast to the Islamic world told another story. “The Saudis tried tactic after tactic, and it didn’t work,” says Hambley. “It was pushing the rebels deeper and deeper into the catacombs.”
It was clear the Saudi government needed help to capture the leaders alive and put an end to the siege. They turned to French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
“Our ambassador told me that it was obvious the Saudi forces were very disorganised and didn’t know how to react,” Giscard d’Estaing tells the BBC, confirming for the first time France’s role in this crisis.
“It seemed to me to be dangerous, because of the weakness of the system, its unpreparedness and the repercussions this could have on the global oil market.”
The French president discreetly dispatched three advisers from the recently formed counter-terror unit, GIGN. The operation had to remain secret, to avoid any criticism of Western intervention in the birthplace of Islam.
The French team was headquartered in a hotel in the nearby town of Taif, from where it devised a plan to flush out the rebels – the basements would be filled with gas, to render the air unbreathable.
“Holes were dug every 50m in order to reach the basement,” says Capt Paul Barril, who was in charge of executing the operation. “Gas was injected through these holes. The gas was dispersed with the help of grenade explosions into every corner where the rebels were hiding.”
For the anonymous witness, holed up down in the basement with the last of the resisting rebels, the world seemed to be coming to an end.
“The feeling was as though death had come to us, because you didn’t know whether this was the sound of digging or of a rifle, it was a terrifying situation.”
The French plan proved successful.
“Juhayman ran out of ammunition and food in the last two days,” says Nasser al-Hozeimi, one of his followers. “They were gathered in a small room and the soldiers were throwing smoke bombs on them through a hole they made in the ceiling… That’s why they surrendered. Juhayman left and all of them followed.”
Maj Nufai witnessed the meeting that followed, between the Saudi princes and a stunned but unrepentant Juhayman: “Prince Saud al-Faisal asked him: ‘Why, Juhayman?’ He answered: ‘It’s only fate.’ ‘Do you need anything?’ He just said: ‘I want some water.'”
Juhayman was paraded before the cameras, and just over a month later 63 of the rebels were publicly executed in eight cities across Saudi Arabia. Juhayman was the first to die.
While Juhayman’s belief in the Mahdi may have set him apart, he was part of a wider movement of social and religious conservatism reacting against modernity, in which hardline clerics gained the upper hand over the royal family.
One man on whom the siege had a profound effect was Osama Bin Laden. In one of his pamphlets against the Saudi ruling family, he said they had “desecrated the Haram, when this crisis could have been solved peacefully”. He went on: “I still remember to this day the traces of their tracks on the Haram’s floor tiles.”
“Juhayman’s actions stopped all modernisation,” Nasser al-Huzaimi says. “Let me give you a simple example. One of the things he demanded from the Saudi government was the removal of female presenters from TV. After the Haram incident, no female presenter appeared on TV again.”
Saudi Arabia remained on this ultra-conservative path for most of the next four decades. Only recently have there been signs of a thaw.
In an interview in March 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, said that before 1979, “We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia.”
He was referring above all to the siege of the Grand Mosque.
