Saudi Arabia recently announced the arrests of more than 40 militants, including eight involved in the Abqaiq attack . Saudi authorities reported that the others arrested had a role in providing financial support, hideouts, and spreading propaganda for terrorists but did not say that any of those arrested had a role in plotting or carrying out future attacks. However, they confiscated a number of weapons in raids undertaken to arrest the suspects.
The speed with which Saudi authorities were able to hunt down those involved in the Abqaiq attack is evidence of the Kingdom?s efficacy in tackling its al-Qaeda presence, even if it has failed to reform the extremist social and religious environment in the country that is the root of its terrorist problem . Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has been weakened to a point that it would be difficult for the organization to carry out large-scale attacks. It is still feared that Saudi Jihadists returning from Iraq will bring new vitality and expertise to the ranks of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz announcing publicly that Iraqi war veterans are likely to be more dangerous than their Afghan predecessors. But, recent successes like the thwarting of the Abqaiq attack and the quick identification and arrest of those involved give the impression that Saudi Arabia is a difficult country for terrorists to operate in.
With this series of arrests, Saudi Arabia may have inaugurated a new method to catch terrorists. Nineteen of those arrested are thought to have been uncovered due to their activities online. Saudi regime dissident Mohammed al-Massari, a radical Islamist whose organization hosts a Jihadist website (Terror Web Watch), is saying that he believes that Saudi intelligence compromised a Jihadist forum and captured information about its members, then arrested them. Members of Jihadist forums echo this suspicion, remarking in discussions in the forums over the past week that they suspect Saudi security gained control of one of the forums and was able to capture the IP addresses of members signing onto the forum. Massari and these anonymous online Jihadists say that their theory is supported by how quickly Saudi authorities were able to locate a number of the participants in the Abqaiq attack in a house immediately after the group uploaded a claim of responsibility for the attack to a particular Jihadist forum.
Saudi authorities have said that those arrested for their Internet activities were using it to spread the ideology of ?the deviant group? (a Saudi euphemism for al-Qaeda). At least one individual who circulated ideology was also an active terrorist, a member in a Jihadist cell. However, it is unknown how many of the other militants arrested might also have been involved in other terrorist activities. Saudi Arabia also did not reveal whether those taken into custody, arrested from a number of different regions around the country, used the Jihadist forums to coordinate terrorist plans with one another or even to make first contact with one another. If these forums were used in this way, then it would represent one of the possible first cases in which Jihadist forums were used effectively to coordinate and plan specific terrorist attacks in the physical world. This is a feared next step in Jihadists? use of the Internet, and though there are a number of signs that it is happening online, there have not yet been physical world attacks to confirm the phenomenon.
The suspect forum has since been closed, but traffic and activity on other, similar forums is unaffected in general. Following the arrests of members involved in posting the claim of responsibility, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continued to upload other materials to Internet forums, indicating a degree of confidence that the security breach was contained. Still, the incident must cast some doubt among those who use Jihadist forums to discuss hypothetical or real attack plans, to boast about their activities, and to circulate their ideology that their anonymity is not guaranteed.