After King Khalid's death in 1982, Crown Prince Fahd gained the throne. Fahd maintained Saudi Arabia's foreign policy of close cooperation with the United States and began to increase purchases of sophisticated military equipment. Fahd perceived a need to strengthen his government. However, political leadership underwent a serious challenge when Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990.
The Kuwaiti government fled to Saudi Arabia, and King Fahd denounced the Iraqi invaders. Fearing an invasion by Iraq, he requested military support from the United States. U. S. president George Bush responded by sending 230,000 troops to Saudi Arabia. King Fahd then expanded his goals beyond the protection of Saudi Arabia to include the liberation of Kuwait, and he established diplomatic ties with China, the Soviet Union, and Iran.
The impact of the 1991 Persian Gulf War was considerable. The nearby countries of Yemen and Jordan supported Iraq diplomatically. Saudi Arabia, while housing and assisting foreign troops and Kuwaiti civilians, expelled Yemenis and Jordanians.
Saudi Arabia also greatly increased its own armed forces and gave financial subsidies to a number of foreign governments that supported them diplomatically against Iraq. Total costs in 19901991 ran as high as US$64 billion. When the United States attacked Iraq by air on January 16-17,1991, the Saudi government played an active supporting role.
The Saudi government's involvement in the 1991 Persian Gulf War drew it into international conflicts in ways that were unexpected at the time. The American military presence in Saudi Arabia, a consequence of the war, provoked anger among Muslim extremists. On November 13,1995, a car bomb struck a building in Riyadh connected to U. S. military advisers. The following year, the Saudi government arrested four Saudi men, three of whom had been volunteers with Muslim units fighting against the Russians in Afghanistan. After their execution, a fuel truck loaded with explosives blew up outside a military complex housing U. S. personnel, killing nineteen U. S. servicemen, in an apparent act of revenge.
These bombings were the beginning of a series of terrorist attacks on American targets and, eventually, on targets within the United States itself. Muslim extremists, many of whom had become organized and developed military skills during guerrilla fighting in Afghanistan, were outraged by the presence of American troops in the historic center of Islam.
Osama bin Laden, whose father had moved to Saudi Arabia from Yemen and become wealthy in the construction industry, was the central figure in the al-Qaeda network. This organization was dedicated to driving the Americans out of Muslim holy lands, and especially out of Saudi Arabia. Stripped of his Saudi citizenship years earlier, bin Laden, had been living in Afghanistan since 1996. Afghanistan's Taliban government had become heavily dependent on the financial support provided by Bin Laden, who retained a great deal of personal wealth and had resources available through supporters of al-Qaeda.
On August 7,1998, terrorists bombed U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The United States maintained that this was the work of al-Qaeda and responded by bombing suspected al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. On September 11, 2001, terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda hijacked airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., destroying the World Trade Center towers and killing thousands of civilians. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were known to have been Saudi Arabians.
The Saudi government condemned the hijackings but did not allow American forces to use its territory in the invasion of Afghanistan that followed. King Fahd's administration was pub-lically opposed to al-Qaeda, since Osama bin Laden had criticized the Saudi leadership as corrupt and had called for its overthrow. The Saudis played a key role in getting the Organization of the Islamic Conference to pass a resolution condemning terrorism in general and the September 11 attacks in particular.
World History
