In 1979, as smoke rose from the Grand Mosque in Mecca during a bloody zealot siege, I felt the first tremors of Saudi Arabian extremism firsthand. A quarter-century before 9/11, the seeds of the hijackers’ radicalization were already being sown inside the kingdom. Working in Riyadh at a private school for the Saudi royal family, I know firsthand that a cumulative series of internal crises led to that tragic day.
The 9/11 attacks were not just an assault on America, but the explosive export of Saudi Arabia’s internal domestic crises. The state’s compromises with extremist elements allowed an ecosystem of terror to flourish and eventually converge with global conflicts.
In the 1980s, the war in Afghanistan drew tens of thousands of Saudi and other foreign fighters who rallied to aid the mujahideen against the Soviet occupation. Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi national, was central to this movement, providing both financial and logistical support as well as foot soldiers. When bin Laden returned home in triumph in 1989, he boldly approached the Saudi royal family, offering his al Qaeda militants as a vanguard for the Saudi military. When the Saudi monarchy rejected his proposal, bin Laden took the rebuff as a deep personal affront.
This rejection ignited a slow-burning animosity toward the House of Saud, a hostility that intensified dramatically during the 1990 Gulf War. When the monarchy chose to host American forces (including female and Jewish soldiers) on sacred Muslim soil to defend against Iraq, bin Laden vehemently denounced the decision. This open defiance would eventually result in bin Laden’s revoked citizenship and expulsion from the Kingdom, setting him on a definitive path of global terrorism.
Bin Laden had no choice but to relocate to Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime embraced the Saudi jihadist and his disciples. Al-Qaeda training camps quickly metastasized across the Afghan landscape.Â
By the late 1990s, al Qaeda graduated from regional incitement to direct terrorist attacks, including the simultaneous deadly 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, followed by the 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. These operations forced a diplomatic crisis upon Riyadh.
Prince Turki al Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence, launched a final diplomatic mission to Afghanistan to demand the Taliban surrender the wayward Saudi dissident. For the Saudi royal family, bin Laden had transformed from a theological insurgent into an acute geopolitical embarrassment and threat. However, that mission failed, cementing the Taliban-al Qaeda nexus and clearing the logistical path for bin Laden’s ultimate operation: deploying 15 radicalized Saudi nationals to weaponize commercial aircraft within the American homeland.Â
Bin Laden’s broader objective extended far beyond mass casualties. By striking the U.S. homeland, he demonstrated a terrifying operational reach while successfully exposing geopolitical fissures between the United States and Saudi Arabia. The aftermath left the House of Saud compromised and Washington scrambling to reassure anxious citizens, altering the fragile alliance between the two dissimilar nations at the worst possible time.
OSAMA BIN LADEN IS WINNING FROM THE GRAVE
Today, however, the Kingdom is undergoing a profound transformation that my 1979 self would have found unimaginable. Gone are the once-feared mutawa (religious police) who patrolled the souks and city centers, harassing both foreigners and Saudi citizens alike. Under Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia has systematically dismantled the power of the religious police, integrated women into the workforce, and actively promoted a moderate, tolerant version of Islam.
The journey from the siege of Mecca to modern social reform has been long and bloody. As Washington evaluates its strategic ties in the Middle East, policymakers must recognize that the ideological ecosystem that gave birth to bin Laden is being actively dismantled from within. Supporting this internal reformation is not just good diplomacy — it is essential for global security.
Kenneth R. Strange Jr. is a foreign policy analyst and law enforcement commentator who lived in Saudi Arabia from 1979 to 1985. He is also a former FBI Special Agent of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, DOJ Special Agent in Charge, and author of the award-winning true crime memoir A Cop’s Son: One G-Man’s Fight Against Jihad, Global Fraud and the Cartels.