The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [51]
Turki returned from Tunis to Jeddah at nine o’clock that night and drove his own car to Mecca. The entire city had been evacuated, and the streets were spookily vacant. The giant stadium lights that usually illuminated the immense mosque were cut off, along with all power, so the building loomed mountainously in shadow. Turki went to a hotel where his uncle, Prince Sultan, who was the minister of defense, was waiting for him. As Turki entered the hotel, a shot rang out from one of the rebel snipers in the minarets, shattering the glass door in his hands.
Later that evening, Turki moved to the command post, a hundred meters from the mosque, where he would remain for the next two weeks. Most of the hostages had been let go, but an undetermined number of them were still locked in the sanctuary. No one knew how many insurgents there were, how many weapons they had, what kinds of preparations had been made. About a hundred security officers from the Interior Ministry had made an initial attempt to regain the mosque. They were immediately gunned down.
Forces from the Saudi Army and the National Guard soon joined the surviving security officers. Before the princes on the scene could order a military assault on the mosque, however, they first had to gain permission from the Saudi clerical establishment, and there was no certainty that they would receive that blessing. The Quran forbids violence of any kind within the Grand Mosque—not even a plant can be uprooted—so the prospect of a gun battle within the holy confines posed a dilemma for both the government and the ulema. The king would face revolt from his own men if he ordered them to open fire within the sanctuary. On the other hand, if the ulema refused to issue a fatwa endorsing the government’s right to reclaim the mosque, they could be seen as siding with the rebels. The historic compact between the royal family and the clergy would be broken, and who could guess the outcome?
The leader of the ulema was Abdul Aziz bin Baz, blind, seventy years old, an eminent religious scholar but a man who was suspicious of science and hostile to modernity. He claimed that the sun rotated around the earth and that the manned landing on the moon had never occurred. Now bin Baz found himself in an awkward and compromised position: Oteibi had been his student in Medina. Whatever bargain was struck during the meeting between the ulema and King Khaled, the government emerged with a fatwa authorizing the use of lethal force. With this decree, Prince Sultan ordered an artillery barrage followed by frontal assaults on three of the main gates. They never got close to breaching the rebel defenses.
Inside the mosque were four or five hundred insurgents, including some women and children. They included not only Saudis but also Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians, and even some American Black Muslims. In the weeks leading up to the hajj, they had stolen automatic weapons from the armory of the National Guard and smuggled them into the compound on biers on which the dead were commonly brought for ritual washing. The rebels had hidden their arms and supplies within the hundreds of tiny underground chambers beneath the courtyard that were used as hermitages for pilgrims on retreat. Now they were well fortified, and they had taken up commanding positions in the upper stories of the mosque. Snipers were picking off Saudi forces whenever they showed themselves.
In the field headquarters outside the mosque, a number of senior princes and the generals of rival services congregated, and their reckless orders, compounded by abundant contradictory advice from the military attachés from the United States and Pakistan, were causing confusion and needless fatalities. In the middle of the day, Sultan directed a suicidal helicopter assault in which troops were lowered on