The weekend carnage in Khobar came less than a month after Saudi Arabia vowed to "strike with an iron fist" against militants who carried out attacks and said it was making every effort to protect foreigners in the kingdom.
"The government is doing all it can to protect all residents," Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told a news conference.
Such assurances have been heard before and will no doubt be heard again, though whether they are likely to cut much ice with the foreign workers on whom the kingdom depends is another matter.
Since the Riyadh bombings on May 12 last year, which left 35 people dead, including nine attackers, the Saudi authorities have rounded up hundreds of suspects, seized numerous weapons caches and fought gun battles with Islamic militants -- and yet the attacks show no sign of abating.
Seventeen people died in a suicide bombing in Riyadh last November; another in April killed five, including two senior police officers and an 11-year-old girl; an attack by gunmen on the offices of an oil company in Yanbu on May 1 killed six Westerners and a Saudi.
The ability of suspects to escape when apparently cornered, and the heavy casualties suffered by security forces -- five of them died in one raid last January -- has also raised doubts about the authorities' competence.
"The credibility of the Saudi statements about having the situation under control are looking very, very weak at the moment. The whole confidence in their security apparatus is getting lower and lower as we speak," Tim Ripley, a research associate at the Center of Defence and International Strategic Studies at Lancaster University, told Reuters on Sunday.
"The blatant nature of the attack [in Khobar] and the seeming inability of the Saudi security services to deal with it and even prevent it and contain it, will be sending real shock waves through the region," he said.
The first major attacks on housing compounds in the capital in May last year infuriated many Saudis who complained that despite plenty of warnings there had been little or no attempt to step up security. It was not until four days after the event that security around the compounds visibly improved.
Interior Minister Prince Nayef then bumbled through a press conference where he announced that a number of people had been arrested.
When asked how many arrests there had been, he gave three different answers and had to be prompted by an official.
In almost any other country, Nayef, who has run the Interior Ministry for almost 30 years, would have been forced to resign by now, but he is virtually unsackable because of his position in the royal family.
The prince, who is regarded as one of the main obstacles to reform, initially blamed the Sept. 11 attacks in the US on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and/or Zionists.
In the midst of the most serious security crisis the kingdom has ever faced, he has also found time to arrest liberal reformers and ban "un-Islamic" imports of female dolls and teddy bears.
The Saudi militants, though, would present a formidable challenge to any security system. They are difficult to detect since they tend to work in small, unconnected cells, and they prefer death to arrest -- ideally causing as many casualties as possible before they die.
Although their rhetoric is directed against "infidels" and "Crusaders," in practice their attacks are less specific and many of their victims have been Muslims.
At root, they are engaged in a struggle for the heart and soul of Islam by seeking to wrest control of its birthplace from the Saudi royals whom they regard as effete and corrupt (a view that many non-militants would share).
Since the Saudi economy relies heavily on foreign workers, attacking them -- regardless of religion -- meshes neatly with the militants' strategic objectives.
There are signs that this is beginning to have an effect. After every attack, more expatriates talk of leaving. Some firms have transferred non-essential workers to the United Arab Emirates, and for jobs that cannot be done outside the kingdom recruitment is likely to become a growing problem.
Beyond these local difficulties is the issue of global dependence on the Saudi oil industry. Saudi Arabia is the world's main "swing" producer, able to turn the taps on or off quickly in order to stabilize prices.
The weekend attacks will therefore cause reverberations far beyond its own borders, and particularly in Washington where rising oil prices could become a factor in the presidential election.
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
The Legislative Yuan on Friday held another cross-party caucus negotiation on a special act for bolstering national defense that the Executive Yuan had proposed last year. The party caucuses failed to reach a consensus on several key provisions, so the next session is scheduled for today, where many believe substantial progress would finally be made. The plan for an eight-year NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.59 billion) special defense budget was first proposed by the Cabinet in November last year, but the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) lawmakers have continuously blocked it from being listed on the agenda for
On Tuesday last week, the Presidential Office announced, less than 24 hours before he was scheduled to depart, that President William Lai’s (賴清德) planned official trip to Eswatini, Taiwan’s sole diplomatic ally in Africa, had been delayed. It said that the three island nations of Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar had, without prior notice, revoked the charter plane’s overflight permits following “intense pressure” from China. Lai, in his capacity as the Republic of China’s (ROC) president, was to attend the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s accession. King Mswati visited Taiwan to attend Lai’s inauguration in 2024. This is the first
RSS