The bloody attack on the US consulate

WHEN I received a phone call last Monday from a Filipino friend who works in Ruwais, a working-class neighborhood near the US consulate in Jeddah, I thought he was in trouble.

"What's wrong?" I said, thinking he might have been arrested.

"There's shooting going on at the US Consulate," he told me.

"OK, I'll check it out," I said.

It was 11:28 a.m. and I was in the middle of teaching my Arab students English. I immediately called up my colleagues at Arab News and alerted them to the incident.

I was a little troubled by the news, but thought that maybe it was just one of the many other drive-by shootings that the US diplomatic facility had suffered several times before this year.

Dropping by my office to pick up a fax, I asked a reporter what was the latest and she told me that the gunfire was ongoing, and that a battle was taking place between the attackers and the National Guardsmen protecting the consulate.

More alarmingly, we could see black smoke rising from the consulate compound, even though our building is several kilometers away from the consulate.

Then the news started pouring in fast from our reporters in the field and from the Al-Arabiya satellite TV news channel. Police had cordoned off the entire Al-Hamra district where the consulate is located. Palestine and Al-Andalus streets were cut off, creating massive traffic jams.

Now reports said the attackers had penetrated the consulate's heavily guarded grounds by detonating two bombs: one to distract the guards, another to blast their way through the 12-foot-high reinforced concrete wall that surrounds the huge compound. This later turned out to be untrue.

The terrorists had apparently pulled up at the consulate's side entrance on Hail Street behind a consulate vehicle that was pulling in. Barriers prevented the terrorists' car from entering, so they jumped out, and guns ablaze, ran into the compound, setting a Marine house afire.

At around 1 p.m., reports started coming in that the terrorists were holding 18 consulate staff hostage. Were they American diplomats, support staff or visitors who had been applying for US visas? We didn't know. Later, security sources told us that there were no hostages, but that locally hired staff had gotten hit in the exchange of gunfire between both sides.

Accounts by survivors later confirmed that they had indeed been ruthlessly used as human shields by the terrorists. By 1:45 p.m. after the Saudi Special Forces had stormed the compound, the gunfire had stopped and it seemed like the siege was over.

Nine people were killed in total: Three of the five terrorists were dead (one later died in hospital), along with five staff of the consulate.

One Filipino, a Pakistani, a Yemeni, an Indian and a Sri Lankan were among the dead. Ten staff members were injured. The US Department of State insists that no Americans perished, despite reports that two white male bodies were allegedly seen being removed from the scene.

Two American diplomatic staff members were slightly injured, including Vice Consul for Political Affairs Monica K. Lemieux, who happened to be entering the consulate grounds in a vehicle at the time the terrorists attacked, spraying her car with bullets. One of them hit her in the shoulder. Her Pakistani driver and a Filipino carpenter at the consulate, Wenceslao Pescante, who was hitching a ride with her into the compound, were also hit by bullets and are now recovering in hospital.

At a press conference on Tuesday, a visibly shaken US Ambassador James C. Oberwetter and Consul General Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley both praised the heroic efforts of the consulate's security staff and US Marines at fighting off the attackers. Photos of the bullet marks on the chancery's front and back doors have now been posted on the US consulate's website.

In the aftermath of such a bloody attack, many rumors began flying around, the most damaging of which was that the fortified safe haven zones within the main chancery building were allegedly reserved for American staff only.

Stories of local staff cowering under their desks for the three-hour duration of the attack, while the Americans were in their bunkers with direct phone lines to Washington and Riyadh, were rife. But were they true? Carol Kalin, spokeswoman of the US embassy, denied this rumor in an interview on Thursday, saying that all the safe areas had a mixture of American and local staff.

"We have security procedures for all of our staff and depending on where they were when the attack began determined whether they were able to make it to the safe areas in time," explained Kalin.

"We also have to deny press reports that quoted the father of one of the Indian victims saying that our Marines used his son as a human shield. That is just not true," said Kalin. "It was the terrorists who used our staff as shields."

Kalin confirmed that a 50-strong contingent of specially trained US Marines are being deployed to secure the consulate, but said that no decision has yet been made on when the facility would reopen to the public.

Local press reports have said that three of the five terrorists were from Madinah and had already tried to fight the Americans in Fallujah, Iraq. They allegedly went to Iraq during Ramadan, but soon came back when they found Fallujah sealed off by the US military. The US consulate in Jeddah then became an easier and closer target.

The pivotal question that remains is why are young Saudis still falling prey to those religious fanatics who brainwash and distort Islam to such an extent that all non-Muslims are considered the enemy in their eyes, with the Americans reserved the special tag of "Crusaders"?

Many Muslims may disagree with what the US is doing in Iraq, but attacking their diplomatic missions won't change US foreign policy. This bloody imagery of Islam promoted by these deviants should be stamped out by the Saudi mainstream. Moderate religious scholars, intellectuals, businessmen, educators and most important of all the government have to speak out forcefully against such ideology.

Tiptoeing around this problem, wishing it would just go away is wishful and dangerous thinking. The time to act against such fanatics is long overdue.

Comments or questions? E-mail the author at rasheed@arabnews.com