The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine

A must read to understand modern day evolution of jihadist groups and extremism

This is a well written and well researched account of the now almost forgotten 1979 assault of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by a group of Islamic-Sunni extremists. This assault almost brought down the Royal House of Saud and with it oil rich Saudi Arabia. In the course of this story Trofimov provides the reader with an all together fascinating account of the fundamentalist Sunni Wahhabi sect which was embraced by the house of Saud and still has a symbiotic relationship with them. Wahhabism is a fundamentalist breeding ground for extremism and more dangerously terrorism. It served in 1979 and even today as a source for religiously inspired anti-western feeling throughout the Islamic world. Because of the relationship between the Saudi Royal Family and the Wahhabi sect, Saudi Arabia to this day has an under current of fanaticism its government is loathe to repress.In 1979 Saudi security forces were ill-organized and ill-trained with very little understanding modern security and combat techniques. This has presumably changed, but one has many reasons to doubt this. The attack on the Mosque itself served to fuel an already volatile anti-Americanism that was a constant under current in the Islamic world then and now. With Iranian encouragement Pakistani mobs burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad to ground and came close to killing the Embassy staff. Americans every where in the Near East were in real danger. Yet in the end the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan served to take some the pressure off of the U.S. and suddenly Pakistan moved into the position that it retains to this day as an indispensable strategic ally. A status the Saudi Arabia has had since the end of WWII.As Trofimov recounts this story, the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1976-1980) repeatedly is shown as having a weak and vacillating foreign policy towards Islam reflecting a remarkable ignorance and confusion on the part of the President and his advisors. It is not clear from this book if this an accurate picture or not.

This is a very interesting book that traces events that fell below the radar in late 1979. At the same time that the Iranian Hostage crisis was going, a group of religious fanatics also took over the holiest shrine in Islam! It was held for over two weeks and was not brought back under Saudi control until well over 300 people had been killed. One would think that such an event would get a lot of coverage and be seen as one of the major event in the recent history of the Middle East, but it is hardly ever mentioned. This is no coincidence, Trofimov argues, and indeed the cover-up is part of the story.This book is a fast paced narrative that traces the events that lead up to the seizure of the mosque to the bloody retaking. Trofimov does a very good job of giving a brief accounting of the history of the Al Saud family and their relations to the religious authorities in the countries and how the deals that they made to maintain power would lead to some of the very problems that they would encounter later on. Many of these problems can be connected to many of the challenges still faced in the Middle East.One of the more interesting parts of the book is the account of the attacks on the various U.S. embassies throughout the world at the time. While the one in Terahan was getting most of the coverage, Pakistani and Libyan embassies were razed with the embassy staff barley escaping with their lives. All of these events would eventually wreck the Carter presidency and the author's disapproval of how the president handled the crisis is apparent.This is a very good account of a story that is covered up by the Saudi government and the author does a very good job of showing how the actions taken to solve this crisis would lead to even greater tragedies and loss of life in the future. This book is a perfect example of how short-term interests are satisfied at the cost of long term stability.