More on Muhammad bin Nayef Attack

The attack on Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (immediately previous posting) is drawing more attention, since it was the first attack on a Saudi royal in a long time, and also came so close to the man running the counterterror operation. Here's a recent Al-Jazeera English update. More to the point, Thomas Hegghammer at Jihadica offers some important background:

Having said all this, I don’t think the incident itself tells us very much at all about QAP’s [Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula's] operational capability or Saudi regime stability. This was essentially a stupid security slip-up, whereby the bomber was allowed to get deep into the building without any security inspection. I would be very surprised if this happened again.

To understand how this could occur, one needs to understand Muhammad Bin Nayif’s role in the Saudi counterterrorism apparatus. In addition to being the top CT official, he is also the main contact point between the state and the radical Islamist community. He is the one that militants go to see when they want to surrender. He has been doing personal behind-the-scenes liaison work with the jihadi community since at least the late 1990s. He has made a point of always being personally accessible to militants wanting to talk. And he has a reputation in the Islamist community (outside of al-Qaida) for discretion, kindness and financial generosity.

Bin Nayif has received hundreds of jihadis in his office in this way, and by all accounts there have never been any security problems. I suspect that over time, this made the Prince and his staff overconfident about their security. In this particular case, the fact that it was 11.30 at night during a popular Ramadan reception probably made security even more lax. The bottom line is that it didn’t take operational genius or a high-ranking mole get close to the Prince.

As many reports have emphasized, the attacker was wanted and had reportedly told authorities he was there to turn himself in to the Prince.

It's also worth noting that Hegghammer says that though the SITE Intelligence group earlier reported that Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula had claimed responsibility, he (Hegghammer) and others have not yet found the claim on jihadi websites. The Waq al-Waq website has the same problem: they doubt that the claim is real.

Claim or no claim, it was still a pretty daring operation to get so close to a senior royal, and the counterterrorism chief at that. As a commenter on my earlier post noted, there have even been suggestions that Muhammad might be better suited than his father Prince Nayef for the throne some day; he's not a minor prince.

Weekend or not, if there are developments in this story I'll try to post on them.