AFP

Saudi Arabia, Nov 30: Saudi arrests of hundreds more Al-Qaeda suspects for plotting attacks shows that Riyadh's security crackdown is not enough to vanquish them and that the authorities also need to combat the extremist thinking that drives them, analysts said Thursday.

"By focusing on the security approach, the state has eliminated the visible threat" by foiling a series of attacks, Sheikh Mohsen al-Awaji, a prominent Saudi Muslim cleric, told AFP.

"But the latent threat is there, and it is a big one. There is no guarantee that (the crackdown) will always succeed" unless it is accompanied by an effort to "confront the deviant thinking" of the militants.

The Saudi interior ministry said on Wednesday that security forces had rounded up 208 suspected Al-Qaeda militants plotting assassinations and an attack on a logistical oil facility in the Eastern Province.

The arrests, made over the past few months, were among the most numerous since the kingdom began fighting followers of Saudi-born Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who launched a spate of bombings and shootings in May 2003.

Saudi Arabia has often reported arrests of "deviant" cells despite its success in thwarting attacks such as those that shook the oil powerhouse in 2003-2004.

In April, Riyadh reported rounding up 172 suspects, some of whom had plotted airborne suicide attacks on oil facilities and army bases.

In February 2006, it announced that it had foiled an attempt to blow up the world's largest oil processing plant in the Eastern Province.

Awaji, a moderate Islamist, said Riyadh needs to "mobilise the whole society" to defeat the militants ideology of "takfeer" -- branding other Muslims as infidels in order to legitimise violence against them.

"The state achieved results that were beyond expectations by doing this in prisons," he said, referring to the government-appointed "advice committee" that reportedly persuaded 1,500 detained militants to changed their ways.

It must enlist clerics, academics, psychiatrists and others to "raise awareness in society of the danger" posed by extremism, Awaji said.

Fares bin Huzam, a Saudi journalist and researcher who specialises in Al-Qaeda, said the "ideological battle" was slow, in contrast with the security crackdown being waged at full speed.

"The takfeeri ideology is there, and the ground is fertile for it -- through the spreading of hatred and hostility toward non-Muslims and foreigners," he told AFP.

"It's not in the (academic) curricula. It's in the street, in mosques, in seminars ... It may have decreased, but just a little," he said.

Bin Huzam said that while security forces had managed to thwart any major Al-Qaeda operation for three years, "there is no guarantee that this success will continue because of the absence of an ideological battle."

He said foreign states were exploiting the extremist thinking still prevalent in Saudi Arabia to recruit and manipulate militants.

"All indications are that there are states behind these groups, and that they are not directed only by bin Laden and (his second-in-command Ayman) al-Zawahiri," bin Huzam said.

"Al-Qaeda has spent one billion riyals (266 million dollars) since launching its operations in 2003. Where are they getting this money from and who is giving them weapons? Forty percent of the 208 people arrested are not (Saudi) citizens," he said.

Although bin Huzam did not name any state, he pointed out that the interior ministry has repeatedly linked the militants to "troubled regions," in veiled references to Iraq and Afghanistan, and that it spoke on Wednesday of militants who were "tools in the hands of others."

"Who is helping returnees from Iraq (get into Saudi Arabia)? There is no way they can cross the border" directly due to tight security at the frontier, he said.