For most Saudis who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s, jihad was about repelling infidels in blatant cases of territorial invasion and occupation. In the mid-1990s emerged a new community of activists for whom jihad meant something much more drastic: confronting America with terrorist operations anywhere in the world, including in Saudi Arabia. The doctrine of global jihad was articulated by Usama bin Ladin and implemented by the al-Qaida organisation through a series of spectacular attacks on US targets, culminating with 9/11. But why did the global jihadist doctrine emerge at this particular point in time, and what exactly did it say about Saudi Arabia? What accounts for al-Qaida's growth and how did its infrastructure evolve in the kingdom?

The global jihadists

The global jihadi doctrine took shape in the first half of the 1990s within an increasingly uprooted and embattled Arab Afghan community. The Afghan jihad had produced transnational networks of militants, many of whom could not return to their home countries for fear of persecution. Over time, life in exile isolated these activists from their original political environment and imbued them with a more transnational political vision. Moreover, most of the Islamist struggles of the early 1990s failed. The revolutionary experiments in Algeria and Egypt ended in bloodbath and failure for the Islamists. In the irredentist struggles in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir, the foreign activists were unwanted and unable to ‘liberate’ the local population.