War on the Arabian Peninsula was a radical project even by Saudi jihadist standards. While the early jihadists had joined conventional conflicts and the al-Qaida recruits explored training camps, the QAP members were to launch suicide bombings in the streets of Riyadh. The militants also knew that domestic activism was likely to attract a much harsher government response than would fighting abroad. In short, the QAP's project was vastly more controversial and dangerous than anything previously undertaken by Saudi Islamists. Why did it still attract hundreds of people?

To answer this question, we shall look at the backgrounds, motivations and trajectories of individual QAP recruits, as we did with the previous activists. The following analysis is based on a collection of 259 biographies of people involved in the QAP campaign between 2002 and 2006. To address the issue of varying depth of involvement, the analysis distinguishes between the full sample of 259 and a core sample of 69 of the most active militants.

Boys of Riyadh

The QAP consisted primarily of Saudi nationals, but there were also foreigners, especially from Yemen, Chad, Morocco, Kuwait, Syria and Mauritania. Some non-Saudis in the QAP, such as the Yemeni Khalid al-Haj and the Moroccans Karim al-Majati and Yunus al-Hayyari, held positions of leadership, but most foreigners played marginal roles in the movement, which remained a distinctly Saudi phenomenon. Interestingly, there were virtually no South Asians.