The GIGN had dealt with the deadly fanaticism of Islamic terrorists before. In 1979 a captain and two sub-officers had been dispatched on an urgent mission to Saudi Arabia to help dislodge several hundred armed Muslim extremists who had taken over the Sacred Mosque in Mecca. Thousands of pilgrims on their annual hajj to Mecca were being held hostage in a labyrinth of underground passages beneath the Mosque.
The very survival of the Saudi monarchy hung in the balance as Captain Paul Barril presented the Saudi National Guard with his plan to use paralyzing gas to flush out the insurgents from an underground area of sixty square kilometers. The GIGN advisers trained handpicked teams of Saudi soldiers in demolitions and room-clearing techniques to conduct the assault, which resulted in 2000 dead after an entire day of close quarters battle.
The hostage crisis in Mecca (Saudi Arabia) - one of the world's largest and most bloody terrorist acts - clearly demonstrates this syndrome. On November 20, 1979, tens of thousands of Muslim pilgrims were patiently filing across the square inside the huge mosque and waiting their turn to approach the Kaaba (holy stone). In the space of a few minutes hundreds of people with red bands on their clothes took up their positions. Suddenly their drew out hidden weapons and began a terrible massacre.
The shaken pilgrims began desperately to try and escape from the mosque, but hundreds of them were trampled by the crowd. The terrorists took over 6 thousand people hostage and sent them into the sanctuary under the mosque. They were members of a Saudi fundamentalist sect established in 1973. On the basis of prophesies of the arrival of Allah's envoy in Mecca to 'purify' Islam, the fanatics decided to speed up events and impose a member of their organisation on the country as the Messiah. It was later discovered that the sect had been created on the initiative of several Arab countries that were hostile to the Saudi government.
The terrorists had carefully prepared for the operation over many weeks. Their weaponry included machine guns, anti-tank weapons and a huge supply of ammunition. They had supplies of food and water which they had earlier brought into the mosque through secret entrances. They had even prepared and equipped a hospital with 30 beds and a doctor and nurses.
King Khaled of Saudi Arabia approached the French President with a request for help, and on November 23 Captain Paul Barril, the commander of the French anti-terrorist regiment, arrived in the country with two commandos. The French expert suggested using a paralysing gas with temporary and non-life threatening effects during the operation. Preparations for freeing the hostages began.
On November 27 a bizarre and tragic event occurred. At about 11.00 the terrorists decided to release 1000 of the 6000 hostages. When these began to run out of the mosque's gates, the Saudi soldiers surrounding the building opened fire, thinking that the terrorists were launching an attack. Some of the pilgrims were killed, and what is more, the same situation was repeated twice. Finally, after several days, a plan for storming the building was completed, and the special forces launched an attack. The troops' position became much more complicated when hostages began to join the terrorists and fight on their side. Over 100 soldiers were killed or wounded in the attack, with the special forces losing half of their men. The terrorists also suffered extensive losses - out of several hundred only a couple of dozen were captured. Many hostages were also killed.
The exact date was November 20, 1979; The time was 5:00PM; The place was the courtyard of the Great Mosque at Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where over 50,000 Muslim pilgrims were devotedly swirling around the sacred Kaaba. The "time bomb" was set off by a Sauid pilgrim who did the unthinkable: In the very heart of Islam, at the Holy Kaaba, he brandished a submachine gun from under his djellaba and fired into the air. This was the signal for some 1,500 Saudi "pilgrims" to don red headbands; To display their hidden firearms; To occupy "strategic positions" and sacrilegiously take control of the Great Mosque.
In the ensuing pandemonium several thousand pilgrims were either trampled to death or shot by the Saudi security forces. But, as carefully planned, the "desecrators" were able to lead about 6,000 pilgrims to the "safety" of the uncharted underground cellars and passageways of the fifteen hundred year old Great Mosque, where they were held as hostages.To quell the revolution, which is was this mass action was, the Saudi government did not hesitate to call on a government of "infidels" for assistance: The French government was contacted, agreed to help and immediately dispatched on captain and two no-commissioned officers of their elite GIGN (Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, a military/state police/delata force type organization.
Although "infidels" are strictly prohibited from entering the Mecca, the Saudi officials gave the French officers secret access to the city to evaluate the situation at the Great Mosque. After having oversome the stench of thousand decomposing cadavers, the French "gendarmes" eventuallly proposed to swamp the entire underground structure of the Great Mosquewith "tranquilizing gas". The Saudi government and Imam of the Great Mosque approved. Two tons of gas were flown in from France and on December 4, after a two week standoff and an expedited training by the French agents, the Saudi security forces attacked the rebels. The gas quickly neutralized the insurgents and their hostages.
Saudi Arabia was the first of the traditionalist conservative states to erupt in Islamist violence. On November 20, 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca was seized by a well-organized group of 1,300 to 1,500 men under the leadership of Juhayman ibn-Muhammad ibn-Sayf al-Utaibi. A former captain in the White Guards (National Guard), he now declared himself a "mahdi" (messiah). In addition to the Saudis the group's core included well-trained mujahideen (Islamic holy warriors) from Egypt, Kuwait, Sudan, Iraq, North Yemen (the YAR), and South Yemen (the PDRY). Egyptian and Soviet sources estimated the total number of rebels to be 3,500. Although the assault was in the name of the return to the purity of Islam, most of the 500 leading attackers had been trained and equipped in Libya and especially South Yemen by instructors from East Germany, Cuba, and the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). These attackers included Communists in command positions who demonstrated excel-lent organizational and tactical skills. Furthermore, fifty-nine of the participating Yemenis had been trained in Iran and received weapons via the Iranian Embassy in Sana.
During the preparations for the assault Juhayman's men had recruited several members of the elite White Guards and received active support in the smuggling of weapons and equipment into Saudi Arabia and the mosque itself. A White Guards colonel was among the senior instigators of the plot and organized the smuggling of the automatic weapons, provisions, and supplies into the mosque. The bulk of the weapons used had been brought from South Yemen over a lengthy period. The rebels also smuggled in huge quantities of food and drinking water to supply them-selves and their supporters for a long siege.
On November 20, after a brief firefight to secure control of the Qaaba (the center of the Grand Mosque complex, containing the holiest shrine of Islam), Juhayman addressed the crowd of trapped pilgrims and asked for their support. Sermons and discussions of corruption, wastefulness, and the pro-Western stance of the Saudi royal family quickly gained the rebels widespread support among the worshipers. Before long most of the 6,000 pilgrims taken hostage asked to be issued arms so that they could join the revolt. Juhayman's sermons gained sympathy even among the leftist and quasi-Marxist students. News of Juhayman's sermons incited militant mobs throughout Saudi Arabia to storm local mosques and government posts. Latent subversive elements came to life as almost simultaneously with the seizure of the Qaaba a series of bombs exploded in places sensitive to the royal family in Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, and Riyadh. Among these targets were palaces, personal and official offices, and businesses.
Initially the White Guards reacted chaotically to the attack and suffered a humiliating defeat. Moreover, growing discontent in the ranks of the Saudi elite units led the royal family to fear that even they might rebel. The Saudi security forces settled for a siege of the mosque that lasted about two weeks. In the end the rebellion was only subdued by a special detachment of French paramilitary special forces, antiterrorist experts who used stun grenades and chemical weapons.
In 1979 a group of hundreds of men opposing the Saudi regime, took pilgrims hostages and stayed inside the Great Mosque of Mecca. The Saudi government ordered its troops to intervene following the advice of three French military advisers affiliated to the GIGN of the Gendarmerie’s Intervention Elite. The toll: 153 deaths and 560 wounded.
a band of 200 to 300 well- armed raiders in November seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest of all Islamic shrines, which is under the protection of King Khalid. The raiders appeared to have mixed religious and political motives: they seemingly were armed and trained in Marxist South Yemen, but were fundamentalists opposed to all modernism, led by a zealot who had proclaimed the revolution in Iran to be a "new dawn" for Islam. It took the Saudi army more than a week to root them out from the catacomb-like basements of the mosque, and 156 died in the fighting--82 raiders and 74 Saudi troopers.
