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In mid-2003, Islamic militants struck inside the kingdom, targeting three residential expatriate compounds
-- the first of a string of assaults that later hit government buildings, the U.S. consulate in Jiddah and the perimeter of the world's largest oil processing facility in Abqaiq. Al-Qaida's branch in the country announced its aim to overthrow Al Saud royal family. The attacks galvanized the government into serious action against the militants, an effort spearheaded by Nayef. Over the next years, dozens of attacks were foiled, hundreds of militants were rounded up and killed. By 2008, it was believed that al-Qaida's branch was largely broken in the country. Militant leaders who survived or were not jailed largely fled to Yemen, where they joined Yemeni militants in reviving al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Nayef took a leading role in combatting the branch in Yemen as well. In 2009, al-Qaida militants attempted to assassinate his son, Prince Muhammad, who is deputy interior minister and the commander of counterterrorism operations: A suicide bomber posing a repentant militant blew himself in the same room as the prince but failed to kill him. The cooperation against al-Qaida both in the kingdom and in Yemen significantly boosted ties with the United States. The anti-militant campaign also boosted Nayef's ties to the religious establishment, which he saw as a major tool in keeping stability and preventing the spread of violent al-Qaida-style "jihadi" theology. The Wahhabi ideology that is the official law in Saudi Arabia is deeply conservative
-- including strict segregation of the sexes, capital punishments like beheadings and enforced prayer times
-- but it also advocated against al-Qaida's calls for holy war against leaders seen as infidels. Nayef's Interior Ministry allied with clerics in a "rehabilitation" program for detained militants, who went through intensive courses with clerics in "correct" Islam to sway them away from violence. The program brought praise from the United States. Nayef never clashed with Abdullah over reforms or made attempts to stop them
-- such a step would be unthinkable in the tight-knit royal family, whose members work hard to keep differences under wraps and ultimately defer to the king. But Nayef was long seen as more favorable to the Wahhabi establishment. In 2009, Nayef promptly shut down a film festival in the Red Sea port city of Jiddah, apparently because of conservatives' worry about the possibility of gender mixing in theaters and a general distaste toward film as immoral. Nayef, a soft-spoken, stocky man of medium build, was born in 1933, the 23rd son of Abdul-Aziz, the family patriarch who founded the kingdom in 1932 and had dozens of sons by various wives. Nayef was one of the five surviving members of the Sudairi seven, sons of Abdul-Aziz from his wife Hussa bint Ahmad Sudairi who, for decades, have held influential posts. That makes him a half-brother of King Abdullah. Before being appointed interior minister, he held the posts of Riyadh governor, deputy minister of interior and minister of state for internal affairs. Nayef has 10 children from several wives.
[Associated
Press;
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