Saddam would be a lot less reasonable if Israel was immediately next door to him, I'll guarantee you that.
And I believe you're right - the SCUD capabilities were really a byproduct of the massive arms shipments for Iran-Iraq.
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
And I believe you're right - the SCUD capabilities were really a byproduct of the massive arms shipments for Iran-Iraq.
The Soviets may send some older equipment but that may be it.
Haboob - Part IV
Haboob - Part IV
The events of late May and early June in Lebanon and the Golan had opened up a question in the Middle East - what, exactly, was coming next? It seemed clear that the much-hyped "Ba'ath Bloc" was clearly not up to the task of dislodging Israel from its strongholds captured in 1967 or its new expeditionary advancements in Lebanon, but nor was it clear that Israel could or would advance much further, especially with European leaders making plain that an attack into Beirut proper would be a red line from which Tel-Aviv could not return. The Israelis had devastated the Syrian Air Force and tank divisions at the Golam, but the Iraqi Expeditionary Force had performed well to the north and Saddam made clear he would not retreat under present conditions. As May and June had advanced, Iraqi logistical tails had expanded through Syria, dozens of new air squadrons had arrived in Syrian airbases, and the tension could have been cut with a knife. The world breathed in and waited; there was no guarantee things would suddenly break, but there was nonetheless a sense that something was about to change, dramatically.
And change it did. Three events in June would dramatically reshape expectations in the Middle East and help bring about an end to the immediate Israeli-Ba'athist conflict, though the bleeding ulcer of Lebanon would bedevil Israeli administrations for years to come. The first was on June 8, 1982, when Iraq finally carried out the second-largest air and missile attack of the war. Having brought mobile Frog-7 short-range missile launchers forward to positions in Syria, Iraq expended a massive amount of ordnance in the early evening of June 8 combined with sending much of the air force they had gathered in Syria over Jordanian airspace - which King Hussein had famously declared "open" to the Ba'athists even as he assured the West that Jordanian troops would not attempt to strike into the West Bank. The result was a rain of fire over Tel-Aviv, Haifa, and other Israeli towns and cities, with Jerusalem notably spared Saddam's wrath. Thanks to the remarkable inaccuracy of the Frogs and the tightness of Israeli air defenses shooting down much of Saddam's attack, just over a hundred Israelis were killed in the worst civilian loss of life in any of the Arab-Israeli Wars, though Saddam did not exit bloodlessly; far from it, as he lost twenty-nine valuable MiGs, and having seen more than half of the rockets fired from Syrian soil intercepted by Israeli air-defense systems bought from the United States. As the dust settled, Soviet backchannels to Washington suddenly started to get noisy; Saddam, it seemed, was signalling through superpower and local intermediaries such as Sadat or Iran's Jahanbani alike that the June 8 air raids were a direct retaliation for the Osirak bombing, and that his bloodlust was now sated.
There were a number of factors in Saddam's decision to massively escalate against Israeli civilians and then pull back suddenly. One, it created a proportional attack from the air, in parallel to Israel's unprecedent preemptive bombing of his nuclear power plant; two, it signaled that he could in fact carry out such an attack; and three, he was quickly starting to realize how expensive the war was, with Soviet support being considerably more limited than he had anticipated, as Moscow's panic over its deteriorating position in Eastern Europe in spring and early summer of 1982 distracted it and the remarkable humiliation of Syria at the Golan persuaded Primakov that there was little more to be gained, and Primakov's word carried tremendous weight in Moscow. On top of that, Iraqi forces were far from home with improved but limited logistics, and oil prices, though rising sharply throughout May, had failed to spike to the point that Saddam would have liked to see in order to get some kind of windfall such as that of 1973-74 or 1978-80 out of it.
The second event came to be known as the Battle of the Camps, a series of events which came to badly damage Israel's standing in Western eyes. On June 10-15 in South Beirut, with Israeli logistical support including limited airstrikes beyond the Peres Line, the Lebanese Phalange militia launched a massive attack into PLO camps in the south of the city, killing hundreds if not thousands in the course of several days as they sought to dislodge fighters and refugees alike. News reporters from around the world on site in Lebanon photographed and recorded the terrifying scenes of women with babies clutched to their breasts running bloodied down the streets as Maronite mortars exploded around them; Bachir Gemayel's proud televised declaration on the 15th that "the camps have been liquidated" brought up uncomfortable parallels for leadership in Europe, even as it was blamed on a mistranslation. It was also a strategic failure, in that most PLO fighters were simply forced to retreat deeper into the city rather than be expelled into Lebanon's north, entirely, which the Israeli-Maronite alliance suffered an extremely poor public relations episode thereafter and the continued Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon grew increasingly unpopular globally. Gemayel would leverage his win into the Lebanese Presidency that August, which elated his staunchest followers but terrified Lebanon's Sunnis across the north and the Bekaa and further persuaded Syria that they needed to redouble their efforts in the country, as did Israel, which say Gemayel's triumph as proof its Lebanon policy was working. The small, diverse country's nightmare was far from over, even as it became clear as June wound down that further offensives from Israel, Syria or Iraq were highly unlikely and that the Fifth Arab-Israeli War was effectively over.
The third and final hingepoint for the Middle East in June 1982, however, had little to do with the war storm in the Levant, but rather the death of King Khalid in Riyadh on June 13 after seven years on the throne; with Saudi Arabia long increasingly unstable, especially in its center and west, the West and countries like Bangladesh which supplied so many of the Kingdom's remittance workers in its oil industry braced for what could - and did - come next...
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Just makes me think of the battle of the same name from ASOIAF. Essentially pretty similar, soldiers in camps completely caught of guard leading to a slaughter
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"It is free real estate."~ Saddam the moment the shooting starts in Arabia (probably).
Pretty much. Like, there are a lot of various factions and such, and when you change power, well, things can be a bit testy. Especially in the middle of a war and with a lotta cash at stake.
I feel like this gonna cause chaos in Egypt and get Sadat killed. Saddam just gave Israel it’s biggest black eye it’s ever truly gotten and Egypt is on the sidelines doing nothing, Saddam and the Assad are gonna blame Sadat for more progress being made and I can’t see the Egyptian people not agreeing also the raid of the PLO camps is only gonna compound this when the Egyptians see the horrific pictures and news coming from Lebanon . Saddam is gonna be giving a lot of funding towards Egyptian rebels against Sadat.
Also Hafez Assad is completely at the mercy at Saddam now too cause another military embarassment is gonna really cause massive problems for Assad. Syria under him controlling the military has been the Arab weak link in the wars against Israel and this has to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back especially for a guy like Saddam who’s insanely petty. Could easily see a coup or massive protests in Syria over Syria’s military weakness.
Funny enough I could actually see the Saudi and Kuwaiti monarchy’s begging Saddam to send his military to Saudi Arabia to help contain rebels.
Also Hafez Assad is completely at the mercy at Saddam now too cause another military embarassment is gonna really cause massive problems for Assad. Syria under him controlling the military has been the Arab weak link in the wars against Israel and this has to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back especially for a guy like Saddam who’s insanely petty. Could easily see a coup or massive protests in Syria over Syria’s military weakness.
Funny enough I could actually see the Saudi and Kuwaiti monarchy’s begging Saddam to send his military to Saudi Arabia to help contain rebels.
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Once again I think this is a somewhat implausibly successful result for the Iraqi's. The Iraqi's do have Frog-7 SRBM's which will get through but they are very inaccurate and while the Iraqi Air Force was better than the Syrians they did not perform very well in OTL against Iran considering the problems that the Iranians had. Against the Israeli's they would have been slaughtered for little result and considering recent events there is no chance that they would catch the Israeli's off guard. I just can't see any attack like this ending in anything that Saddam can call a success.
It’s been a while since I read those, refresh me on what that is?
Landing the plane here is going to be a challenge
I’m well known for how much I hate writing combat material and my penchant for guesstimates/winging it, such as here, is case in point as to why
. Lol
Hafez is majorly weakened here, but his bloodthirsty brother Rifat is still around…
And, yes. I could, too. The East of Arabia is exactly where the Ikhwan would be least popular
Such a complete pain in the ass. I had two small combat scenes for "Honor and Profit" and they took forever to plot out and write. God bless you for pulling it off in all your TLs!
One-on-one fights I don’t mind as much, but that’s when I did novels rather than scrapbook TLs haha.
Thank you!
Indeed.
I've written myself into a tiny bit of a corner with Saudi, as I've mentioned a few times (there is a zero percent chance the West lets it get Iran'd, for a variety of reasons) but I'm increasingly content with some of the ideas I have, and the Riyadh Crisis of summer 1982 will be the next update.
Then, at last, we can start doing the bigger, longer updates to move the TL along at a clip more alike "Exocet" and its brethren, because I need to actually get some of these projects moving along, lol.
. And man, you’ve got alot of wild stuff 
Is Saudi Arabia going to be better or worse than it ended up in Rumsfeldia?
The Riyadh Crisis - Part I
New
(Author's Note: So when I way back when started seeding the shit hitting the fan in Saudi Arabia, I did so in my time honored tradition of seeding an idea that I had no concrete plans on how I intended to execute it in the long run. My original idea was something similar to the Iranian Revolution going off in Saudi Arabia, but I hadn't really thought the full implications out from there. For a variety of reasons, the conditions of an Iranian Revolution analogue in SA are difficult to pull off - Sunnism has powerful imams, but nothing as legalistically dominant as the ayatollahs, and the House of Saud, while much more open/Western in the 1970s in terms of Arabian society and how they governed, were themselves much more traditional in their presentation to the public and were not even in the same universe as the Shah in terms of offending their more conservative subjects' religious and cultural sensibilities. Thus, despite having the Grand Mosque Siege go even more haywire, the analogue runs out of steam after some time. That being said, I promised some chaos in Arabia, and that's what I've written here. I hope you all enjoy it, even if I'm personally not entirely satisfied with how it turned out. - KS)
The war in Lebanon and the Golan had, by mid-June of 1982, seemed to reach a stalemate. It was clear that Israel, partially due to awareness of their limitations and partly not wanting to irritate Western allies already furious over their unprovoked and unilateral bombing of Iraq's civilian nuclear reactor, was not going to invest Beirut or advance upon it, and were going to let the Maronite militias under Bachir Gemayel do their dirty work for them. It was also clear that after the humiliation upon the Golan and Saddam's fizzle of an aerial and missile strike against Israel [1] that the Ba'athist Bloc, missing Egypt's tank divisions and air force to distract Israel on their southern and western flank, was not going to do much if anything to punish Israel for Osirak, and Iraq had more than acquitted itself and restored face with its halting of Israel's advance in the Bekaa and gallantry in battle even if the result had been a strategic draw. The only question remained to what extent the Iraqi-Syrian alliance would continue to occupy northern Lebanon, and what effect that would have on Israel's own occupation of southern Lebanon, both urgent questions for the United Nations as it scrambled to maintain the safety of its peacekeepers and debated requesting the United States intervene directly with the Marines to potentially keep the peace, a course of action which the Carey White House was extremely reluctant in a post-Vietnam, post-Panama world to even begin to entertain.
For all the fireworks in the Levant in May and June of 1982 - which had bothered but not panicked the world oil market - it was what would erupt in Saudi Arabia that really made 1982 a summer to remember and proved the energy efficiency pushes of the West in the 1970s quite prescient, while also dramatically and permanently reshaping the Middle East's physical politics. The death of King Khaled - who had ruled since 1975, when King Faisal had been murdered by a distant cousin - saw King Fahd, his half-brother, be next in line. Fahd was no babe in the woods, having been the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia for much of Khaled's reign due to the late King's fragile health, and there was little expectation that his policy program - a shift in the direction of the conservative public after the Grand Mosque Siege while continuing the crackdown on the Ikhwan terrorists and ties to the West remaining strong - would change much. Indeed, it was that experience of Fahd's that made the transition barely even a blip on the West's radar, with a man not particularly well-liked but seen as capable continuing on in Riyadh.
That all came to a screeching halt on June 17, 1982, the day of public mourning for King Khalid. Muslim funeral practices encouraged the near-immediate washing and burial of a body, but a major public show of grief for the late King was encouraged tacitly by Fahd and would, as it turned out, represent the largest gathering of the House of Saud's myriad princes and sheikhs in quite some time. All six of Fahd's younger and politically influential brothers - members of the so-called Sudairi Seven due to their mother - would be in attendance to bid farewell to their half-brother, and most of the other senior members of other "clans" of the House of Saud would be there too. [2]
June 17, 1982 remains both one of the most critical days in Middle Eastern history and one of the worst terrorist attacks ever perpetrated. As thousands gathered in central Riyadh, eight massive bombs, all of them in critically-parked trucks, went off, and forty Ikhwan commandos opened fire on the crowd, some with Gatling guns mounted in covered vehicles they had driven into place. Well over a thousand people were killed, the majority as the explosions ripped through the prone crowd and neighboring buildings alike, and thousands more injured from the bombings as well as being shot or struck by shrapnel come out in a bullet's ricochet. The siting of two of the trucks allowed the bombs to destroy the dais on which much of the Saudi royal family was sitting; the new King Fahd, his four eldest sons, as well as four of his Sudairi clan brothers and nearly thirty other prominent members of the House of Saud, all half-brothers and first or second cousins, were slain. At four days, his reign would be the shortest of the House of Saud. [3] No single day in Arabian history, it was said thereafter, made so many widows, and June 17 is still remembered in much of the Arab world as the "Day of Widows" or "the Widowmaker."
The bombing had removed of the dominant faction of the House of Saud not just Fahd but his capable brothers Sultan, Nayef, the estranged Turki, and Salman; left behind remained only Abdul Rahman and Ahmed, neither of whom were particularly well regarded by others in the family with Ahmed, the youngest of the seven, in particular being dismissed as an administrator at best. Abdul Rahman was now King of Saudi Arabia quite suddenly, reeling from the slaughter of his kinsmen that was, in part thanks to Ahmed's interventions as Minister of the Interior, quickly traced back to the Ikhwan.
This revelation was perhaps not surprising but nonetheless a sea change in Riyadh. The ulema would never publicly turn on the Sauds, it had been generally thought, but they had nonetheless become far more favorable to the Ikhwan than one would have expected in the wake of the Grand Mosque seizure of December 1979. The Riyadh bombing changed all that; the ulema was already hesitant to turn against an Islamic ruler who had not committed any sins against the faith, which the House of Saud had not credibly done, and the fanatics now trying to decapitate the royal family in one massive go with considerably greater casualties saw, to them, no reasonable sourcing in Islam. The Ikhwan's institutional support, meagre as it was, evaporated almost overnight, and several influential Saudi imams went so far as to issue fatwas against them, whereas just a year earlier many of them had begun debating whether a post-Saudi republic governed by the Ikhwan and clerics was permissible under Islamic law.
The attack was a hugely destabilizing incident, too. It proved the Sauds were mere mortals and had crippled the family, with many junior princes having to rise in place as Riyadh reeled. Riots erupted in Qatif, a Shia-dominated city, and people began turning on one another, accusing each other of being Ikhwan fighters. The anger and shock over the slaughter of the Saudi royal family's upper echelon would not seem to be a revolutionary environment or one conducive to an overthrow of the house, but that is nonetheless what came next.
The Saudis had, very nearly, been deposed in 1969 by a cadre of military officers inspired by Nasser and the ideals of Arab socialist nationalism; it had not been longer before, either, that Moammar Gaddafi had come to power in Libya or the Iraqi monarchy had fallen, so a successful coup against the House of Saud would seem to have been well within the traditions of the recent Middle East. The coup failed, however, for a variety of reasons - Najdi loyalty to the royal family when most of the coup plotters were Hejazi, as well as Saudi Arabia being exactly the wrong country to try to introduce secularist socialism. There had not been a serious effort to topple the family again until the Ikhwan's emergence in 1979, and the successful escalation of their attacks proved that the base of Saudi authority, especially outside of Najd, was indeed quite brittle. Fertile ground, then, for ambition, and such ambition found its protagonist in Mohammed Sabri Suleiman, generally referred to in the West as Mohammed Sabri. [4]
Sabri was, quite critically for the (partial) success of what he was about to execute, neither an Arab socialist, nor an Arab nationalist. He was a devout Muslim, trusted by the establishment enough to be appointed the commanding officer of the Royal Saudi Air Force, and had up until the Day of Widows been considered a reliable cog in the Saudi machine, having even personally directed air strikes he had approved against Ikhwan camps in the desert, a remarkable escalation of an internal conflict. Sabri was also, crucially, well-respected by military commanders not of the House of Saud, and was one of the few men in the small and fairly unimpressive Saudi military with any credibility with the Saudi street. As such, on June 28, 1982, he made his move - coordinating with three Army commanders to move two thousand troops and twenty tanks into Riyadh. The Riyadh Crisis was thus now into its next, more volatile phase.
Sabri himself had taken a small group of elite men to the main television broadcaster in Riyadh, seized it (and executed several pro-Saudi journalists and managers within) and then started a broadcast declaring a coup had occurred, that his men were seizing control of the capital, and that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was, hereby, abolished and that an Islamic Republic of Arabia had replaced it. He denounced the Ikhwan and any clergy who explicitly supported them, vowed to purge the country of this "and other subversive elements" but also stated that the Day of Widows had proven that the House of Saud no longer could credibly govern the Kingdom, with this declaration couched carefully and with no hint of irony behind the flimsy excuse of "in that they could not safely defend the Grand Mosque nor themselves in their capital at Riyadh."
This immediately triggered a whole host of knock-on crises. Minor and middle-ranking princes of the House of Saud had already been quietly fleeing the country for days after June 17, commandeering private jets or C-130s sold by the United States and jetting off to Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates in worry for their safety and that of their families. The Sabri coup only further spurred dozens more princes to flee abroad, on or after June 28, with the putschists quietly encouraging this and making it clear that they would not arrest those trying to flee, and then turning around and publicizing these escapes to a stunned public, attempting to portray the Sauds as cowardly leeches now fleeing the country as their hegemony collapsed. American analysts jokingly called the sudden frequent one-way flights out of Riyadh as the "Fall of Dry-gon" or "Air Sheikh," but there was a fair deal of alarm in Washington, London and Brussels, to say nothing of neighboring states. Had the ancient House of Saud actually fallen in the course of just two weeks?
This was, naturally, getting quite ahead of itself. The bureaucracy and much of the military was heavily Najdi (especially after the near-miss of 1969), and clan and tribal loyalties flared even in this modern world. The Saudi Arabian National Guard - referred to frequently as SANG or, in Riyadh, as the White Guard - had been formed specifically to protect the inner royal family against an attempted coup and mobilized quickly to put down Sabri's putsch. The air force commander had thought ahead, however, and in the days before his coup and immediately after had all air force frames evacuated from not only central Saudi Arabia but from air bases in the Hejaz as well to the East, and had most brigade commanders loyal to him moved East as well. On June 31, as the television studio in Riyadh was retaken by the SANG and he was denounced by King Abdul Rahman, Sabri escaped Riyadh in a Toyota driven by his aide-de-camp to an airfield where he was evacuated by helicopter to Dammam, where he had concentrated his forces and, in doing so, effectively taken control of Saudi Arabia's most valuable and sprawling oilfields, in particular the Ghadar field. For the Saudi government to attack him now would mean doing so with almost no air force and only half their army plus the SANG, and doing so directly into the Kingdom's most valuable - indeed, only valuable - economic resource. The West, spooked forever after the oil crises of 1973-74 and 1978-79, would never again allow something as such to happen, and Sabri could at least anticipate some kind of support, even if it was just diplomatic, if just to keep the precious oilfields from being attacked and damaged and nipping the world's nascent economic recovery in the bud.
Arabia - and indeed the global economy - dangled on the precipice thanks to the Arabian Revolution..."
[1] Formal retcon with @Thoresby's feedback
[2] Abdulaziz alone had forty five sons. The family can be embedded in every office there because there's so many of them.
[3] Irony - Fahd was the longest-ruling Saudi monarch IRL, from 1982 to 2005.
[4] Who is this man, you may ask? No idea. I got his name off a Wikipedia artilce on the Saudi Royal Air Force and all his biographical data is purely my invention.
The Riyadh Crisis - Part I
The war in Lebanon and the Golan had, by mid-June of 1982, seemed to reach a stalemate. It was clear that Israel, partially due to awareness of their limitations and partly not wanting to irritate Western allies already furious over their unprovoked and unilateral bombing of Iraq's civilian nuclear reactor, was not going to invest Beirut or advance upon it, and were going to let the Maronite militias under Bachir Gemayel do their dirty work for them. It was also clear that after the humiliation upon the Golan and Saddam's fizzle of an aerial and missile strike against Israel [1] that the Ba'athist Bloc, missing Egypt's tank divisions and air force to distract Israel on their southern and western flank, was not going to do much if anything to punish Israel for Osirak, and Iraq had more than acquitted itself and restored face with its halting of Israel's advance in the Bekaa and gallantry in battle even if the result had been a strategic draw. The only question remained to what extent the Iraqi-Syrian alliance would continue to occupy northern Lebanon, and what effect that would have on Israel's own occupation of southern Lebanon, both urgent questions for the United Nations as it scrambled to maintain the safety of its peacekeepers and debated requesting the United States intervene directly with the Marines to potentially keep the peace, a course of action which the Carey White House was extremely reluctant in a post-Vietnam, post-Panama world to even begin to entertain.
For all the fireworks in the Levant in May and June of 1982 - which had bothered but not panicked the world oil market - it was what would erupt in Saudi Arabia that really made 1982 a summer to remember and proved the energy efficiency pushes of the West in the 1970s quite prescient, while also dramatically and permanently reshaping the Middle East's physical politics. The death of King Khaled - who had ruled since 1975, when King Faisal had been murdered by a distant cousin - saw King Fahd, his half-brother, be next in line. Fahd was no babe in the woods, having been the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia for much of Khaled's reign due to the late King's fragile health, and there was little expectation that his policy program - a shift in the direction of the conservative public after the Grand Mosque Siege while continuing the crackdown on the Ikhwan terrorists and ties to the West remaining strong - would change much. Indeed, it was that experience of Fahd's that made the transition barely even a blip on the West's radar, with a man not particularly well-liked but seen as capable continuing on in Riyadh.
That all came to a screeching halt on June 17, 1982, the day of public mourning for King Khalid. Muslim funeral practices encouraged the near-immediate washing and burial of a body, but a major public show of grief for the late King was encouraged tacitly by Fahd and would, as it turned out, represent the largest gathering of the House of Saud's myriad princes and sheikhs in quite some time. All six of Fahd's younger and politically influential brothers - members of the so-called Sudairi Seven due to their mother - would be in attendance to bid farewell to their half-brother, and most of the other senior members of other "clans" of the House of Saud would be there too. [2]
June 17, 1982 remains both one of the most critical days in Middle Eastern history and one of the worst terrorist attacks ever perpetrated. As thousands gathered in central Riyadh, eight massive bombs, all of them in critically-parked trucks, went off, and forty Ikhwan commandos opened fire on the crowd, some with Gatling guns mounted in covered vehicles they had driven into place. Well over a thousand people were killed, the majority as the explosions ripped through the prone crowd and neighboring buildings alike, and thousands more injured from the bombings as well as being shot or struck by shrapnel come out in a bullet's ricochet. The siting of two of the trucks allowed the bombs to destroy the dais on which much of the Saudi royal family was sitting; the new King Fahd, his four eldest sons, as well as four of his Sudairi clan brothers and nearly thirty other prominent members of the House of Saud, all half-brothers and first or second cousins, were slain. At four days, his reign would be the shortest of the House of Saud. [3] No single day in Arabian history, it was said thereafter, made so many widows, and June 17 is still remembered in much of the Arab world as the "Day of Widows" or "the Widowmaker."
The bombing had removed of the dominant faction of the House of Saud not just Fahd but his capable brothers Sultan, Nayef, the estranged Turki, and Salman; left behind remained only Abdul Rahman and Ahmed, neither of whom were particularly well regarded by others in the family with Ahmed, the youngest of the seven, in particular being dismissed as an administrator at best. Abdul Rahman was now King of Saudi Arabia quite suddenly, reeling from the slaughter of his kinsmen that was, in part thanks to Ahmed's interventions as Minister of the Interior, quickly traced back to the Ikhwan.
This revelation was perhaps not surprising but nonetheless a sea change in Riyadh. The ulema would never publicly turn on the Sauds, it had been generally thought, but they had nonetheless become far more favorable to the Ikhwan than one would have expected in the wake of the Grand Mosque seizure of December 1979. The Riyadh bombing changed all that; the ulema was already hesitant to turn against an Islamic ruler who had not committed any sins against the faith, which the House of Saud had not credibly done, and the fanatics now trying to decapitate the royal family in one massive go with considerably greater casualties saw, to them, no reasonable sourcing in Islam. The Ikhwan's institutional support, meagre as it was, evaporated almost overnight, and several influential Saudi imams went so far as to issue fatwas against them, whereas just a year earlier many of them had begun debating whether a post-Saudi republic governed by the Ikhwan and clerics was permissible under Islamic law.
The attack was a hugely destabilizing incident, too. It proved the Sauds were mere mortals and had crippled the family, with many junior princes having to rise in place as Riyadh reeled. Riots erupted in Qatif, a Shia-dominated city, and people began turning on one another, accusing each other of being Ikhwan fighters. The anger and shock over the slaughter of the Saudi royal family's upper echelon would not seem to be a revolutionary environment or one conducive to an overthrow of the house, but that is nonetheless what came next.
The Saudis had, very nearly, been deposed in 1969 by a cadre of military officers inspired by Nasser and the ideals of Arab socialist nationalism; it had not been longer before, either, that Moammar Gaddafi had come to power in Libya or the Iraqi monarchy had fallen, so a successful coup against the House of Saud would seem to have been well within the traditions of the recent Middle East. The coup failed, however, for a variety of reasons - Najdi loyalty to the royal family when most of the coup plotters were Hejazi, as well as Saudi Arabia being exactly the wrong country to try to introduce secularist socialism. There had not been a serious effort to topple the family again until the Ikhwan's emergence in 1979, and the successful escalation of their attacks proved that the base of Saudi authority, especially outside of Najd, was indeed quite brittle. Fertile ground, then, for ambition, and such ambition found its protagonist in Mohammed Sabri Suleiman, generally referred to in the West as Mohammed Sabri. [4]
Sabri was, quite critically for the (partial) success of what he was about to execute, neither an Arab socialist, nor an Arab nationalist. He was a devout Muslim, trusted by the establishment enough to be appointed the commanding officer of the Royal Saudi Air Force, and had up until the Day of Widows been considered a reliable cog in the Saudi machine, having even personally directed air strikes he had approved against Ikhwan camps in the desert, a remarkable escalation of an internal conflict. Sabri was also, crucially, well-respected by military commanders not of the House of Saud, and was one of the few men in the small and fairly unimpressive Saudi military with any credibility with the Saudi street. As such, on June 28, 1982, he made his move - coordinating with three Army commanders to move two thousand troops and twenty tanks into Riyadh. The Riyadh Crisis was thus now into its next, more volatile phase.
Sabri himself had taken a small group of elite men to the main television broadcaster in Riyadh, seized it (and executed several pro-Saudi journalists and managers within) and then started a broadcast declaring a coup had occurred, that his men were seizing control of the capital, and that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was, hereby, abolished and that an Islamic Republic of Arabia had replaced it. He denounced the Ikhwan and any clergy who explicitly supported them, vowed to purge the country of this "and other subversive elements" but also stated that the Day of Widows had proven that the House of Saud no longer could credibly govern the Kingdom, with this declaration couched carefully and with no hint of irony behind the flimsy excuse of "in that they could not safely defend the Grand Mosque nor themselves in their capital at Riyadh."
This immediately triggered a whole host of knock-on crises. Minor and middle-ranking princes of the House of Saud had already been quietly fleeing the country for days after June 17, commandeering private jets or C-130s sold by the United States and jetting off to Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates in worry for their safety and that of their families. The Sabri coup only further spurred dozens more princes to flee abroad, on or after June 28, with the putschists quietly encouraging this and making it clear that they would not arrest those trying to flee, and then turning around and publicizing these escapes to a stunned public, attempting to portray the Sauds as cowardly leeches now fleeing the country as their hegemony collapsed. American analysts jokingly called the sudden frequent one-way flights out of Riyadh as the "Fall of Dry-gon" or "Air Sheikh," but there was a fair deal of alarm in Washington, London and Brussels, to say nothing of neighboring states. Had the ancient House of Saud actually fallen in the course of just two weeks?
This was, naturally, getting quite ahead of itself. The bureaucracy and much of the military was heavily Najdi (especially after the near-miss of 1969), and clan and tribal loyalties flared even in this modern world. The Saudi Arabian National Guard - referred to frequently as SANG or, in Riyadh, as the White Guard - had been formed specifically to protect the inner royal family against an attempted coup and mobilized quickly to put down Sabri's putsch. The air force commander had thought ahead, however, and in the days before his coup and immediately after had all air force frames evacuated from not only central Saudi Arabia but from air bases in the Hejaz as well to the East, and had most brigade commanders loyal to him moved East as well. On June 31, as the television studio in Riyadh was retaken by the SANG and he was denounced by King Abdul Rahman, Sabri escaped Riyadh in a Toyota driven by his aide-de-camp to an airfield where he was evacuated by helicopter to Dammam, where he had concentrated his forces and, in doing so, effectively taken control of Saudi Arabia's most valuable and sprawling oilfields, in particular the Ghadar field. For the Saudi government to attack him now would mean doing so with almost no air force and only half their army plus the SANG, and doing so directly into the Kingdom's most valuable - indeed, only valuable - economic resource. The West, spooked forever after the oil crises of 1973-74 and 1978-79, would never again allow something as such to happen, and Sabri could at least anticipate some kind of support, even if it was just diplomatic, if just to keep the precious oilfields from being attacked and damaged and nipping the world's nascent economic recovery in the bud.
Arabia - and indeed the global economy - dangled on the precipice thanks to the Arabian Revolution..."
[1] Formal retcon with @Thoresby's feedback
[2] Abdulaziz alone had forty five sons. The family can be embedded in every office there because there's so many of them.
[3] Irony - Fahd was the longest-ruling Saudi monarch IRL, from 1982 to 2005.
[4] Who is this man, you may ask? No idea. I got his name off a Wikipedia artilce on the Saudi Royal Air Force and all his biographical data is purely my invention.
I haven't read all of that TL, so you'll have to spoil for me how SA winds up there?