At Harvey Nichols, set in one of Riyadh’s opulent shopping malls, the sharp desert light shimmers off the glass windows. A ring of concrete bollards and barriers surrounds this new ornament to Saudi Arabia’s capital in the hope of stifling the compressed blast of any car-bomber tempted to shatter this latest symbol of the kingdom’s brittle modernity.
Car-bombers, for the moment, appear to be contained. After a wave of suicide attacks that began with a triple explosion at a westerners’ residential compound in Riyadh in May last year, Saudi police have foiled several serious attacks. As a result, Islamist terrorists are instead fielding small cells of gunmen, and directing them against expatriate oil industry executives, Saudi security forces, US military contractors, foreign journalists and, indeed, any random target that looks western.
