WASHINGTON – In Washington discussion groups, the question is frequently asked, 'How long before the House of Saud falls?' And the answers vary from a few months to very few years.

The question is posed in the context of the so-called 'war on terror' – a US-sponsored initiative that has put a number of American allies, not least the House of Saud, in a difficult position.

For a start there is the close relationship between Al Qaeda and Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. The front pages of Saudi newspapers were this week festooned with images of 25 of the kingdom's 26 most-wanted terrorists – a group that remains at large and apparently well protected by the local Al Qaeda underground.

The Saudi government launched a massive crackdown against Al Qaeda after suicide bombers attacked three housing compounds in Riyadh in May. Rewards of SR1 million ($267,000) have been posted for information leading to the arrest of just one of the suspected terrorists behind those attacks. The reward rises to $1.3 million for more than one and $1.9 million for information that prevents a terrorist attack.

The Al Qaeda offensive in Saudi Arabia is mainly directed at US and UK targets and nationals, although the most recent suicide attack, in November, hit a residential compound housing a predominantly Arab population, killing 17 people. All US diplomatic and military personnel in Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dhahran have been instructed to remain indoors in their heavily guarded residences unless on essential business.

While frequently the target of doom-laden lectures by Al Qaeda leaders, the House of Saud, however, has not been targeted. Or not yet.

Saad Al Faqih, head of the exiled Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA), believes the terrorist offensive will soon take aim at the 24,000-strong royal family – and then, he says, "the collapse will be imminent."

The Saudi royal family is nothing if not resilient – and well organized. Wherever one goes in the kingdom, a royal prince - there are 7,000 - is in charge of key local and national nerve centers. If a renegade non-royal colonel were to try to plot a nationwide coup in an area the size of Western Europe, counter-intelligence would soon get wind of it. But that is not to say that an unknown colonel couldn't pull it off in one town, perhaps even in one city. And while that would of course be a far cry from nationwide control, it could be the beginning of a civil war that would split the princes, with young Western-educated liberals facing off against their septuagenarian elders.

Of course, another powerful force in the kingdom is the Wahhabi ulema (clergy). After the May 12 terrorist bombing in Riyadh, however, some 1,000 clerics were hauled up a royal carpet and ordered to drop any reference to jihad or mujahideen (freedom fighters) from their enkindling homilies. Transgressors would face re-education in government-controlled seminaries, or even be deprived of their right to preach.

Ever since the 1979 concordat between the Wahhabi ulema and the Wahhabi royal regime, which followed the seizure of the grand mosque in Mecca by Wahhabi militants, the clergy has been flush with lavish royal subsidies. However, there was a catch.

So much as a soupcon of faultfinding with the House of Saud would not be tolerated. But there were no limits placed on training Wahhabi missionaries to spread the Wahhabi gospel abroad (protected by the immunity of diplomatic passports), or building Wahhabi mosques, madrassas (Islamic schools), and Islamic community centers. Tens of thousands of madrassas are spread through Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Middle East, Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa, and North and South America.

Even in the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, where most of the country's 8 million Muslims – 10 percent of the population - live, and where the Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf is located, there are some 3,000 Saudi-funded madrassas. Before it was toppled by the United States, the hard-line Taliban regime in Afghanistan was also the recipient of Saudi funds.

But the House of Saud is being forced to reassess its compromise with the Wahhabi clergy. For a start, the Saudi government has finally withdrawn its sponsorship of the Virginia-based Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences, after years of scurrilous teachings denouncing Jews and Christians. The institute, a satellite campus of a Riyadh university, trained 75 lay ministers for the US military, according to The Wall Street Journal. The chairman of its board of trustees was Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The House of Saud has now finally conceded that the institute's Wahhabi missionaries, whose subversive activities enjoyed diplomatic immunity, were engaged in teaching anti-Western religious fanaticism. (It is worth noting that while there are some 2,000 mosques in the United States, the majority established by Wahhabis, not a single Christian church is allowed in the kingdom, even for its foreign population.)

It is through the Wahhabi clergy that the House of Saud comes upon another weak spot: Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Saudi clerics encouraged young men to volunteer for duty against the 'heathen' Soviets. Osama Bin Laden was a clergy hero, coming from a good family with lots of money for the Arab volunteers (including some 20,000 Saudis) who fought alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan. After Moscow decided to cut its losses in Afghanistan, abandoning the field to its enemies, Bin Laden, a devout Wahhabi, became superman at home.

Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and the House of Saud's decision to invite US forces into the kingdom for Operation Desert Shield, Bin Laden turned against the royals and sympathetic clerics read his secret messages during Friday prayers. The concordat began fraying.

Bin Laden was eventually expelled from Saudi Arabia and his stature, magnified by the September 11 attacks on the United States, has been growing ever since. For Saudi clerics, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were proof that the Bush administration was determined to shrink the Muslim world; Bin Laden is now the only man leading the global struggle, for the second time in his life, against an evil empire.

Saudi backing for Operation Iraqi Freedom was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. A respected cleric, Sheikh Hamoud Bin Oqla Al Shuaibi, told his congregation that this support deprived the House of Saud of "Islamic legitimacy."

There is a growing movement – mainly abroad - calling for change in the Saudi regime. MIRA chief Saad Al Faqih goes further, condemning the regime as unable to tolerate "even minimal freedoms of expression and assembly. If these freedoms were allowed, people would demand an accounting of the many billions stolen by the royals and, if they were not stopped, they would then encircle the princes' palaces, demanding the return of these billions. People would demand that those behind the abuse of thousands of prisoners be prosecuted and, if not stopped, would attack the prisons or the interior ministry," he says.

But Faqih anticipates the regime "will fall on its own," as a result of "internal problems."

"Our role then would be to prevent the chaos rather than remove the regime," he says.

But the House of Saud cannot discount the possibility of outside pressure – not least from Osama Bin Laden.

"I think Bin Laden is more concerned with America," says Faqih. Indeed he is, with Iraq his chosen battlefield. And for that very reason a US withdrawal from Iraq short of its objectives could well spell doom for the House of Saud.UPI