The Siege of Mecca has many of its roots in the short, violent but also extremely successful history of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: a widely unknown country that began to exist only in 1932. Until very recently, the Kingdom isolates itself from the world, whoever wants to enter needs a "sponsor". Tourist visas were first issued just about 18 months ago. Saudi society is fundamentally tribal, the ancient ways are still part of everyday life. Plus, it is not one country: there are many deep differences between the populations of the oil-producing East, the conservative central heartland where the capital Riyadh is located, and the much more casual West along the Red Sea shore (the Hijaz).

Saudi often say that they "we are divided into those born before and after the siege of Mecca": the older ones experienced the radical changes created by the siege, the younger ones blame "the Meccan rebellion" (this is how historians Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix call it) for the Kingdom's restrictive policies in all areas of live that they grew up with. The story of the Mecca Siege is almost impossible to fully understand without knowing some essential parts of Saudi history and creating a context for the siege (if anybody is interested in this, I can elaborate).

But the Saudi portion is only one half of the story. Western involvement in the Mecca crisis, namely the presence of French special forces in Mecca, may have led to a disastrous end of the siege. Since 1979 Saudi Arabia, France and the US have found a "way to tell this story" where each of them protects the other: the Saudis say the French were merely "consulting" and won't tell any details about what exactly was brought into the country from Paris; the French do not reveal how close Saudi Arabia was to the brink of a civil insurgency and - after some initial utterances in the rainbow press - today deny they ever set foot into Mecca (knowing that would create outrage among the conservative Saudis).

America is - until today - kind of hiding behind everybody else's (partially correct) assumption that they had a lot of trouble on the other side of the Persian Gulf. After all, Khomeini had unleashed the Islamic revolution just a few months earlier, and the world's eyes were all pointed to Tehran in 1979. Plus, the Americans were crippled by Carter's foreign politics that rendered them unable "to actually do anything in Mecca": when the Saudis asked the Americans for tear gas to lure out the insurgents from the "Mosque catacombs", it was denied to them. US policy at the time was to not give that kind of material to countries where it could be used on protesters - according to at least two veteran US diplomats, Mark Hambley and David Rundell.

While all participants in the Siege of Mecca - the insurgents, the royal family, the French - probably have grave responsibilities, the West overall tends to brush over events like this, maintaining its disturbingly judgmental attitude towards the Middle East and the allegedly "hopelessly backward" Islam. Yet, many Europeans and Americans tend to forget that most of the ongoing conflicts in that region - including the Palestinian conflict - were originally created by the West. Remember Mister Sykes and Monsieur Picot, dividing the Middle East between the UK and France according to where the oil was assumed to be found? That did a lot of damage, and that was only the beginning…

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Anyway, some additional good reading material in my opinion is:

Black Wave - Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020, Kim Ghattas)

Blood and Oil - Mohammed bin Salman's Ruth (2020, Bradley Hope & Justin Scheck)

Cold War In The Islamic World - Saudi Arabia, Iran And The Struggle For Supremacy (2019, Dilip Hiro)

The Looming Towers (2006, Lawrence Wright)

Graveyard of Clerics (2020, Pascal Menoret)

and most and best of all

Fighting for the Holy Mosque: The 1979 Mecca Insurgency, by Pascal Menoret, an essay that appeared in: Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations in Sacred Spaces, ed. C. Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008