HENRY SCHUSTER

I want to start with a story that took place about four months ago. I was in front of the house at number five Momir Asma bin Mohammed Street. A week before, even a few days before, this was an unremarkable house on an unremarkable short side street near the Sahara Mall in the King Fahd neighborhood of Riyadh. But on this day, the houses in the street looked like they belonged in Baghdad, not Riyadh. There were literally thousands of pockmarks from bullet holes up and down the streets.

As for the house itself, number five, half of it stood looking normal on the outside. The other half was twisted as if in a half grimace. The heat, the intensity of the 120-degree heat from what must have been an explosion, had melted half of the front gate. As you walked up to the house as I did – I had tried to get there two nights before that when there had been a shootout between Saudi security forces and members of Saudi al Qaeda – the first thing that you noticed was that underfoot there were still hundreds of rounds that had become embedded in the asphalt.