Americans and French liberating people? You mean more like massacring them.
Cali
Lest you forget. Have you ever heard of a Saudi bloke called Juhayman Al Otaybi? Probably not. he was the first modern Binladen. Did you hear of the Mecca seizure in 1979 and how a bunch of French special forces liberated pilgrims caught in the Ka3ba seizure? Do you know hundreds of pilgrims died in that seizure? Probably not.
Edited Version. Read the whole article on;
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/how-1979-siege-mecca-haunts-house-saud
How the 1979 Siege of Mecca Haunts the House of Saud.
Saudi Arabia is in a familiar, if unpleasant, position. On June 23, security forces in the kingdom disrupted an impending attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, according to Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry. The event triggered an avalanche of international commentary about the terrorist plot, which reportedly involved three cells ready to attack security forces and worshippers at the mosque. And though the Interior Ministry's statement did not allude to it, the foiled conspiracy doubtless brought back uncomfortable memories for the Saudi royal family of the siege of the Grand Mosque in November 1979.
Despite the incident's gravity and its lingering influence on Islamist terrorism, the Grand Mosque's siege is a historical footnote nearly 40 years later. Saudi Arabia quickly shut down its communication channels to the outside world as the event unfolded. Since then, it has had no desire to discuss the most destabilizing and embarrassing moment in its history,
when militants seized and held Islam's holiest shrine for 15 days, and Riyadh had to rely on clandestine members of the French special forces to regain control. But as the recent plot and the kingdom's enduring fight against radicalism underscore, the legacy of the 1979 Grand Mosque siege lives on.
On Nov. 20, 1979, al-Otaibi and his followers made their way into the mosque's inner sanctum, well-armed.
Before any of the thousands of pilgrims there could comprehend what had happened, the rebel leader took control of the microphones at the front of the mosque, announcing that his brother-in-law was the Mahdi. (Interviews with survivors of the siege indicate that the brother-in-law bore several physical traits that the Mahdi supposedly would have.) Some Islamic scholars trapped inside the holy site then dialed their superiors for help as the rebels closed the Grand Mosque's massive gates and snipers took up defensive positions in several of its minarets. Mecca police responded hours later, only to be repelled by successive rounds of fire from militants hiding in the upper reaches of the Grand Mosque.
France to the Rescue
As former head of the GIGN Paul Barril tells it, the ill-equipped Saudi military needed to disrupt the rebels from a distance to avoid another bloodbath.
The French operatives settled on using a gas that caused vomiting and temporary blindness to incapacitate the militants, allowing Saudi security forces and a contingent of Pakistani commandos to penetrate the Grand Mosque. Many of the rebels retreated into the recesses underneath the structure, and from there, a brutal battle erupted. Saudi forces indiscriminately threw grenades, killing untold numbers of pilgrims, military personnel and rebels. Official estimates put the death toll at around 255, but sources outside the Saudi government say that as many as 1,000 people died in the fight.