Slums a breeding ground for al-Qaeda amid Saudi splendour

"The slum south of Riyadh where an Irish cameraman was killed and a British BBC reporter critically wounded is a short drive from the bright neon lights, towering skyscrapers, massive gated palaces and walled residential compounds of one of the world's wealthiest capitals.
But, as the impoverished epicentre of the kingdom's new Islamic insurgency, it is a world away from the Saudi capital's veneer of 21st-century modernity.
The Al-Suwaidi district has a reputation as a bastion of strict Wahhabism even among the other residents of the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom.
It attracts a steady stream of villagers from the surrounding countryside in search of a better life in the city.
The more than half-a-million people already crammed into the district live in a massive entanglement of narrow lanes, potholed roads and open sewers, and suffer frequent power and water outages.
They are the people most attracted by al-Qaeda's call to rid the kingdom of corruption and decadence, and the slum has predictably become a fertile breeding ground for Islamic extremism."