The Siege of Mecca | The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine | Yaroslav Trofimov

20 November 1979: as morning prayers began, hundreds of hardline Islamist gunmen, armed with rifles smuggled in coffins, stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca. With thousands of terrified worshippers trapped inside, the result was a bloody siege that lasted two weeks, caused hundreds of deaths, prompted an international diplomatic crisis and unleashed forces that would eventually lead to the rise of al Qaeda.

Reviews

"Trofimov tells this tale with considerable verve and authority. He has interviewed many of the surviving witnesses and participants in a country suffused with fear and paronoia, and sets the siege within a wider historical context." Michael Burleigh, Literary Review

"A gripping, highly informed narrative" Financial TImes

"A thriller-like account of an event largely hushed up" The Times

Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for two consecutive years, in 2022 and 2023. Before covering the Russian war on Ukraine, he reported on most major conflicts of the past two decades, serving as the Journal's bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan and as a correspondent in Iraq. He holds an MA from New York University and is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Faith at War and The Siege of Mecca. His most recent book is Our Enemies Will Vanish.