You think the Mid east is out of control now???? Read this!

Imagine this...

On one of the holiest days in the Islamic year the preacher at Mecca's Grand Mosque is suddenly replaced by the world's most wanted man. Insurrection, economic meltdown and full-scale war follow. James Buchan describes the west's worst nightmare.

This is fiction, but not impossible. At sundown on December 6 2001, corresponding to 23 Ramadan, 1422 in the lunar calendar used by the Muslims, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, prayer leader of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, made his way to the pulpit in the vast mosque courtyard.

It was no ordinary evening, but possibly the holiest in the holiest month of Islam, the so-called Lailat al-Qadr, or the Night of Power, on which, according to the Koran, God's revelation was sent down to the Prophet Mohammed. On that night, "better than a thousand months," it is believed that all wishes are granted. More than 50,000 people had gathered on the hot pavement of the mosque enclosure and in the streets outside to pass the evening in prayer. Millions of others were watching on a live television broadcast at home.

As Sheikh Abdul Rahman, famous all over the Islamic world for the beauty of his voice, mounted the pulpit, a hand reached up and tugged at his robe. There was a commotion, and in the place of the Imam stood a tall man, unarmed and dressed in the white cloth of the pilgrim to Mecca, and recognisable from a million television screens: Osama bin Laden, flanked by his lieutenants.

In the four minutes before the signal of the Saudi Broadcasting Service was cut, men and women watched an extraordinary scene unfold. "In the name of God the merciful..." Osama began, his Arabic all the more eloquent for having had no seminary training, but it was drowned in the cries of acclamation. The crowd surged forward to the pulpit and in a moment the courtyard was ringing with the pilgrim's shout, "Labaik, Labaik," - I'm with you! Meanwhile, armed young men appeared from the crowd and could be seen padlocking the gates, and taking up firing positions in the galleries.

So began the insurrection that was to overturn the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, undermine several Arab states and provoke a conflagration that was to lead to war. That a single man, unarmed and dressed in two seamless pieces of white cotton, evaded the power of the United States and took over a 100-year kingdom that boasted an armed strength of 200,000 men, a large police force and pervasive intelligence network, and complete control of telecommunications, broadcasting and the press remains one of the most astonishing events of modern history.

Osama's route back from Afghanistan, across 3,000 miles of mountain, desert and sea, has become legend. It is believed that he left his hideout in the Pakhtia district of southern Afghanistan some time in the first week of November 2001, passed out of the country by the lower Helmand river, and crossed the inhospitable Makran desert to the Arabian Sea coast.

From there, a dhow took him across the Gulf to his ancestral home in Wadi Hadhramawt in Yemen. A witness in the mud town of Shibam told the London newspaper Asharq al-Awsat that he saw a group of women being handed down from four heavily-armed Toyota Land-Cruisers, and there is speculation that Osama left his wives and their children in safety before travelling by way of Marib and the Wadi Najran into Saudi Arabia. Once in Mecca, it may have been comparatively simple to hide out in the warren of caves and tunnels, some stretching back to the era before Islam, under the mosque courtyard until the the time was right. The Saudi Binladin Group, Osama's family construction business, did major extension works to the mosque in the 1950s, and Osama could easily have studied the engineer's drawings during his time at the firm in the 1980s.

Crown Prince Abdullah and Princes Sultan and Nayef, who had run the country since the illness of King Fahd in 1995, were confronted by a dilemma. As Osama well knew, to shed blood in the holiest place of Islam was anathema. While seeking a fatwa from the Grand Mufti, precious hours were lost.

The Saudi Telecommunications Company and the sole internet portal were by now closed down, and Saudi Arabia had passed off the map. What is clear is that in the course of the night and the next morning, there were large demonstrations of sympathy in the towns of Jowf, Onaizah, Riyadh, Buraidah and Jeddah.

In a series of attacks, which were either spontaneous or orchestrated by "Afghans" - that is, Saudis who had fought in Afghanistan - interior ministry and national guard armouries were broken open, western housing compounds in Riyadh and Yanbu were set on fire and the Ruwais prison in Jeddah, which was suspected of holding "Afghan" prisoners, was stormed.

The Al Saud had always relied for their security on the religious establishment and the tribes of the central desert, but also ultimately on the guarantee of the US. The armed forces were chronically under strength, riddled with competing interests, incompatible in their equipment and suspect in their loyalty. When Bedouin units of the national guard in Qasim were ordered into Mecca in the small hours of December 7, they revolted and shot their officers, and the American advisers for good measure. Likewise, when the Royal Saudi Air Force attempted to scramble F-15 aircraft and helicopters from Tabuk airbase, warrant officers disabled the machines and several pilots, including a grandson of Prince Sultan, the defence minister, were killed.

In the course of the next morning, the first of the so-called "Days of God", armed crowds attacked the British and American embassies, branches of banks with foreign shareholders such as the Saudi-French Bank, western civilian contractors and the military hospitals, where they dragged out and abused foreign nurses. A mechanised unit sent to defend the US embassy defected, and by nightfall the main palaces and the head quarter, including palaces in Riyadh, the interior ministry, the airport and Saudi Broadcasting Service were under attack. In the eastern province, a column of vehicles from Khobar descended on the Shia town of Qatif and the foreign compounds of Saudi Aramco, the oil company, and by evening refugees were flooding the causeway to Bahrain.

Under contingency plans, the US embassy had evacuated its personnel to Kharj, in the remote desert south of Riyadh, where the US and British air forces had established a base for their operations against Iraq in the 1990s. That evening, evidently on the advice of the US ambassador, King Fahd left from there by C-130 transport aircraft for medical treatment in Spain.

The orgy of killing continued on December 8. Loyal elements of the royal guard attempted to make a stand at the main royal palace in Riyadh, but were overrun. By the evening, just 48 hours after Osama's dramatic appearance in Mecca, Crown Prince Abdullah left for Syria. Prince Sultan and the other senior members of the royal family left with their entourages.

It was only then, when all the major towns were littered with bodies, that Osama called for a halt to the bloodshed. Speaking on television from a modest house in Medina, where visitors were shown endlessly offering their allegiance to him as Amir ul-Muminin, or Prince of the Believers, Osama referred to the new emirate as simply Dar ul Islam: the House of Islam. Saudi Arabia had ceased to exist.

Quoting a saying attributed to the prophet - Let there not be two religions in Arabia - Osama ordered all non-Muslim residents either to become Muslim or leave the House of Islam within 24 hours. He warned that if the US forces intervened, or delayed at Kharj beyond that period, he would not answer for the consequences to men, women and children. In Washington, President Bush spoke of an "orderly evacuation of United States citizens."

As the long caravans of four-wheel drive vehicles set off towards the borders with Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, they were insulted and spat at by young men. The Kharj air base was besieged by third-country nationals - Filipinos, Keralese, South Koreans - and also by outlying members of the extended royal family desperate to find a way onto the chartered airliners. By December 15, the air base, which had cost hundreds of millions of dollars to equip, was abandoned.

Outside the kingdom, the world economy was reeling. On December 7, as news reached London that communications with Saudi Arabia had been cut, crude oil of the benchmark Brent variety for three-month delivery was quoted at $45 a barrel, or twice its level of the day before. At the opening of US financial markets, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 2,000 points before so-called "circuit breakers", introduced after the 1987 crash, caused trading to be suspended for the week. Trading resumed on Monday, December 10, but only for 15 minutes. By the close on December 14, the Dow Jones had fallen by 50%. In Japan, a country dependent on imported oil and already in deep recession, the Nikkei average was down 65%.

But in the Middle East, enthusiasm for Osama was boundless. Iraq, Libya and the Palestinian authority immediately, and for what appeared to be opportunistic reasons, announced they would unify with the new emirate. The Saudi newspapers, opening under new proprietors, called for a return of all assets held abroad by the Al Saud, war on all apostates and hypocrites in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco and the extermination of "Magians", evidently a reference to Iran. Demonstrations in Cairo, Helwan and Alexandria were put down with heavy loss of life. Iran, a Shia state, announced a 14-day military exercise involving air, sea and land forces, codenamed Zulfikar after the sword of the Shia patriarch, on its western borders.

Both countries were excluded from the meeting of Oapec, the old Arab caucus of the 1970s within the organisation of petroleum exporting countries (Opec). Meeting in Medina on December 15 under the chairmanship of Osama, Oapec agreed a graduated cut in oil production of 5 % each week until such time as the bombing of Afghanistan ceased, sanctions against Iraq were lifted and all "Crusaders and Jews withdrew from the al-Aqsa Mosque, disbanded their armies in defeat and submitted to the rule of Islam, or left the land of God." That day, Brent crude for three-month delivery was quoted in London at $110 per barrel. All over Europe, emergency petrol rationing was introduced, and factories were permitted to operate only three days a week to conserve electric power.

On December 18 2001, just before dawn, the Israeli air force attacked the air bases of Tabuk, Dhahran, Taif and Khamis Mushayt. The war had begun.