Okaz/Saudi Gazette

SAUDI ARABIA passed several milestones and witnessed many major developments since its unification by King Abdul Aziz in 1932.

The first of the 10 key events that shaped the future of the Kingdom was the discovery of oil in 1938 in a well in Dammam, which King Abdul Aziz later renamed the "Welfare Well".

Since its founding, Saudi Arabia has been reeling from a severe scarcity of resources. A desert country as vast as a continent, the Kingdom was without water, agriculture or basic infrastructure. There was no education for its people and poverty prevailed everywhere.

King Abdul Aziz decided to look for oil in his land after he saw how the discovery of oil changed the faces of three neighboring countries — Iraq, Kuwait and Iran.

He approached the British government for a loan of 500,000 sterling pounds to invest in oil exploration after an American geologist had talked about the possible presence of oil in commercial quantities in the Kingdom but Britain turned down the request.

King Abdul Aziz then turned to the United States for assistance. This led to the signing of an agreement in 1933, giving an American firm the concession for oil exploration in the Kingdom.

The company continued digging for years but to no avail. In the summer of 1936, it started digging well No.7 and faced so many difficulties. The American company recalled its engineers to San Francisco to meet with its board of directors to discuss a pullout from Saudi Arabia due to the high costs and disappointing results of drilling in the desert country.

Then the surprise sprung: Saudi Arabia strikes oil. On March 3, 1938, when the company's directors were about to announce the withdrawal, an urgent cable arrived in the boardroom. Oil was found in well No. 7. The initial production was estimated to be about 1,600 barrels per day, which soon went up to 4,000 barrels per day.

Well No. 7 not only changed the history of the Kingdom but the entire region as well.

The second of these events was the meeting between King Abdul Aziz and US President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. With his political foresight, the King was certain that America was the upcoming superpower of the world. He knew this even before America had announced itself as a nuclear power.

The brief meeting between the two leaders aboard the American warship USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake near Cairo on Feb. 20, 1945, was the starting of point of one of the most important and long-lasting partnerships between two countries in modern times.

The third event was the increase of the Kingdom's share in the Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) to 25 percent in 1973. Oil prices increased from $3 a barrel before 1973 to $35 in 1981, bringing about a dramatic change in the lives of the Saudi people.

The fourth event that reshaped the nation was the malicious attack against the Grand Mosque in Makkah on Nov. 20, 1979, by Juhayman Al-Otaybi and his deviant group of followers. In the aftermath of this outrageous aggression against the sanctity of the House of God, religious extremists in the country lost no time to hijack the tolerant religion of Islam to serve their purposes.

The fifth event was in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Kingdom, which had spent more than $200 billion on the war efforts to liberate Kuwait, slipped into a long economic recession, which continued until the year 2,000.

The sixth event was when 15 young Saudi men became part of the Al-Qaeda-orchestrated attack against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. The Muslim Brotherhood and a number of foreign countries tried to use the opportunity to wreck the strong Saudi-US ties. They even egged on Washington to attack the Kingdom but the plot failed miserably.

However, the Saudi-US relations entered a dangerous phase during the Obama administration but were salvaged by the prudent engagement of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman and Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman with the Trump administration.

The seventh event was when the Kingdom decided to take on the Al-Qaeda head on. Between 2003 and 2005, hundreds of military men, citizens and expatriates lost their lives in explosions and terrorist acts that ensued.

The eighth major milestone in modern Saudi history was on March 15, 2011, when Al-Jazeera Shield Forces entered Bahrain to foil an Iranian attempt to occupy the Gulf kingdom. Had it not been for the quick interventional by Saudi Arabia, Iran would have succeeded in its nefarious goal of expanding its influence across the region.

The ninth event is the Yemen war. Saudi Arabia decided to militarily support the legitimate government of President Abdrabb Mansour Hadi in Yemen following the coup d’état by the Houthi militias, who occupied Sanaa. The Kingdom and its allies succeeded in freeing about 80 percent of the Yemeni territory from the Houthi control, protected international maritime routes and purged the Red Sea of the Iranian naval buildup.

The 10th major event that changed the face of the Kingdom was the launch of Saudi Vision 2030 by Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman, deputy premier and minister of defense. This vision has four axils, the first of which is restoration of the tolerant Islam that existed in Saudi Arabia before 1979. The second axil is to bring viability to the Kingdom's economy. The third is purely political, which aims to re-establish the Kingdom's regional and international stature. The fourth and final axil of the vision is to empower the Saudi military to protect the country's land, air and maritime borders. The vision is to meet a major portion of the defense needs including weapons by local manufacturing within the country.