Suicide Bombers Target Saudi Oil Site

This could have been real trouble:

Suicide bombers in explosives-laden cars attempted to attack an oil processing facility that handles about two-thirds of Saudi Arabia's petroleum output on Friday, but were stopped when guards opened fire on them, causing the cars to explode, officials said.

The Saudi oil minister said the blast "did not affect operations" at the Abqayq facility, denying an earlier report on Al-Arabiya television that the flow of oil was halted briefly.

The facility "continued to operate normally. Export operations continued in full," the minister, Ali Naimi, said in a statement.

The price of oil jumped by more than $1.20 on world markets as they heard of the attack. The April delivery price of Nymex sweet light crude, the U.S. benchmark, rose $1.26 to $61.80. The European benchmark, Brent crude, leaped $1.21 to $61.75 for April delivery.

The huge Abqaiq processing facility, also known as Buqayq, handles around two-thirds or so of Saudi Arabia's oil output, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Intelligence Agency.

If the world's terrorist organizations decide to put Saudi Arabia out of the oil business, the damage to the world's economy would be huge. There are plenty of radical Islamists that don't like the Saudi regime because of its connections to the West, and by hitting the Saudi sites, they could in effect attack two enemies at once.