The Siege of Mecca The Siege of Mecca The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of Al Qaeda is a 2007 book by Wall Street Journal correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov about the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca. Hundreds of Islamic radicals led by Saudi preacher Juhayman al-Otaybi invaded the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Islam's holiest shrine, on Nov. 20, 1979. The intruders included men from all over the Muslim world and a handful of American converts. Tens of thousands of worshipers were trapped inside the compound. The battle for the shrine lasted two weeks, causing hundreds of
Mecca failures of crowd control because of the large numbers of people who come to make the Hajj. For example, on 2 July 1990, a pilgrimage to Mecca ended in tragedy when the ventilation system failed in a crowded pedestrian tunnel and 1,426 people were either suffocated or trampled to death in a stampede. On 24 September 2015, 700 pilgrims were killed in a stampede at Mina during the stoning-the-Devil ritual at Jamarat. Mecca is at an elevation of above sea level, and approximately inland from the Red Sea. Central Mecca lies in a corridor between mountains, which is often called