generalspeaking

The Islamist Epidemic

"An al-Qaeda offshoot armed with heavy weaponry and flush with cash wreaking havoc a mere 100 miles from their border is not a dream scenario."
"It also doesn't help that at least two Shiite militias have vowed to bring the war to Saudi Arabia."
Fahad Nazer, political analyst, JTG Inc.

When the Middle East was in the midst of one country after another experiencing some vestige of the Arab Spring phenomenon that first made its name in Tunisia and rapidly spread to Libya, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria and in various watered-down forms elsewhere, Arabs, like their Iranian (Aryan) Muslim counterparts in Tehran, protested for an improvement in their social, civil and political status. Each country seemed to deal separately with the threat to their existing regimes.

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain experienced their Arab Spring protests when their minority Shiite populations began insisting on their equal rights. Those protests were swiftly dealt with, Saudi Arabia kindly sending its military troops as a neighbourly gesture into Bahrain to aid it in putting down an insurrection. Saudi Arabia of course has funded its own fundamentalist brand of Islam through maddrasses it provided to educate Muslim boys all over the world in Wahhabism.

No price too steep for the world's largest oil exporter. Now, however, a competing Islamism, albeit of Sunni derivation has unsettled the sense of security of the Saudi dynasty. First it was the Saudi ingrate Osama bin Laden, whose vision of pure Islamism other wealthy Saudis funded that presented a threat to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but now it is al-Qaeda's competitor Sunni Islamist jihadis who form the Islamic State.

Since the Islamic State marched without opposition back into Iraq from its militant sojourn in Syria to help unseat the Shiite Alawite rule of President Bashar al-Assad, Iraqi troops have fled in the Sunni advance. But there are Sunni groups that rebel against the Iraqi Shiite-led government and they have given (temporary) assistance to the Iraqi Sunni groups that aspire complete conquest over the Shiite-ruled geography to make way for their caliphate.

In their latterly control over large swathes of Iraq and Syria and having wiped out the border between both countries, threatening to do the same with Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the house of Al Saud is beyond mere concern; stimulated to protect the nation's "resources and territory and prevent any act of terror", in the words of King Abdullah meeting with his nation's security council.

It is, however, not only the pretentious bravado backed up by terrorist atrocities on the part of the Islamic State that concerns Saudi Arabia for its future, but the growing threat it perceives from Shiite militias which have in the past struck across the Saudi border and are now responding to the call to arms issued by Iraq's government to aid it in its battle against the jihadi insurgents. And urged on by Iran, Saudi Arabia's nemesis.

Saudi leaders have funded the Sunni Iraqi rebels attempting to remove Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki who has earned their rebuke and rebellion by his moves to disenfranchise Iraqi Sunnis, reversing the entitlements that former Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein had imposed upon the country. While Iraqi Sunnis in general pose no threat to the Saudi Kingdom, the Sunni Islamists boasting of their invincibility as the Islamic State most certainly do, eager to advance and grow their caliphate.

The security risk that the Islamic State represents to Saudi Arabia is a real one. And with the Kingdom recognizing the reality of a double threat; one posed by the "unstoppable" IS and the other by Shiite militias gathering themselves to defend Iraq from Sunni conquest, they find themselves in a very hard place.

"They can live with Syria, they can't live with Iraq", explained Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center. Should signs of Iranian involvement arise "there will be public pressure for counter-intervention. They will have to take measures, and the measures may not only be on the border but inside Iraq as well."

And then? Once, Iraq and Iran fought a deadly war of bloody attrition. Is this in the cards for Saudi Arabia and Iran?

Labels: Conflict, Iran, Iraq, Islamists, Saudi Arabia, Syria

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 08, 2014