Sunday, April 10, 2016

Islam, at War With Itself

"If anyone calls and says, 'Where are you? I want to see you', you don't trust him anymore."
"We don't trust anyone."
Bandar Rashidi, Buraida, Saudi Arabia

"Your apostate brother was a loyalist to the tyrants [therefore ripe for assassination]."
"Were it not for him, the tyrants [the Saudi dynasty] would not exist."
Saudi convert to Islamic State, addressing his mother  
WATCH: ISIS Drive-By Shooting in Saudi Arabia
In a new video purportedly released by the Islamic State, ISIS militants carry out a drive-by shooting on Saudi Arabian Colonel Kitab Majid al-Hammadi in al-Dawadmi, west of Riyadh. The video was released on April 8, 2016 on ISIS terrorist channels.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in its allegiance to a rigid, purist version of Salafist Islam, opened the box of Islamist jihad to popularity when it built madrassas and mosques promoting Wahhabism all over the world, so young Muslim men could study the Koran and Islam as it was first introduced to a  tribal Bedouin population in the Middle East, as a monotheistic religion surpassing all others in authenticity, embarking on rampaging conquests to fulfill a pledge to Allah of jihad.

Wahhabist Islam, representing Sunni Islam's most repressive iteration of the creed, has bred violence and terrorist groups from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas, al-Qaeda to Islamic State. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national whose family found construction wealth in Saudi Arabia, but originally from Yemen, targeted the Saudi dynasty for removal, for having defiled the holy sites of Mecca and Medina by aligning the kingdom with the United States.

Since the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant succeeded al-Qaeda as the most compellingly brutal of all Islamist jihadi groups, it has found a foothold and extensions from Libya to Nigeria, Iraq and Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia itself, drawing into its membership young Muslim men convinced that ISIL represents the purity of Islam that all others have neglected. Ironically enough, the malevolently vicious killing methods of beheading and crucifixions Islamic State has become renowned for, commonly take place as institutionalized forms of capital punishment in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has experienced twenty terrorist attacks since late in 2014. Something rather different has arisen within Saudi Arabia with the infiltration of Islamic State into the kingdom. Family members conspire against other family members; the former radicalized toward Islamic State fanatics, the latter representing the Saudi regime as members of the military.

Saudi citizens secretly become members of Islamic State and target and kill relatives employed in the Saudi security services, justifying their morbid assaults claiming that Saudi Arabia's practise of Islam is that of a corrupted version. A young man, as an example, undertook to murder his uncle who was a police colonel and later carried out a suicide attack beside a prison, wounding two guards. His suicide audio message informed his mother that her brother deserved to die.

Any comparison between the Saudi Wahhabist ideology and that practised by he Islamic State is outright rejected by Saudi officials. Saudi clerics brand the Islamic State group as "deviant". But ISIL directs its recruits to kill officers loyal to the regime, representing members of their own families. "You are closer, so no one will know  you", explained Major General Mansour Turki, spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry who stated that scores of Saudis have been killed and that some 3,000 Saudis have joined militant groups.

Over 5,000 converts to terrorism have been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia on charges of terrorism. In September two men abducted their cousin, a Saudi Army soldier, filming a video of the man bound, begging for mercy as his cousins, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State shot him dead. Then came the abduction and murder of Sergeant Bader al-Rashidi by six of his own cousins who dragged him to a roadside to shoot and kill him. That too was videoed, charging the royal family of having forsaken Islam.

The ringleader of the group Wael al-Rashidi spoke directly to the camera. He had a pharmacy degree and worked in a hospital in Riyadh. As for the purity of his brand of Islam, he demonstrated it by smoking cigarettes, shunned by devout Muslims. He played war games on his Xbox and spent hours hacking on his computer. Another of his brothers who took part in the plot, played the oud, something religious conservatives disowned.

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