Saudis ramp up security, double threat looming
Shiite militias are gunning for kingdom, Sunni rebels find some internal support
— Saudi Arabia is a target for both sides in Iraq’s deepening conflict, one reason it has ramped up security levels to confront a threat that’s more immediate than the Arab Spring revolts three years ago.
The world’s biggest oil exporter convened its national security council for a rare meeting under King Abdullah and has bolstered defences at the border with Iraq, where militants last month seized several cities and declared an Islamic state. The king vowed to protect the nation’s “resources and territory and prevent any act of terror.”
For the 90-year-old monarch, the threat is twofold. Sunni militant groups, like the Islamic State led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that now controls parts of Iraq as well as Syria, have historically posed a challenge to the Al Saud family’s rule. Another danger comes from Shiite militias, which struck across the Saudi border in the past and are now being called to arms to help fight the insurgents.
“An al-Qaida offshoot armed with heavy weaponry and flush with cash wreaking havoc a mere 100 miles from their border is not a dream scenario,” said Fahad Nazer, a political analyst at JTG Inc., a consultancy based in Vienna, Virginia. “It also doesn’t help that at least two Shiite militias have vowed to bring the war to Saudi Arabia.”
Ties between OPEC’s two largest oil producers have been strained since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
As the region’s main Sunni power, Saudi Arabia has links with Iraq’s Sunni minority, which dominated the government before the fall of Saddam Hussein and now complains of discrimination under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite leadership. There’s no Saudi embassy in Baghdad, and little commercial contact.
Official Saudi support for Iraq’s Sunnis doesn’t extend to extremists like the Islamic State, according to Gregory Gause, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a specialist in Gulf politics. Such organizations, including al-Qaida, have attacked Saudi targets in the past, and accused the Al Sauds of collaborating with enemies of Islam through their alliance with the U.S.
While the Saudi leaders don’t like Maliki, they see the Islamic State as “very dangerous to them,” Gause said. The problem is that there are plenty of people in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states ready to support the Sunni insurgents “financially, politically and even as volunteers to fight,” he said.
“The Islamic State is an immediate threat. It is openly violent and, most importantly, is ... capable of galvanizing jihadi-minded citizens,” said Hassan Hassan, an analyst at Delma Institute, an Abu Dhabi-based research centre.
The Sunni insurgents command some support among Saudi Arabia’s dominant Sunni community, making their emergence a domestic political challenge as well as a security risk. The threat from Iraq’s Shiites is different.
In November, the Shiite group Jaysh Al-Mokhtar said it fired six shells into a desert area near the kingdom’s border with Iraq and Kuwait.
Since then, with encouragement from Maliki and religious leaders, the Shiite militias who fought Sunnis in a bloody civil war after the U.S. invasion have regrouped to fight the Islamic State.
“The Islamic State is an immediate threat. It is openly violent ... capable of galvanizing jihadi-minded ...”
hassan Hassan
The elaborate name of one newly formed Shiite militia includes the phrase “Soldiers for the Liberation of Najd and Hejaz,” the Arabic names for the main regions of Saudi Arabia, according to Nazer, who has also worked as an analyst at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.
In the eyes of Saudi Arabia’s rulers, the Shiite threats ultimately emanate from Iran, their main regional rival.
Iran has supported Maliki and has close ties with some of the Shiite militias. It has shown in Syria that it’s ready to help defend its ally Assad.
Saudi leaders will be concerned about a similar intervention in Iraq, which unlike Syria borders their own country, said Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center. “They can live with Syria, they can’t live with Iraq,” he said.
If there are signs of Iranian involvement, “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.”