How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the ISIS takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally God help the Shia. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them. The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shiaa, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shia jihad in Iraq and Syria. Since the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) on 10 June, Shia women and children have been killed in villages south of Kirkuk, and Shia air force cadets machine-gunned and buried in mass graves near Tikrit. There is nothing conspiratorial or secret about these links: 15 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, as was Bin Laden and most of the private donors who funded the operation. The difference between al-Qaida and Isis can be overstated: when Bin Laden was killed by United States forces in 2011, al-Baghdadi released a statement eulogising him, and ISIS pledged to launch 100 attacks in revenge for his death. Saudi sympathy for anti-Shia militancy is identified in leaked US official documents. The then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in December 2009 in a cable released by Wikileaks that Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups. She said that, in so far as Saudi Arabia did act against al-Qaida, it was as a domestic threat and not because of its activities abroad. This policy may now be changing with the dismissal of Prince Bandar as head of intelligence this year. But the change is very recent, still ambivalent and may be too late: it was only last week that a Saudi prince said he would no longer fund a satellite television station notorious for its anti-Shia bias based in Egypt. Saudi Arabia has created a Frankensteins monster over which it is rapidly losing control. The same is true of its allies such as Turkey which has been a vital back-base for the ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra by keeping the 510-mile-long Turkish-Syrian border open. As Kurdish-held border crossings fall to ISIS, Turkey will find it has a new neighbour of extraordinary violence, and one deeply ungrateful for past favours from the Turkish intelligence service. Nor is this the only point on which Prince Bandar was dangerously mistaken. The rise of ISIS is bad news for the Shias of Iraq but it is worse news for the Sunnis whose leadership has been ceded to a pathologically bloodthirsty and intolerant movement, a sort of Islamic Khmer Rouge, which has no aim but war without end. The Sunni caliphate rules a large, impoverished and isolated area from which people are fleeing. Several million Sunnis in and around Baghdad are vulnerable to attack and 255 Sunni prisoners have already been massacred. In the long term, ISIS cannot win, but its mix of fanaticism and good organisation makes it difficult to dislodge. God help the Shia, said Prince Bandar, but, partly thanks to him, the shattered Sunni communities of Iraq and Syria may need divine help even more than the Shia. indiatomorrow.co/world/1652-saudi-arabia-engineered-isis-takeover-of-northern-iraq
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 04:17:00 +0000
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