Saudi Arabia from Abdullah to Salman media.jrn/images/012215+King+Abdullah.jpg Abdullah Dies foxnews/world/2015/01/22/king-abdullah-saudi-arabia-dead-at-0-state-tv-reports/ King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the powerful U.S. ally who joined Washingtons fight against Al Qaeda and sought to modernize the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom has died at 90, according to Saudi state TV... Abdullah was born in Riyadh in 1924, one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabias founder, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. Like all Abdul-Azizs sons, Abdullah had only rudimentary education. Tall and heavyset, he felt more at home in the Nejd, the kingdoms desert heartland, riding stallions and hunting with falcons. Abdullah was selected as crown prince in 1982 on the day his half-brother Fahd ascended to the throne. Abdullah became de facto ruler in 1995 when a stroke incapacitated Fahd. Abdullah was believed to have long rankled at the closeness of the alliance with the United States, and as regent he pressed Washington to withdraw the troops it had deployed in the kingdom since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. finally did so in 2003. When President George W. Bush came to office, Abdullah again showed his readiness to push against his U.S. allies. In 2000, Abdullah convinced the Arab League to approve an unprecedented offer that all Arab states would agree to peace with Israel if it withdrew from lands it captured in 1967. The next year, he sent his ambassador in Washington to tell the Bush administration that it was too unquestioningly biased in favor of Israel and that the kingdom would from now on pursue its own interests apart from Washingtons. Bush soon after advocated for the first time the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The next month, the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks took place in the United States, and Abdullah had to steer the alliance through the resulting criticism. The kingdom was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, and many pointed out that the baseline ideology for Al Qaeda and other groups stemmed from Saudi Arabias Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. When Al Qaeda militants in 2003 began a wave of violence in the kingdom aimed at toppling the monarchy, Abdullah cracked down hard. For the next three years, security forces battled militants, finally forcing them to flee to neighboring Yemen. There, they created a new Al Qaeda branch, and Saudi Arabia has played a behind-the-scenes role in fighting it... More than his guarded and hidebound predecessors, Abdullah assertively threw his oil-rich nations weight behind trying to shape the Middle East. His priority was to counter the influence of rival, mainly Shiite Iran wherever it tried to make advances. He and fellow Sunni Arab monarchs also staunchly opposed the Middle Easts wave of pro-democracy uprisings, seeing them as a threat to stability and their own rule. And while the king maintained the historically close alliance with Washington, there were frictions as he sought to put those relations on Saudi Arabias terms. He was constantly frustrated by Washingtons failure to broker a settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He also pushed the Obama administration to take a tougher stand against Iran and to more strongly back the mainly Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 18:17:37 +0000
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