Jihad is a Boomerang

Saudi Arabia is belatedly waking up, and from now on, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is publicly being recorded as a mortal threat not only to the regime’s internal stability, but also to its influence at the regional level. For decades Saudi Arabia and Islamabad have been two countries, where Islam is the only element of identity and unity. They have a common strategy on manipulating fundamentalist extremism. They subsidize and nurture it only to become an exportable product for use outside its own borders.

Pakistan, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, but mainly after the Taliban regime’s arrival in power in Kabul in 1996, is backing up Islamist guerrilla groups in this country, with the North-West Frontier Province jointly governed by armed fundamentalists and the government in Islamabad. In addition, the fact that Bin Laden lived a few miles from the capital as a peaceful senior citizen makes any other comment irrelevant.

The problem is acute for Saudi Arabia because the Islamic terror of ISIL and the tough implementation of Shariah law are not so much fueled by the decades-long tradition of secularist practices, both in Syria and in Iraq, but rather by the full dimensions of what looks like religiousness and its full integration into Western globalization, which has been managed for a long time by the House of Saud in Riyadh.

The danger for Saudi Arabia came about the moment ISIL forces arrived on the other side of their common frontier with Iraq and Syria, following the declaration of the Islamic Caliphate by ISIL

At the beginning of the jihad attack, Saudi Arabia tried to strike a balance by talking about the proper development being implemented by the wrong people, in an effort to assume protection of Sunni across the border.

Riyadh’s formal rupture with ISIL is rounding off the changes in the given political context in Iraq. The question is to no longer establish a rather impossible consensus with Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites for the future of the country, but a gentleman’s agreement involving Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, at best, to divide the country into spheres of influence and, at worst, the de jure recognition of the already de facto division of the country into three parts.