“In Syria, where the Saudis are a leading backer of rebel groups including the secular Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front, which includes less militant Sunni fighters, Riyadh still has some options to influence the outcome of the war. But in Iraq, its most populous neighbor, with which it shares an 850 kilometer (530 mile) frontier, Saudi Arabia has few tested friends or established links with Sunni groups, and knows that the majority Shi’ites will continue to dominate power……….”

So these authors wrote their report for Reuters, mainly with local interviews from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. They quote some Iraqi ‘analyst‘ who works from Abu Dhabi and is, as they claim, “close to the Saudi Interior Ministry“. They don’t clarify how “close” this analyst is to the Saudi Ministry of Interior, and in what “capacity“. But we know that the Ministry of Interior does not do foreign policy. We also know what it does do: arrests, interrogations, prisons, public floggings, executions by public beheading with occasional crucifixions, religious police, immigration, travel bans, internal exile, external exile, among other things. In effect they run a vast Arabian Gulag.

Odd this assertion: Iraq and Syria are represented as serious problems for Saudi Arabia. But how did Iraq and Syria get to this stage? How did they get to represent serious problems to the region? Yes, you got that one right: because the Wahhabis started sending their intolerant ideology, their killers, their weapons, and their oil money, first to Iraq and then to Syria.

They started on Iraq early on, somewhere around the year 2005. In Syria they waited until the misnamed so-called Arab Spring reached Homs (or was it Der’a) and then the Wahhabi and Salafi and Ikhwan machine went into full gear to try and take it over. With a little help from the Turkish leaders who thought they could open their country to Jihadi traffic into Syria and remain untouched.

They created the monster that now threatens them and that the Iraqis and Syrians have to deal with. If Iraq and Syria ‘pose’ problems for the princes, they are problems of their own creation. They and some other potentates in Qatar and other emirates and their Salafi money-gathering machine. And their misguided underemployed frustrated young volunteers looking towards the joys of captive women as they await the promised unlimited virginal rewards of Paradise.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum