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Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 14-2-SA-Blowback-12

….Muhammed's Army may eventually come home to Mecca."…. "Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed

to instill fear. "

Saudi fighters in Shabwa Province of the Islamic State (IS) in Yemen threatened the Saudi government in a video, declaring that they would return after preparing and gaining

experience.I do think that if they took a gamble, it's a big gamble.

“Empires are lost when inadequate men become leaders and wage war for base reasons or no reason at all.” - Sun Tzu

Supporting terrorism will in the end lead to “Saudi Arabia’s demise,” unless the Saudis wake up and realize they are making a mistake. ISIL’s statement, he noted, declares the organisation’s plans to target Shiites on the Arabian Peninsula, a plan that brings to mind similar statements made by Al Qaeda in the late 1990s.

ISIS declares war on Shias on Arabian Peninsula; create discord and undermine the royal family's rule; to declare war on “enemies of Islam, especially Shiites” on the peninsula’s territory; The jihadist group "has ordered its soldiers everywhere to kill the enemies of religion, especially (Shiites),"to “purify the land” of them; to fend off the "Shiite threat"

The Islamic State believes it can shape future events to its advantage, and in some ways, its strategy for the first phase of its Arabian Peninsula campaign was a success. ISIS declares war on Shias on Arabian Peninsula; Saudi Arabia 'downs Scud missile fired by Yemen rebels' (IS) has claimed two attacks on Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia's Shiite-majority Eastern Province

While we think rebels are stupid and complex weapons need trained manning Saudi Arabia 'downs Scud missile fired by Yemen rebels' Jeddah says it shot down missile fired into kingdom just hours after it repelled a major rebel attack on Jizan province.

06 Jun 2015 11:01 GMT  Saudi Arabia has said it has shot down a Scud missile fired into the kingdom by Houthi rebels and forces allied to the former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. "At 2:45am on Saturday morning, the Houthi militias and ousted [president] Ali Abdullah Saleh launched a Scud missile in the direction of Khamees al-Mushait, and praise be to God, the Royal Saudi air defences blocked it with a Patriot missile," a statement by the leadership of the Saudi-led joint Arab military coalition said.    The statement came just hours after Saudi Arabia said its army had repelled an offensive by Saleh forces backed by Houthis fighters on its Jizan province, which borders Yemen, according to state media. Dozens of armed men, believed to belong to Republican Guard units loyal to Saleh, died in Friday's attack, which the Saudi security sources said was the biggest since the conflict in Yemen began.

The Saudi armed forces said in a statement that four of their soldiers had died of injuries sustained during the attack. "The Armed Forces repelled the offence which was aiming to penetrate the border, in an attempt to achieve, ... a moral victory to compensate the casualties among the aggressors' ranks," the Saudi statement said. Friday's fighting is believed to have started when units of soldiers loyal to Saleh and Houthi fighters tried to infiltrate the border at Al Khouba. The rebels launched a number of rockets at Saudi military positions,

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before the Saudi army retaliated with artillery shelling and air support from Apache helicopter gunships. Houthi reinforcements on the Yemeni side of the border were also targeted during the retaliation. The rebel-aligned Al Masirah TV aired video purporting to show fighters moving towards Saudi watchtowers and firing rockets.

Friday's developments came a day after the Houthis agreed to join UN-backed peace talks in Geneva planned for June 14. Elsewhere, the coalition on Friday carried out air strikes in the capital, Sanaa, and Ibb city, targeting positions of the Houthis and its allies. Rebel military positions were also hit in Dhi Naem district in Al-Bayda province and Ataq city in Shabwa province. A coalition of Arab states has been bombing Houthi forces for more than two months in an attempt to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who has fled to Saudi Arabia.About 2,000 people have been killed and half a million displaced by the fighting.Earlier, there were violent clashes in the southern port city of Aden between Houthi rebels and soldiers loyal to Hadi. Fighting also broke out in the city of Taiz, with popular resistance committee forces battling Houthi militias. The fighters reportedly blew up a home in the city where Houthi fighters had been gathering.

US politicians call for release of secret 9/11 report; White House urged to release 28-pages of classified information alleging Saudi Arabia officials helped organise attacks.03 Jun 2015 11:02 GMT  Several members of the US Congress have joined calls for the release of classified pages from an intelligence report into the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US. The politicians argue that the 28 pages of classified text refers to allegations that Saudi Arabian officials were involved in helping to organise the attacks. Former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the 2002 House-Senate Joint Inquiry, the first official investigation into 9/11, joined current congressional members on Tuesday as they publicly called for the release of the classified material. Graham told Al Jazeera that the US public would be "outraged" if they knew the truth."If the American people knew the full truth, I believe there would be an outrage that a country which alleges to be such an ally of ours has engaged in so many actions that have been so extremely negative towards the United States," Graham said, referring to Saudi Arabia.

ISIS is playing a deadly game of chess with Saudi Arabia

Aaron Zelin, The Washington Institute For Near East Policy Jun. 3, 2015, Wochit NewsThe scene of the ISIS suicide bombing that killed 4 in Damman, Saudi Arabia. Over the past two weeks, the so-called "Islamic State" (IS) has claimed two attacks on Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia's Shiite-majority Eastern Province, one in Dammam and the other in Qatif.While the incidents might not have an immediate impact on the kingdom's overall security, they are relevant to long-term IS strategy of weakening the Saudi government by exposing its alleged hypocrisy.

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They also illustrate how IS has choreographed its actions in phases for its Arabian Peninsula theater.

For example, when IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced new wilayat (provinces) for the so-called caliphate in Saudi Arabia and Yemen last November, he told supporters that Shiites should be targeted first. And in remarks made last month, he zeroed in on the Saudi state and what he described as its failed Yemen war. The latest attacks are therefore harbingers of a wider IS threat to Saudi Islamic legitimacy.

THE ISLAMIC STATE'S CALCULUS By attacking the Eastern Province, IS seeks to place Riyadh in the position of defending or appeasing Shiites, at the expense of a Saudi Wahhabist state ideology that does not tread too far from that of IS (e.g., Saudi schools teach students that Shiites are unbelievers and not Muslims). In that sense, the group likely considers Riyadh's actions following the first attack a victory.

ReutersIn response to the May 22 suicide bombing in Qatif, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki stated that the goal of IS was to spread sectarianism, while Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef visited the town and gave condolences to the victims and their family members. Moreover, Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz ibn Abdullah al-Sheikh condemned the "criminal plot."

From the Islamic State's perspective, such actions highlight Riyadh's rank hypocrisy, showing "true" believers in the "land of the two holy places" how the Saudi state is contravening both God and its own founding standards. By casting themselves as the true bearers of Islam, IS leaders hope to draw more recruits and supporters.

HISTORICAL SUPPORT BASE FOR JIHADISTS Beyond the potential for gaining new supporters, IS knows that Saudi Arabia has been a hotbed for foreign fighter and jihadist

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activism since the 1980s. In all of the major foreign fighter mobilizations over the past three decades (Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq, and Syria), Saudis have been the leading nationality to join up. Most important, Saudis composed the largest bulk of foreign IS members last decade when the group was calling itself al-Qaeda in Iraq, and once again in Syria and Iraq over the past couple years.Since IS joined the Syrian jihad in April 2013, it has pushed anti-Saudi messaging through various means, including an official nashid (religiously sanctioned a cappella music), public announcements issued from its Syrian "provinces" in Raqqa (twice) and Deir al-Zour, and pictures showing words of support from inside Saudi Arabia. IS supporters also claimed responsibility for an attempted assassination of a Danish executive on a Riyadh highway last November, showing footage of the incident online.

REUTERS/StringerShi'ite Muslims prepare graves during a mass funeral for victims of last Friday's suicide attack on a mosque, in Qatif, east Saudi Arabia, May 25, 2015. Some may argue that IS will not succeed in shaking the monarchy, similar to the failed jihad in Saudi Arabia from 2002 to 2006. Although this scenario is definitely possible, local conditions are also quite different today. For one thing, many more Saudis are now involved with IS than there were with al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia in the early to mid-2000s.In addition, the group has wide bases of training and operations on both sides of the kingdom's border with Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Yemen. It also has a small yet important support base in Bahrain, in part because leading IS ideologue Turki al-Binali is Bahraini, but also because Manama has turned a blind eye to IS supporters and radical Sunnis in general -- no surprise given that the island's Sunni rulers are more worried about the Shiite majority threat to their power. Taken together, these bases could provide IS with strategic depth while also widening its war against Shiites in the region.

PROVOKING A SHIITE REACTION OVER TIME Historically, the Shiite populations of the Persian Gulf -- Saudis and Bahrainis in particular -- have not been receptive to Iranian overtures in the same way as Lebanon. Yet just as Iran is now playing a larger role in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, so too does IS hope for a similar scenario to play out in the Gulf monarchies, if only as a means of making the Saudi state look weak and convincing the Sunni populace to look to IS as their natural protectors instead.Iranian proxy networks in Iraq have already shown small signs of supporting militant networks in Bahrain -- at the very least rhetorically, and perhaps materially as well. Since Riyadh deployed troops there to quash protest movements in 2011, Shiite militants on the island have been involved in a series of small-scale attacks on Bahraini state institutions, in addition to condemning the Saudi royal family and accusing it of human rights violations. They have also portrayed their familial connections with Shiites in the Eastern Province next door as an extension of their fight against the Bahraini government.

Therefore, if IS continues attacking Shiites in Saudi Arabia, it will likely hope to drive a wider wedge between them and Riyadh, spurring them to look for protection from the outside -- namely from Iran, which could quickly provide such support via Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militant groups, and/or similar elements in Bahrain. This would put the Saudi state in a bind, forcing it to either push back against increased Iranian influence in its neighborhood or

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continue trying to tamp things down -- a win-win situation from the Islamic State's vantage point.

This scenario may sound a bit absurd now, but many observers likewise believed that Iranian influence in Iraqi Shiite politics would never reach its current peak, so it is important to understand the worst-case developments that IS seeks to foment in Saudi Arabia. Some Shiites in the kingdom are already beginning to create "popular mobilization committees" (al-hashd al-shabi). While these groups are likely unrelated to the powerful Shiite militias of the same name in Iraq, that distinction will likely be lost on the many conservative Saudis who are already edgy about Iran and the potential for Shiite empowerment in the Eastern Province.

Of course, none of these scenarios are inevitable. The Islamic State is gambling on three outcomes: that it can push Saudi Shiites into the arms of militant networks and possibly Iran, that it can gain enough Sunni support for its project by laying bare Riyadh's inability to follow through on its founding ideology, and that it can foster more sympathy for itself as the "true protector" of Saudi Sunnis.

The Islamic State believes it can shape future events to its advantage, and in some ways, its strategy for the first phase of its Arabian Peninsula campaign was a success. The Qatif attack was a bookend to its March attacks against four Houthi mosques in Sana, Yemen.Those incidents created a domino effect of sorts: they spurred the Houthis to move against Aden, which led the Saudis to launch their ongoing military campaign in Yemen, which in turn gave IS a wider opening for operations in Saudi Arabia due to the resources Riyadh is committing next door.How this all plays out is difficult to predict, especially since so many aspects of regional and local politics in the Middle East have become extremely fluid. Many of the old rules have been rendered irrelevant since 2011, especially in the past year.At the very least, the Islamic State is vying to call checkmate against the Saudi state and bring about an even larger change that would further shake regional and global politics. The U.S. government should not take the latest attacks or related developments lightly. Otherwise it will once again be surprised by foreseeable outcomes that were ignored in places such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.Aaron Y. Zelin is the Richard Borow Fellow at The Washington Institute, where his research focuses on how jihadist groups are adjusting to the new political environment in the era of Arab uprisings and Salafi politics in countries transitioning to democracy.

Saudi Arabia is the latest target of ISIL’s plan to divide the regionArabic News Digest June 2, 2015 Ever since the first terrorist attack on Shiite houses of worship in Saudi Arabia, it has been clear that a plan has been put in place to target the country’s unity and stability, suggests the columnist Tareq Al Homayed in the pan- Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat on Monday. The plot was announced following the two terrorist explosions at mosques in Al Qudeeh and Dammam in Saudi Arabia. ISIL issued a statement that shows the extent of its criminal intentions against the kingdom.ISIL’s statement, he noted, declares the organisation’s plans to target Shiites on the Arabian Peninsula, a plan that brings to mind similar statements made by Al Qaeda in the late 1990s.“ISIL’s criminal statement could only mean one thing: their plan is to stoke sectarian strife in Saudi Arabia, plunging the country into turmoil in a bid to serve the interests of many parties,” Al Homayed said. “Caution is called for at every level, especially at this time, when Saudi Arabia is in an open confrontation with criminal systems and militias in the region.”Cautionary measures should begin with strict monitoring of the media and a clampdown on sectarian speech, he suggested.

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Given the kingdom’s past experience fighting Al Qaeda, one can suppose that its population has become more aware and less susceptible to inflammatory hate speech.For his part, the columnist Jasser Al Jasser wrote in the London-based daily Al Hayat that Saudi Arabia is waging three wars to protect its territories, assert its weight and entrench its role in the region. The kingdom has engaged in a battle to rescue Yemen and preserve its Arab identity against a vicious attack that almost turned Yemen into a platform to spread mayhem and destruction throughout the whole region.

Saudi Arabia is waging an internal war against terrorism as evil hands attempt to instil fear and spread sedition. The country is also fighting a war on the drugs that are invading its territories and targeting its youth, the writer said. “Saudi Arabia’s confrontation is an existential one. But the government and the people have proven that they are fully aware of the hidden intentions behind these attacks and have come together to form an impenetrable wall that deters all criminal aggressions,” he noted.Writing in Al Ittihad, the sister paper of The National, columnist Abdullah Al Otaibi pointed out that this new phase of sectarianism in Saudi Arabia demonstrates a new alliance between Iran and its Shiite affiliates on one side and radical Sunni groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and ISIL on the other side.

“Al Qaeda has targeted Saudi, but never made any attempts on Iran. ISIL attacked Saudi, but never Iran. ISIL struck an alliance with Iran’s Syrian allies and Bashar Al Assad, and in Iraq, ISIL is avenging Al Qaeda against the Anbar tribes that eradicated the terrorist group in that region,” the writer said. The sectarian conflict threatens to spread to other Arab countries, especially members of the coalition, he warned. “But, just as Saudi was able to prevail over fundamentalist terrorism, it shall certainly prevail over sectarian terrorism as well,” the writer concluded.* Racha Makarem

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