A suicide bomber killed at least 15 people on Thursday, including 12 members of a Saudi police force, when he detonated explosives in a mosque in southern Saudi Arabia, the state news agency there reported. The bombing was the deadliest attack in recent years on Saudi Arabia’s police forces, and the most recent in a series of attacks on mosques in the kingdom. Most of the recent attacks have targeted mosques used by the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia; the Islamic State, which considers Shiites heretics, has claimed responsibility for the attacks. The state-run Saudi Press Agency said the attack Thursday was at a mosque belonging to a local security force in the region of Asir, in the southwest. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement circulated on social media, saying the bomber had used an explosives belt to blow up “a monument of apostasy” that supported the Saudi state and its “crusader masters.” While Saudi Arabia promotes a conservative interpretation of Islam similar to that of the Islamic State, clerics in the country have denounced the group as misguided and bloodthirsty. Saudi Arabia has joined the United States-led coalition that is waging an air campaign against the group in Iraq and Syria. But the Islamic State movement has found support in some parts of Saudi society, and thousands of Saudis have traveled abroad to join the jihadists. IS has been encouraging Sunni youth through the social media to attack Shias in the Kingdom. Several attacks in the region bear the hallmark of IS. The pervasiveness of its social media campaign, which has caused the radicalisation of many young people all over the world, including the west, means that IS does not have to be physically present in a country to propagate its agenda. Although there have been attacks on Saudi security forces that have been linked to IS, this is the deadliest one yet. Despite the US coalition airstrikes and the Kurdish forces in Syria battling IS on the ground, the group is becoming increasingly brutal and widespread. The fact that IS was able to take control of so much of Syria and Iraq in the vacuum left by the US withdrawal from the latter indicates that the jihadist groups that Saudi Arabia and other world powers had been fostering in the region are increasingly making way for IS. Supporting Islamic militant groups to fight external wars has not turned out so well in the past, as such groups often change course and bite the hand that once fed them. The rise of IS, which has taken the world by surprise, should be a lesson to the governments of the leading world powers about empowering proxies and using them against their enemies. It is time for Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the world, to recognise how daunting the threat of IS really is and come together to wage a coordinated struggle against the IS hydra.
pk.shafaqna.com
