If #ISIS can recruit people from nearly every country in the world, how well do you think it could do in Saudi Arabia if given an unfettered opportunity to do so…. If it can recruit French military personnel (including men from elite units), how would Saudi units fare?
The answer is that ISIS would do very, very well in the Kingdom. Here is why the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is vulnerable to a ragtag network like ISIS:
- ISIS is an aggressively expansionist fundamentalist jihad. It kills, enslaves, or routs unbelievers, moderates, apostates, etc. wherever it finds them, which is the ultimate manifestation of Wahhabi fundamentalism.
- Unfortunately for the KSA, this is the same belief system underlying the legitimacy of the House of Saud and the same fundamentalism the Kingdom has spent the last century beating into the heads of their subjects.
- This means that ISIS is moral kryptonite. A kryptonite built specifically to kill the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A kryptonite that breaks down the moral cohesion that binds the KSA together. A kryptonite that creates competitive centers of gravity that will rip the country apart.
A century ago, the House of Saud started a jihad to do exactly what ISIS is doing today. In that earlier case, the Saudi Ikhwan (a fundamentalist militia that is similar to ISIS) expanded until it conquered the territory that is now Saudi Arabia.
The Ikhwan eventually turned on the Sauds when they called an end to the jihad. The Sauds won that fight and spent the next century building a variant of Wahhabism to legitimize their rule. However, the Sauds never did eradicate the part Wahhabism that seeks expansionist jihad, and this will return to haunt them.
JR
PS: Germany just suspended arms sales worth $400 million a year to Saudi Arabia. Why? It's considered to unstable.