Muslims versus Muslims

Arab News

"Nothing is off the table."
"It depends on the requests that come, it depends on the need and it depends on the willingness of countries to provide the support necessary."
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir 

"[Muslim states have] a duty to protect the Islamic nation from the evils of all terrorist groups and organizations, whatever their sect and name, which wreak death and corruption on earth and aim to terrorize the innocent."
Saudi state news agency SPA

"There will be international coordination with major powers and international organizations ... In terms of operations in Syria and Iraq, we can't undertake these operations without coordinating with legitimacy in this place and the international community."
"[The Alliance will confront] any terrorist organization that appears in front of us." 
Saudi Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman  

A Yemeni tribesman from the Popular Resistance Committees, supporting forces loyal to Yemen's Saudi-backed President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi, fires a machine gun in the area of Sirwa, east of the capital Sanaa on December 14, 2015. AFP/ABDULLAH AL-QADRY)

Just as al-Qaeda grew out of support from wealthy Saudis and the Saudi establishment itself of the madrasses it funded throughout the world, raising a new generation of jihad-inspired Islamists, so too did the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Sunni Islam's answer to Shiite Islam's penchant for establishing the creation of terrorist groups to convincingly persuade Muslims that their brand of worship was not pure enough, and non-Muslims that without surrender to Islam they forfeit the right to life.

But, as happens in both fiction and in life, the Frankensteins that we create tend to turn their violence directed outwardly, to an inward direction. And Osama bin Laden vowed to destroy the Saudi monarchy and so too does the Islamic State caliphate vow to destroy all the ruling monarchies and sheikdoms and theocracies in favour of expanding itself to grasp those nations into one great concentrated caliphate, the supreme conquest of Islamic State.

Saudi Arabia, in its own defense of its longevity has decided that the Frankenstein must be destroyed. Not to prevent it from continuing its predation on Shiite Muslims whose existence is anathema to the larger Sunni Muslim devotees, but in prevention of their faint but possible success in destroying the monarchies, shiekdoms and theocratic rulers. If they had only had the good sense to focus their violent antipathy on Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, all would have been well.

The new 34-nation coalition to form an "Islamic military alliance" whose purpose will be to battle terrorism, its operations controlled from Saudi Arabia will, it seems, be a defensive, not an offensive operation because, terrorism "should be fought by all means and collaboration should be made to eliminate it." About time, and good luck. The Arab League never felt it imperative to stop the slaughter in Syria.

That kind of military intervention, well coordinated, planned and conducted could have saved the lives of a quarter-million Syrian Sunnis, but it was obviously too inconvenient at the time since the greater Sunni majority within the Middle East did not then see itself under threat of upheaval. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did warn on several occasions that the implosion of Syria would radiate throughout the Middle East.

And so, it has. 

The inclusion in the alliance of Mali, Chad, Somalia and Nigeria, along with Yemen, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt speaks to an absolute need, to protect the lives of people in all those countries from the malign influence of Islamist terrorism. At its heart, however, the battle is within Islam itself, the hard-core Salafists hating the soft-core Muslim majority, the majority Sunni despising the minority Shiites, all of whom want nothing better than to annihilate one another.