ISIS isn’t just a threat to Iraq and
Syria. As the group spread across Iraq last summer and fall, neighboring
Saudi Arabia started building a 600 mile fence aimed at keeping
militants out. The Saudis are adding chain link razor wire fencing,
silent alarms, watchtowers armed with video, along with thermal and
night vision surveillance. Gregory Gause is head of the International
Affairs Department at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of
Government and Public Service. I asked him if his high-tech barrier
signals Saudi Arabia’s fear of an outright invasion by ISIS.
GREGORY GAUSE: I think that that’s one
of those low probability but very high-impact events that governments
tend to do over plan for. I think that the more serious issue for Saudi
Arabia and many other states in the Middle East is the affect that ISIS
can have within its own domestic populations. I think that there’s quite
a bit of sympathy in many areas of Saudi public opinion for ISIS’ fight
against the Assad regime, for their fight against what many people in
Saudi Arabia see as an Iranian puppet-regime in Iraq. So there is
undoubtedly sympathy for what ISIS is doing.
CORNISH: ISIS is linked to Sunni Muslims
in identity. Saudi Arabia has traditionally been home to very
conservative Sunni Muslims, and some have talked about private donors in
the past funding or supporting the precursor to ISIS. Give us a context
for why the Saudi government has been so aggressive about fighting
ISIS.
GAUSE: Well, I think that they see ISIS
as an analog to al-Qaeda. And the Saudis, in the 1980s, as we did,
supported Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union
and, in the ’90s, kind of turned a blind eye to the development of this
Salafi jihadist movement. And then that came back to bite them when
al-Qaeda conducted a real campaign within Saudi Arabia against the
regime. And I think that the leaders of Saudi Arabia see ISIS as
possibly doing the same thing. And I think that there’s a real
recognition at that point in Riyadh that this could have really serious
domestic repercussions for the country.
CORNISH: We’ve talked about this from
the perspective of the Saudi government, but, when it comes to Saudi
Arabia, what are the goals of ISIS?
GAUSE: Eventually they would like to
take over Saudi Arabia, just like al-Qaeda wanted to. The holy cities of
Mecca and Medina, the heartland of Arabia is almost irresistible to
Salafi jihadists like ISIS. It is their home base. And so I think that
there is a sense where ISIS is shooting at Saudi Arabia as an ultimate
goal. But this particular attack, I think, was more just a shot across
the bow to let the Saudi’s know that, you know, you’re in our sights.
CORNISH: We’ve been talking about this
border fence, but what other actions is the government taking there in
response to the threat that they perceive from ISIS?
GAUSE: At the beginning of 2014, the
Saudi’s officially put ISIS on their brand-new terrorist list. They
criminalized any Saudi joining a foreign jihad. It’s explicitly illegal
for them to be members of ISIS or even express support for ISIS. So, in
that regard, the Saudis defined ISIS as a domestic security threat. And
that was, I think, the big escalation. There’s also an effort on the
part of the religious establishment at the behest of the Saudi
government to try to delegitimize ISIS. That, of course, is a harder
thing to do because, on the political front, it’s easy for the Saudi
religious authorities to say these guys are bad because they stand and
against our government. But, at the practical level, the way ISIS
governs the territory it controls is not all that different from – at
least in theory – the way the Saudi religious establishment thinks Islam
requires you to govern any territory. They work from the same texts,
and although ISIS is much more extreme and much more brutal, there is a
similarity in terms of the core texts that both the Saudi religious
establishment and that ISIS looks at for guidance about how politics
should work in an Islamic State.
CORNISH: Gregory Gause. He’s the head of
International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public
Service at Texas A&M University. Thanks so much for explaining it to
us.
GAUSE: It was my pleasure.
Source : npr
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