AFP Shia communities in several countries have protested against the sheikh's death
Iran and Saudi Arabia are locked in an escalating dispute over the Saudi execution of leading Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
Diplomatic ties have been broken, angry words exchanged and Iranian protesters stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran. But the dispute between the two Middle Eastern nations has deep religious, historic and political roots.
Religious divisions are a factor, but not the only one
Iran and Saudi Arabia are on opposing sides of a more than 1,000-year old argument at the heart of Islam - between Sunnis and Shia.
After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his followers split over who was his rightful heir.
It is important not to overstate the division. Sunnis and Shia share fundamental beliefs, and have co-existed for centuries - the animosity between Iran and Saudi Arabia is better understood in terms of a power struggle in the Middle East and beyond.
But despite this, sectarianism is an ugly reality in many of the conflicts raging today.
Iran and Saudi Arabia's status as leading exponents of Shia and Sunni Islam respectively have informed their foreign policies, with both sides forming alliances with countries who share their theologies - and backing militant groups in those that don't.
The Iranian revolution launched decades of hostility
The recent rift between Iran and Saudi Arabia can be traced to the Iranian revolution of 1979, which saw a pro-Western leader toppled and Shia religious authorities taking over.
Tehran began backing Shia militias and parties abroad, and Riyadh - concerned at the growing influence of a newly-strident Iran - strengthened links to other Sunni governments, including the formation of the Gulf Co-operation Council .. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/country_profiles/4155001.stm .
The 1980s saw tensions between Saudi and Iran escalate - Saudi Arabia backed Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and after clashes at the hajj in 1987 killed hundreds of Iranian pilgrims, Saudi Arabia suspended diplomatic ties for three years.
Another key milestone was the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the overthrow of Saddam Hussein saw a Shia-led government come to power in Riyadh's neighbour.
AFP The Iraq invasion shifted the regional balance of power towards Iran
The Arab Spring saw Iran support its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with the Saudis backing the opposition when popular protests turned into civil war.
In Bahrain, Saudi troops helped put down anti-government protests by the majority Shia population there.
Saudi Arabia felt threatened by last year's Iranian nuclear deal .. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-33519808 , fearing the easing of sanctions would allow Tehran to further support Shia groups in the Middle East.
Today there are two ongoing major flashpoints - Syria and Yemen.
As news emerged of the executions, a Saudi-led coalition battling Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen officially announced the end of a ceasefire that neither side had ever fully observed.
AP Iran and Saudi Arabia support opposing sides in Syria's bloody civil war
Saudi Arabia accuses Iran of backing the Shia group, and intervened to support Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.
Divisions on Syria boil down to the fact that Iran wants its ally, President Assad, to stay while Saudi Arabia says he must go. Both support rival fighters on the ground.
Painstaking efforts were taken to get the two sides to join peace talks later this month aimed at resolving a conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people, but with Riyadh-Tehran diplomatic ties severed, chances of success look ever more distant.
What happens next is unclear, but the situation is dangerous
Perhaps the only thing we can be certain about is that hostile Iranian-Saudi relations will only prolong the misery of Yemen and Syria, with a diplomatic solution unlikely and both sides keen to prevent the other gaining influence.
International reaction has been predictable, with Saudi allies such as Bahrain also taking measures to downgrade or end relations with Iran.
World powers have called for de-escalation. The US is in a delicate position, being a long-term ally of Saudi Arabia but seeing a thaw in ties with Iran in the wake of the nuclear deal.
American foreign policy is undergoing a "pivot" towards Asia; the US enjoys greater energy security following a fracking boom - how far would Washington be prepared to wade into the row?
The gloomiest prediction from commentators is that the region could be entering a version of the Thirty Years' War, which saw Catholic and Protestant states battle for supremacy in the 17th Century.
But many will be hoping those angered by Sheikh Nimr's death will take the advice of the cleric's own brother, Mohammed, who said any protests should be peaceful.
Lots more BBC stuff beneath the story, including Hillary dealing with a rude heckler and James Blunt welcoming a comment that he is gay as a complement.
.. putting the relatively anti-democratic and repressive nature of the Saudi system aside the worst part of that as noted in the article was the bunching of Sheikh Nimr with the violent jihadists .. that is a stretch ..
.. to put the demo and executions in context before seeing that the 'some 157' executed in 2015 was the highest in two decades, i wondered how the unrest today in Saudi Arabia compared to other years
has decided to take a harder line than King Abdullah did .. the article said the executions were not in public as normal in the past so that's one positive .. as the election of women in local election last year was, too ..
Salafists attacking Salafists is another interesting aspect .. why? .. ok, here's one opinion
Only Saudi Arabia can defeat Isis Nawaf Obaid
I have often heard claims that my country created Isis. On the contrary – we are leading the fight against it
The rapidly escalating conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, sparked by the execution of a Saudi Shiite activist, may seem like the natural outgrowth of a decade’s Sunni-Shiite tensions. But more than denominational differences, what’s driving the open conflict is the Saudis’ deepening fear that the U.S. is shifting its loyalties in the Persian Gulf region from its traditional Saudi ally to a gradually moderating Iran. And in a sense, they’re right: Although the U.S. is a long way from becoming an instinctive Iranian ally, the nuclear deal has led Washington to start broadening its base in the Gulf, working with Iran where the two sides have overlapping interests. Of which there are many these days.
The outspoken al-Nimr symbolized the possibility that Saudi Shiites might never fully accept their second-class status and, worse, might seek autonomy or independence in the event of the Saudi state’s weakness. The Saudis seem to have calculated that if Iran made any noise about the execution, it would not have leverage to do anything about it. Undoubtedly the Saudis knew the Americans wouldn’t be best pleased with them for killing a nonviolent activist -- but again, they must’ve thought it wouldn’t matter.
Executing al-Nimr was thus probably intended to demonstrate that the Saudis can go it alone, making security-related decisions without worrying what their neighbors or the U.S. think. If that’s right, the execution was an indirect signal that Saudi Arabia is feeling isolated, and that if isolated, it will act unilaterally.
Here the Saudis overplayed their hand. The Iranians reacted cleverly. First, the government stirred up public sentiment by condemning the execution. Then, it allowed angry protesters to storm the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Finally, the Iranian government shut down the protest, made arrests and issued public statements disclaiming responsibility for what had happened.
To be sure, the Iranian government is a complex organism with many moving parts, and the whole response likely wasn’t planned or coordinated by a single actor. But the result was highly effective. It showed the Saudis that Iran took the execution as directed toward it. And it simultaneously gave other countries the cover they would need to side with Iran.
The Americans, rather remarkably, took the Iranian side. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry let it be known that he was talking .. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/world/middleeast/iran-saudi-arabia-execution-sheikh-nimr.html?_r=0 .. to his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif. In the past, a U.S. secretary of state would’ve reached out solely to the Saudi foreign minister, not least because there were no official diplomatic ties to Iran. Meanwhile, a former deputy CIA director, Michael Morell, publicly praised .. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-cia-official-iran-acted-responsibly-after-saudi-embassy-attack/ .. the Iranians for their handling of the situation in Tehran. This was downright astonishing, given Americans' historical associations with embassy occupation there.
These reactions show that Saudi worries about American abandonment are to a degree justified. After the Iran nuclear deal, American foreign policy makers can look at an episode like the al-Nimr affair and ask: Whose fault is this? If the answer is the Saudis, the U.S. can now afford to side with Iran.
More broadly, this shift reflects increasingly overlapping U.S.-Iranian interests. Both want to stabilize Iraq, including by keeping the Iraqi Sunnis in a secondary position. Both would like to defeat Islamic State, a relatively low priority for the Saudis, who either don’t fear the Sunni militant group or fear it so much they don’t want to join the battle.
There are still plenty of points where U.S. and Saudi interests converge, and oppose Iranian interests. Both sides dislike Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and want Hezbollah to have less, not more power in Lebanon. Both want to restabilize Egypt and indeed the region more broadly, creating a broad-based Sunni alliance to balance Iranian expansion.
But an alliance based on accidents of converging policy is a lot less solid than what Saudi Arabia traditionally had with the U.S., namely an alliance based on reliable, instinctual friendship. In that longtime relationship, the Americans ignored Saudi human-rights abuses and absolutism, and the Saudis turned a blind eye to unflinching U.S. support for Israel. Among close friends, such aberrations can be forgiven. That’s now changing, and the Saudis are understandably feeling nervous about it.
The painful truth for the Saudis is that the U.S. and Iran are plausible strategic allies, whose once close relationship was disrupted by the Islamic Revolution. The U.S. preference for Saudi Arabia in the Gulf was the result of Iranian intransigence and ideology, not any inherent strategic advantage possessed by the kingdom.
A Republican president, urged on by Israel, might conceivably try to roll back the Obama administration’s steps to realignment, and bring back the good old days for the Saudis. And Hillary Clinton might be tougher on Iran than Barack Obama has been. But foreign policy continuity on Iran is likely, regardless of rhetoric. Any president will need to try and produce wins on Islamic State and Iraq -- and those can’t be achieved without Iran.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story: Noah Feldman at nfeldman7@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net
ISIL/ Daesh Threatens to attack Saudi Arabia after Executions
Jan. 6, 2016
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) has pledged to attack and destroy .. http://tinyurl.com/z92mk5p .. the two Saudi political prisons, al-Ha’ir (Riyadh) and al-Tarfiya (Qaseem region), where Muslim radicals are typically held, and release their inmates. These prisons hold several thousand Saudis accused of involvement in terrorism. It was the organization’s first response to Saudi’s execution of dozens of accused terrorists last Saturday.
Analysts said that the announcement was an indirect rejection of any deal for the exchange of prisoners with Saudi Arabia.
In the organization’s weekly magazine, “al-Naba'”(News), as reported at al-Bawaba, it carried an article condemning the Saudi monarchy for executing 47 prisoners last Saturday. Although most attention has focused on the four Shiites among them, including cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, because of the Iranian reaction, the bulk of those executed were al-Qaeda members who carried out terrorist attacks on Riyadh and other Saudi cities in a campaign that lasted from 2003 to 2006. Daesh called the terrorists “Unitarians” or “Monotheists,” which is what Saudi’s Wahhabi branch of Islam calls itself.
It said of those executed “dozens of them were men we consider the best of the unitarians, rather jihadis in the path of God.”
Daesh said that the Saudis were implicitly announcing a new policy, of mass incarceration of Daesh sympathizers (“unitarians”), so as to use them as hostages whereby to threaten the jihadis. In response, Daesh said it would kill any official holding Daesh prisoners in Saudi Arabia.
They said that other regimes had attempted this tactic, including the Alawites of Syria and the Shiites of Iraq, and it had yielded nothing but the collapse of their power at the hands of the holy warriors. They pointed out that they had emptied three prisons in Iraq of their inmates, in Tikrit and Ninewah Provinces.
The article went on to attack the founder of the modern Saudi state, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, as having fooled the Saudi Bedouin into supporting him on the grounds he was a unitarian or strict monotheist, whereas he and the clerics who supported him were corrupt.
Fascinatingly, this critique of Ibn Saud was common among a Saudi rural fundamentalist movement, the Ikhwan or Brethren, in the 1920s (over his introduction of the radio and his treaties with Christian Britain and with regional powers), and led to the Ikhwan rebellion of 1928-1930, which Ibn Saud put down with the help of the urban population. It was a turning point, after which the Saudi monarchs’ power base was increasingly urban. Rural discontents have remained strong (Saudi Arabia is 87 percent urban now), and this article suggests that some section of Daesh is made up of Neo-Wahhabi Brethren.
Daesh also maintains that the Saudi royal family (there are 7,000 princes but perhaps a dozen really consequential ones) is riven with power rivalries, and that rivals of King Salman are saying that they can take on the Muslim radicals more effectively than he has.
The allegation makes some sense of why the king may have felt it necessary to stage a spectacle of mass executions last Saturday– he is fending off law and order candidates seeking to weaken him and ultimately replace him.
The article may be vastly exaggerating, of course, but it depicts Daesh as having extensive cells inside Saudi Arabia, which so pose a threat to the monarchy that it was panicked by internal criticism into that mass execution, as a show of force.
[ Saudi Arabia announced 34 country Islamic military coalition to fight terrorism, said to include Egypt, Qatar, UAE, Lebanon, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Gulf Arab and African states ]
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