Maliki: Saudi Arabia and Qatar are at war with Iraq
By Agence France-Presse Saturday, March 8, 2014
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are supporting militant groups in Iraq and have effectively declared war on the country, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said as nationwide violence left 15 dead Saturday.
The rare direct attack on the Sunni Gulf powers, with Maliki also accusing Riyadh of supporting global terrorism, comes with Iraq embroiled in its worst prolonged period of bloodshed since 2008, with more than 1,800 people killed already this year, ahead of parliamentary elections due next month.
The bloodletting in Iraq, which shares a long border with Saudi Arabia, has been driven principally by widespread discontent among the country’s Sunni Arab minority and by the civil war in neighbouring Syria.
Maliki, a Shiite, has in the past blamed unnamed regional countries and neighbours for destabilising Iraq.
But in an interview with France 24 broadcast on Saturday, Maliki said allegations he was marginalising Sunnis were being pushed by “sectarians with ties to foreign agendas, with Saudi and Qatari incitement.”
Referring to the two countries, he said: “They are attacking Iraq, through Syria and in a direct way, and they announced war on Iraq, as they announced it on Syria, and unfortunately it is on a sectarian and political basis.”
“These two countries are primarily responsible for the sectarian and terrorist and security crisis of Iraq.”
He said Riyadh and Doha were providing political, financial and media support to militant groups and accused them of “buying weapons for the benefit of these terrorist organisations.”
- ‘Dangerous Saudi stance’ -
In the interview, Maliki also accused Saudi Arabia of supporting global terrorism, both inside the Arab world and in other countries.
He slammed “the dangerous Saudi stance” of supporting “terrorism in the world — it supports it in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon and Egypt and Libya and even in countries outside” the Arab world.
Maliki in January blamed “diabolical” and “treacherous” Arab countries but has consistently refused to point directly at particular states.
But as violence has worsened markedly in Iraq — the death toll from violence last month was more than double that of February 2013 — and with elections due on April 30, Maliki has taken a hard line, pushing security operations against militants.
He has also called for greater coordination against militancy, with Baghdad due to host an international counter-terrorism conference on March 12.
On Saturday, violence nationwide killed at least 15 people, including a parliamentary election candidate and four children, security and medical sources said.
In Sharqat, north of Baghdad, gunmen shot dead Mohammed Hussein Hamid, who was standing in next month’s parliamentary elections on Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak’s list.
Hamid was the second parliamentary candidate to be killed this year, after gunmen murdered Hamza al-Shammari last month.
Election candidates have been targeted in the past, with nearly 20 killed ahead of April 2013 provincial council elections.
In Samarra, also north of Baghdad, a shooting at a checkpoint killed two secondary school students and a policeman, while a roadside bomb blast in a village south of Sharqat killed two children.
Gunmen attacked a checkpoint in Sharqat, killing a police major and a policeman, while a roadside bomb in Khales killed army Lieutenant Colonel Abbas al-Rubaie and another soldier.
Iraqi soldiers and police are frequently targeted in bombings and shootings by militants opposed to the government.
In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near a market in the Qahira area, killing at least four people and wounding 11.
And a shooting killed one person in the northern city of Mosul, one of the most dangerous parts of the country.
Violence has killed at least 110 people so far this month, and more than 1,800 since the beginning of the year, according to AFP figures based on security and medical sources.
Agence France-Presse AFP journalists cover wars, conflicts, politics, science, health, the environment, technology, fashion, entertainment, the offbeat, sports and a whole lot more in text, photographs, video, graphics and online.
(By Juan Cole) Saudi Arabia’s listing of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and the withdrawal of the Saudi, Kuwaiti United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain ambassadors from Qatar signal a big geopolitical realignment in the Middle East. Qatar is the Red Prince of the Middle East. Despite being fabulously wealthy because of its natural gas exports, its foreign policy has been populist, showing a special fondness for the Muslim Brotherhood and a dislike of the Middle East’s secular authoritarian dictators, including Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Qatar has used its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood as a form of soft power in places like Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Egypt. Its popular Aljazeera Arabic news channel cheered on the 2011 popular upheavals in the region. Saudi Arabia’s octogenarian princes were furious about the fall of Mubarak in Egypt. Although the Saudi official religious ideology is the hard line Wahhabi sect, the Saudi state likes order and stability more than it likes political Islam. The Saudis have therefore often been entirely happy to back secular leaders, as long as they could help keep the masses quiet. Moreover, Wahhabis are often political quietists and those in Saudi Arabia fully support the monarchy. The Saudis view the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over Egypt for a year from June 30 2012 to July 3, 2013, as a political cult, as a set of secretive revolutionary cells attempting to take over one country after another, rather as Stalinist cells took over Hungary and Czechoslovakia after the end of WW II. I.e., the Saudi leadership now looks at the Brotherhood rather as the American Right wing looked at Communism in the McCarthy period. And it looks at Qatar as the patron of the Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia has another big anxiety, which is Khomeinism or Shiite Political Islam, the ideology of the Iranian state. Some 12% of Saudis are Shiite and they live over the kingdom’s petroleum. The Saudis think Iran is behind the restiveness of Bahrain’s majority Shiites (it isn’t), and sent troops into Bahrain to shore up the Sunni monarchy. The Saudis are also upset that Iraq has now been taken over by pro-Iranian Shiites (the majority there). And they are disturbed by Bashar al-Assad’s alliance with Iran, as well as the role of Lebanon’s Hizbullah as foot soldiers for Iran in the Levant. I suspect that from the point of view of a Wahhabi absolute monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeinist Shiism look very similar. Both are populist movements. Both advocate a republic and are hostile to monarchy. Both challenge the Establishment in the Middle East. So from King Abdullah’s point of view, the opening toward Iran conducted by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Morsi last year was confirmation that the two forms of political Islam were operating in tandem. The Saudis are furious with the Obama administration. It reluctantly acquiesced in the fall of Mubarak and ultimately endorsed the Arab Spring. It accommodated to the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. And now it is trying to make an opening to Iran. Last year this time, the momentum in the region was with Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. The Brotherhood had taken Egypt and was becoming more powerful in Libya. A religious center-right party was ruling Tunisia (though it wasn’t a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate). Qatar and Aljazeera were widely influential. At the same time, Iran’s alliance with Syria and Hizbullah was keeping the latter in place and powerful against Saudi allies like Saad Hariri in Lebanon and Sunni Salafis in Syria. Saudi Arabia appeared to be in a vise. Then the Saudis caught a break, with the Rebellion (Tamarrud) movement in Egypt and the military take-over there last July 3. The Saudis, the Kuwaitis and the United Arab Emirates offered Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi $24 Billion, with a promise of much more, to stabilize the Egyptian economy, which is in free fall. In December, the military-appointed government in Egypt declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization after the bombing of a provincial state security building, even though it wasn’t proven that the Brotherhood was behind it. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has gone from ruling Egypt to being a proscribed terrorist organization in just a year. Now the Saudis have followed suit in forbidding it. While the fringes of the Brotherhood had violent people in them, the leadership gave up violence in a 1970s bargain with then Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat, and had largely adhered to their pledge. To now declare a major form of Arab political Islam to be simple terrorism is Arab McCarthyism (or Arab Bushism, since W. liked that kind of approach, and the ‘war on terror’ language in the Arab world is being lifted directly from Bush). Saudi Arabia is determined to crush its ideological rival, the Brotherhood. Hence the pressure on Qatar and the threat to cut the peninsula off from food and other imports by land. The Saudis also allegedly want Qatar to close branches of the Brookings Institution and the Rand Corp in Doha. This demand is not just a manifestation of a new Saudi anti-Americanism but is likely aimed at particular scholars at those institutions who lean toward the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi Arabia isn’t supporting any particular alternative to the Brotherhood and pro-Iranian states and movements. Its counter-moves are pragmatic and ad hoc. Secular nationalists will do, like Gen. al-Sisi. They just have to be against populist political Islam, whether of the Brotherhood or the Shiite variety. (How messy this pragmatism can be is shown by the Egyptian military’s new preference for the Baathist government of al-Assad in Syria, in contrast to Saudi policy). The Saudis themselves might have supported the Baathists in Damascus (and did, in the 1970s and 1980s) except that the latter made an alliance with Iran. Now Riyadh wants al-Assad overthrown, but wants to be sure that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, with its Qatari ties, isn’t the organization that does the overthrowing. That the Brotherhood can effectively be eliminated seems to me unlikely. My guess is that some 20% of Egyptians support it at least vaguely, even now. The harsh moves taken by Egypt and Saudi Arabia to criminalize Brotherhood membership will push some fringe elements into violence, risking the development of a long-term low-intensity guerrilla war or terrorist struggle. In short, the region could be Iraqized. Saudi Arabia is also now bruiting the induction of Egypt into the Gulf Cooperation Council, presumably with the proviso that Egypt will be allowed to extract enormous strategic rent from the GCC. In return, Egypt will protect the very wealthy but very weak GCC from Iran and Shiite Iraq, and from the Brotherhood. Anonymous Egyptian sources I saw quoted in the Egyptian press when I was there last week were speculating that if al-Sisi becomes president, he can bring in $240 billion in investments and aid from the Gulf. Given the high price of gasoline for several years, Saudi Arabia has a rumored $850 billion in reserves, and other Gulf states like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are also flush. That would be a trillion and a half Egyptian pounds. Al-Sisi said Thursday in an interview that Egypt needed a government budget of a trillion pounds in order to back on the right path economically and to re-do infrastructure. Iraq is pushing back on the Shiite side, accusing Saudi Arabia of being behind Sunni terrorism in Iraq, as a way of keeping the Shiite government weak. Turkey doesn’t agree with the ban on the Brotherhood, though it is allied with the Saudis on Syria. So this is the Saudi grand strategy: prop up anti-Brotherhood Egyptian nationalism, isolate Qatar, overthrow Bashar al-Assad (Iraqis maintain that a. If it all worked, the Saudi Kingdom would have uprooted populist political Islam from the region. It isn’t likely to work.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Saudi Arabia is always the engine behind these things. We know that a year before Cheney, Rummy, Wolf and Condi were conducting their January 2001 "how do we snatch Iraq's oil" meetings, their close pals Saudi Arabia were guiding two of the 9/11 hijackers to rendezvous points in San Diego with Saudi attaches. Saudi Arabia also staged the Khobar Barrack attacks on marines using al Qaeda, and convinced the FBI Iran did it
Saudi Arabia hates Iran with a passion, and it was curious their puppy Zawahiri always obsessed about Iran in those videotapes. Its also clear Saudi Arabia was deep in on the invasion plans for Iraq as well.
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
Dubai: A week after recalling their ambassadors from Doha, Gulf states are concerned that the crisis with Qatar might be prolonged and may even get worse, a Gulf diplomatic source said on Thursday.
“Qatar’s foreign policy is totally unrealistic. We realise they want to play an active role regionally that is way bigger than the small size of their country, but the policies they adopted, and cost them $4 billion annually, have become adventurous and even opportunities, jeopardising in the process the stability of fellow member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC),” the diplomat told Gulf News on condition of anonymity.
On March 5, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Qatar, saying Doha had failed to abide by an accord not to interfere in each others’ internal affairs.
The diplomatic source said Doha had in fact agreed verbally at meetings of Gulf foreign ministers in Kuwait late last year and Riyadh this month to abide by a GCC document, proposed by Saudi Arabia in which member states “pledge not to naturalize opponent of other governments or offer support to radical groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.”
However, the Qatari foreign minister refused to sign it.
"During the Riyadh meeting, the minister went out of the meeting to make a phone call. When he came back, he said he will not be signing,” the source said. The next day, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain withdrew their envoys. In response, a Qatari official said his country “will not let go of its foreign policy, no matter what the pressures are.”
By supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, “which continues to pose a threat to Gulf states” and providing it with a medium like Al Jazeera TV station, Qatar’s foreign policy has become a threat to the stability to other GCC states, the diplomat said.
“And what is worrying is that we don’t see any sign that they are even reconsidering their position. I am worried the crisis will only get worse,” he added.
Still sounds like bullshit to me.
Here's one perspective on all this from Tony Cartalucci, take it for what it's worth. I agree with most of the points made.
"The sudden shift in Qatar’s standings in the Middle East has left much of the world perplexed, suspicious, and skeptical. Others are hopeful that it indicates a fraying in an axis that has been sowing violence and destabilization across much of North Africa and the Middle East for years."
The new way of thinking is precisely delineated by what it is not.
Qatar plot to kill Saudi King prompts Riyadh rancor: Analyst
Sun Mar 16, 2014
An alleged plot by Qatar to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has been the main reason behind Riyadh’s withdrawal of its ambassador from Doha, a political analyst says.
Citing diplomatic sources, Egyptian newspaper al-Shorouk's Editor-in-Chief Emad El-Din Hussein said in a recent interview that Saudi Arabia is in possession of authentic documents which indicate that Qatari security service had supported Libya’s former ruler Muammar Gaddafi’s plot to assassinate King Abdullah when he was still crown prince.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain announced the withdrawal of their ambassadors from Qatar on March 5.
He further said that Saudi Arabia might close its border to Qatar amid rising tensions between the two countries.
According to Saudi media reports, top sources in Riyadh also say that following the toppling of Gaddafi in 2011, Saudi Arabia has gained access to audio recordings containing a conversation between senior Qatari leaders discussing an attempt to overthrow the Saudi monarch.
Unconfirmed reports added that the audio recording belonged to Qatar’s former Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and former Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim.
The development comes as Qatar and Saudi Arabia are also at loggerheads over Doha’s links with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the role of al-Jazeera television station.
US-based newspaper Huffington Post has reported that Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal has said only the severance of ties with the Brotherhood, closure of al-Jazeera broadcaster and expulsion of two US think tanks – identified as Brookings Doha Center and the Rand Qatar Policy Institute -- would be sufficient to prevent Qatar from “being punished.”
On March 7, Saudi Arabia listed Muslim Brotherhood along with several other groups as terrorist organizations. According to the new law, those who join or back the groups could face five to 30 years in jail.
cptmarginal wrote:"The sudden shift in Qatar’s standings in the Middle East has left much of the world perplexed, suspicious, and skeptical. Others are hopeful that it indicates a fraying in an axis that has been sowing violence and destabilization across much of North Africa and the Middle East for years."
For what it's worth, I'm with the "others" -- from here it definitely feels like a seismic shift is happening, with repercussions that may be too enormous to imagine right now. Instead of fragmenting the region into warring ethnic/religious statelets, the project that has met with some "success" in Iraq, Libya, Yemen (which recently disintegrated into 6 'regions'), these efforts have provoked a strong backlash, giving rise to a push for unity on the part of previously hostile Arab states. This unity is manifesting in a pooling of resources so that the alliance is much stronger than the sum of its parts. Also, though it's still only a rumble, there are indications that a previously inconceivable rapprochement between arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran is now a definite possibility. A lot can happen to derail all this, and certainly the US/Israel/Turkey/Qatar team will spare no effort, but I am very optimistic that the region is gearing up for a transformation for the better.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
cptmarginal wrote:"The sudden shift in Qatar’s standings in the Middle East has left much of the world perplexed, suspicious, and skeptical. Others are hopeful that it indicates a fraying in an axis that has been sowing violence and destabilization across much of North Africa and the Middle East for years."
For what it's worth, I'm with the "others" -- from here it definitely feels like a seismic shift is happening, with repercussions that may be too enormous to imagine right now. Instead of fragmenting the region into warring ethnic/religious statelets, the project that has met with some "success" in Iraq, Libya, Yemen (which recently disintegrated into 6 'regions'), these efforts have provoked a strong backlash, giving rise to a push for unity on the part of previously hostile Arab states. This unity is manifesting in a pooling of resources so that the alliance is much stronger than the sum of its parts. Also, though it's still only a rumble, there are indications that a previously inconceivable rapprochement between arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran is now a definite possibility. A lot can happen to derail all this, and certainly the US/Israel/Turkey/Qatar team will spare no effort, but I am very optimistic that the region is gearing up for a transformation for the better.
"For what it's worth" - your input is worth quite a bit, actually. Care to provide any articles or analysis about why Saudi Arabia would be changing their foreign policy attitude? I got the impression that Maliki's accusation of a Saudi-Qatari funded militia onslaught on Iraq occurred right as they were publicly distancing themselves from each other.
It's easy for me to express pessimism while not actually living in that part of the world, but I'm quite suspicious of the Saudi royals and their motives in just about everything they do.
