OPINION: Hold Saudis Accountable for Sponsoring Radicalism

This week, the American news program 60 Minutes featured a story on the 28 classified pages of the 9/11 Commission Report that ostensibly describe the role of Saudi Arabia in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. However, the classified pages likely demonstrate that Saudi officials and elites played a key roll in sponsoring the terrorist attacks. Former Florida Senator Bob Graham, a leader of the 9/11 Commission inquiry, has said that the 28 classified pages of the report depict Saudi Arabia as “the principal financier” of 9/11. The 60 Minutes story has spurred a wider discussion Arabia’s role in inciting radicalism and terrorism throughout the Middle East.Saudi Arabia is a radical Islamic state. Founded on the ideology of Wahhabism, a puritanical version of Islam that began in the 18th century, the Saudi state was formed as an alliance between the Saudi monarchs and the Islamist clergy who legitimize the regime. Moreover, Saudi Arabia pursues a dual strategy vis-à-vis Islamic radicalism: it smothers extremism at home to ensure the regime’s survival but finances extremism abroad to spread its Islamist ideology across the region.

Saudi Arabia has long been a consequential sponsor of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East. A classified 2009 U.S. State Department memorandum revealed by Wikileaks labeled Saudi donors “the most significant source of funding” for global Sunni terrorism. Moreover, the memo exposed that the Saudi state has done little to stymie the millions of dollars of funding emanating from the country to groups including al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Saudi Arabia is also a chief sponsor of fundamentalist culture across the Middle East. Saudi donors have spent billions funding religious television channels and newspapers as well as fundamentalist preachers, mosques, and madrassas across the region. In doing so the Saudis have also propagated their own extremist ideology that decries modernity, the West, and women’s rights throughout the region. Moreover, by exporting its puritanical brand of Sunni Islam throughout the region, Saudi Arabia has undermined religious pluralism in the Middle East. Saudi extremism propagates intolerance for Sufi, Shia, and moderate Sunni Islam and decries the region’s religious minorities including Christians, Jews, and Druze.

Saudi Arabia’s financial support for terrorist groups and fundamentalist ideology has been instrumental in creating the region’s most powerful terrorist group: ISIS. When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Saudi Arabia financed radical Sunni fighters there, and some Saudi-funded groups including Jabhat al-Nusra have united with ISIS. Cole Bunzel, a Princeton University scholar of Wahhabist history, described the impact of Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of extremism in founding the Islamic State. “Wahhabism is fundamental to the Islamic State’s ideology,” Bunzel said, explaining the ideological influence of Saudi extremism on ISIS.

ISIS recruiters have found fertile ground in Saudi Arabia, where the population has lived for generations in the context of an Islamic fundamentalist culture not unlike that of ISIS. Threatened by the ideological influence of ISIS, the Saudi regime has aided the fight against ISIS: it is a part of the U.S. coalition against ISIS, it designated ISIS a terrorist organization in 2014, and it announced in 2015 that it would fight ISIS with its own coalition of Muslim states.

Thus, in re-examining the role of Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, it is clear that Saudi Arabia has been an instrumental force in funding terrorism and religious extremism throughout the region. The Saudis will continue to play an instrumental regional role in the years to come, and only time will tell the eventual outcome of its exploits.

Saudi Arabia has been a crucial American ally for decades, but it is also a key financier of Islamic radicalism in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state that was founded in an alliance between its monarchy and clergy who espouse Wahhabism, a puritanical brand of Islam. While today the regime strategically smothers radicalism at home to ensure its survival, Saudi Arabia finances Islamic extremism across the region to increase its influence.

Saudi Arabia has directly financed Islamist terrorism in the Middle East. A U.S. State Department memorandum revealed by Wikileaks called Saudi donors “the most significant source of funding” for Sunni terrorism and exposed that Saudi officials do little to stymie the terrorist funding. Saudi donors have also spent billions funding religious television channels, newspapers, and mosques across the region to export Sunni fundamentalism. In doing so, they have propagated a creed that denounces modernity, the West, and women’s rights throughout the region. They have also undermined religious pluralism in the Middle East, propagating a creed that has no tolerance for those who do not ascribe to their beliefs, Muslims and religious minorities alike.

Saudi Islamist exploits were also instrumental in ISIS’s rise. When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Saudi Arabia financed radical Sunni groups, some of which are now united with ISIS. Moreover, according to Princeton University scholar Cole Bunzel, an expert on Wahhabism, described the Saudi brand of radical Islam as “fundamental to the Islamic State’s ideology.” Unsurprisingly, ISIS recruiters have found fertile ground in Saudi Arabia. Threatened by ISIS’s influence, the Saudi regime has aided the fight against ISIS by joining the U.S. coalition against ISIS, designating ISIS a terrorist organization, and announcing that it would lead its own anti-ISIS coalition. Thus, although Saudi Arabia has been an instrumental force in funding terrorism and Islamic extremism throughout the region, it could become instrumental in suppressing it.