On the Jihadist Wars of No Consequence

Autocracy and oil wealth have allowed a country like Saudi Arabia to wield jihad as a weapon of foreign policy with little blowback for decades

Wars have consequences. Governments provoke them, fund them and fight them, but if they don’t turn out right, there’s usually a price to be paid. We’ve just seen one great if unsung example of that: the Biden administration’s election loss to Trump after two years of failed, expensive war in Ukraine that had economic impacts across the Western world. But like the voters who deserted the Democrats over Gaza, this is an element of the election defeat that mainstream media and its analysts prefer not to talk about.

However, there’s one party to war that has a consistent record of paying virtually no price at all for its failures: Saudi Arabia. The Syrian civil war was the most recent of the three jihads of modern times sponsored by the Gulf state — all of them a relatively cost-free gamble made possible by a combination of extreme wealth and autocracy.

The first, the insurgency against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, saw Saudi Arabia and the United States manage a pipeline of fighters into the country, utilizing regional Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Wahhabi networks. Some $20 billion was poured into moving anything between 35,000 and 40,000 young men to join the effort to pull down the Soviet Union by what was hoped would be its Achilles Heel. The US-Saudi alliance against the Soviet bloc and Arab nationalism was cemented during the reign of King Faisal from 1964.

But what had become more of abstraction after the death of Nasser in 1970 was suddenly reality again with the double whammy of 1979: the Iranian Revolution and the Wahhabi revolt in Mecca. If the Afghanistan jihad was one response, the Saudi regime also decided it had to double down on Islamic rule to solidify its grip on power. The Wahhabi religious scholars were given wider powers to monitor and patrol society in education, media and on the streets through increased funding to the morality police. The kingdom embarked on a massive program of soft power projection through printing Qurans in many languages with Wahhabi interpretative glosses for global distribution and increased funding of mosques around the world.

The Afghanistan war had a bitter aftertaste for many parties to it. Egyptians who were among the Arabs funneled for the jihad returned to Egypt to lead the al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya in its insurgency of the 1990s against the Mubarak regime and returnees filled out the ranks of the Islamist forces locked in a brutal civil war against Algeria’s military rulers in the same decade. The post-Afghanistan Islamist movement Al-Qa’ida, led by Saudi national Osama bin Laden and the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, took the United States as its prime target, beginning with the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salam and then of course the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The Saudi price to pay, at least initially, was rather more prosaic: the political blowback from September 11 and the fact that 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis.

Anti-Shia Jihad

The second modern jihad for Saudi Arabia followed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the Saudi regime saw to its horror that its US ally had made the monumental mistake of empowering Iran and allowing to expand its group of regional allies. The Saudi response to this was to encourage the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, even though it was dominated for several years by Al-Qa’ida. Saudis quickly emerged as the main foreign contingent of an insurgency that was fighting the emergence of an Iran-backed Shi’ite-dominated system. Al-Qa’ida also launched an insurgency inside Saudi Arabia itself at this time.

If this was a belated consequence of the Afghan jihad, it was a manageable one. By killing Saudi Muslims in attacks on Western and government targets, the Al-Qa’ida insurgents quickly lost public support, and from then on it was simply a mopping up operation that took several years, in cooperation with Western counter-intelligence officials. As early as a few months into the occupation reports emerged of Saudi interrogators telling al-Qa’ida detainees to go fight in Iraq and leave the land of Islamic law alone. The trick for Saudi Arabia was to avoid any public approval of this undeclared jihad in which American troops were losing their lives and ensure that the number of Saudis in Iraq did get too high to attract US media attention. But in the West, there was the 7/7 attacks on London transport in 2005, in which 56 people died, and the Madrid train attacks of March 2004 in which around 200 people died, and after which the government taking part in the Iraq occupation was voted out of office.

Syrian ‘Smart Jihad’

This “smart jihad” was the model used in Syria. For both Saudi Arabia and Qatar the early protests were an opportunity — for Qatar, to install another Muslim Brotherhood regime, for Saudi Arabia either to remove an Iranian ally, or at the least to create a graveyard for the Arab Spring uprisings, the war of wars that would discourage anyone from challenging authority for years to come. Through the random weaponization of a range of neo-Wahhabi groups — renamed with the euphemism ‘Salafi’ — Saudi Arabia waged its second undeclared jihad of recent times. Again, the j-word was shunned at the official level, but as in Afghanistan, US security agencies were intimate collaborators (the CIA called it Operation Timber Sycamore). Western governments chose to monitor rather than prevent the stream of foreigners passing through Turkey and Jordan to make war on a regime branded in pan-Arab media as heretical because its ruling clique belonged to the Alawi rite.

The price paid was again negligible. Once a NATO coalition was put together to fight the Islamic State after it declared itself a caliphate in 2014, Islamic State violence exploded around the world, targeted at the countries taking part or simply Shia Muslims for being Shia Muslims, and Al-Qa’ida staged its own series of attacks in an effort to match the elan of the Islamic State. Among the most deadly and spectacular, 142 were killed in the bombing of two Zaydi Shia mosques in Sanaa in March 2015, 224 were killed when a passenger flight from Egypt to Russia was bombed in October 2015, Paris was struck with the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 killing 12 and the Bataclan attacks in November in which 138 died. There were dozens more around the world, contributing to the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe and a gradual right-wards shift in politics. By contrast, in Saudi Arabia there were two major attacks on Shia mosques, killing 30 and in Kuwait, which played a major background role funding the jihadists, there was one attack on a Shia mosque, killing 27. The electoral price for these interventions was zero.

Conventional wisdom viewed the Islamic State as a threat to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and this was a view that Saudi officials were happy to perpetuate since it won them sympathy and plaudits among Western patrons. But on both political and security grounds this was not the case. The policies used to handle militancy from 2003 were simply kicked into gear to handle what in any case never rose the level of insurgency. Politically, the real threat to the regime was Arab Spring democracy demands, even more so if framed in Islamic discourse. The Islamic State was a minor blip in the project to crush the uprisings, a project that entailed the launch of another jihadist war of no consequence.

Post-Jihadism

Since then, Saudi policy has moved on. The government is projecting Islamic moderation and tolerance as an integral element of its Vision 2030 plan for massive social and economic change, a plan that has helped secure once more Saudi Arabia’s place as a Western ally after the uncertain years following 9/11, while at the same time winning new friends in Asia. The claim is even made by pro-Saudi Western think tanks that the country has become a “post-Wahhabi” state. But just as the clerics are ready to be switched back on when needed at home, they continue to do work for Saudi Arabia abroad. Salafi Jihadism may be over as a Saudi export to Syria, but it’s gone under the radar in Western media and policy circles that Saudi-backed Salafism is very much alive and well in Yemen as an arm of Saudi foreign policy (for example, the Nation’s Shield militia and numerous Salafi teaching institute still in existence). Policymakers go along with this airbrushing at their peril.