The Islamic State's Saudi Chess Match

drawing Iran into the fray, the group is playing a complicated game aimed at

delegitimizing the royal family and destabilizing the kingdom, the Washington institute

said.

Over the past two weeks, the so-called "Islamic State" (IS) has claimed two attacks on

Shiite mosques in Saudi Arabia's Shiite-majority Eastern Province, one in Dammam and

the other in Qatif. While the incidents might not have an immediate impact on the

kingdom's overall security, they are relevant to long-term IS strategy of weakening the

Saudi government by exposing its alleged hypocrisy. They also illustrate how IS has

choreographed its actions in phases for its Arabian Peninsula theater. For example, when

IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced new wilayat (provinces) for the so-called

caliphate in Saudi Arabia and Yemen last November, he told supporters that Shiites

should be targeted first. And in remarks made last month, he zeroed in on the Saudi state

and what he described as its failed Yemen war. The latest attacks are therefore harbingers

of a wider IS threat to Saudi Islamic legitimacy.

THE ISLAMIC STATE'S CALCULUS

By attacking the Eastern Province, IS seeks to place Riyadh in the position of defending

or appeasing Shiites, at the expense of a Saudi Wahhabist state ideology that does not

tread too far from that of IS (e.g., Saudi schools teach students that Shiites are

unbelievers and not Muslims). In that sense, the group likely considers Riyadh's actions

following the first attack a victory.

In response to the May 22 suicide bombing in Qatif, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman

Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki stated that the goal of IS was to spread sectarianism, while

Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef visited the town and gave condolences to the

victims and their family members. Moreover, Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz ibn Abdullah al-

Sheikh condemned the "criminal plot." From the Islamic State's perspective, such actions

highlight Riyadh's rank hypocrisy, showing "true" believers in the "land of the two holy

places" how the Saudi state is contravening both God and its own founding standards. By

casting themselves as the true bearers of Islam, IS leaders hope to draw more recruits and

supporters.

HISTORICAL SUPPORT BASE FOR JIHADISTS

Beyond the potential for gaining new supporters, IS knows that Saudi Arabia has been a

hotbed for foreign fighter and jihadist activism since the 1980s. In all of the major foreign

fighter mobilizations over the past three decades (Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq,

and Syria), Saudis have been the leading nationality to join up. Most important, Saudis

composed the largest bulk of foreign IS members last decade when the group was calling

itself al-Qaeda in Iraq, and once again in Syria and Iraq over the past couple years.

Since IS joined the Syrian jihad in April 2013, it has pushed anti-Saudi messaging

through various means, including an official nashid (religiously sanctioned a cappella

music), public announcements issued from its Syrian "provinces" in Raqqa (twice) and

Deir al-Zour, and pictures showing words of support from inside Saudi Arabia. IS

supporters also claimed responsibility for an attempted assassination of a Danish

executive on a Riyadh highway last November, showing footage of the incident online.

Some may argue that IS will not succeed in shaking the monarchy, similar to the failed

jihad in Saudi Arabia from 2002 to 2006. Although this scenario is definitely possible,

local conditions are also quite different today. For one thing, many more Saudis are now

involved with IS than there were with al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia in the early to mid-

2000s. In addition, the group has wide bases of training and operations on both sides of

the kingdom's border with Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Yemen. It also has a small yet

important support base in Bahrain, in part because leading IS ideologue Turki al-Binali is

Bahraini, but also because Manama has turned a blind eye to IS supporters and radical

Sunnis in general -- no surprise given that the island's Sunni rulers are more worried

about the Shiite majority threat to their power. Taken together, these bases could provide

IS with strategic depth while also widening its war against Shiites in the region.

PROVOKING A SHIITE REACTION OVER TIME

Historically, the Shiite populations of the Persian Gulf -- Saudis and Bahrainis in

particular -- have not been receptive to Iranian overtures in the same way as Lebanon.

Yet just as Iran is now playing a larger role in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, so too does IS

hope for a similar scenario to play out in the Gulf monarchies, if only as a means of

making the Saudi state look weak and convincing the Sunni populace to look to IS as

their natural protectors instead. Iranian proxy networks in Iraq have already shown small

signs of supporting militant networks in Bahrain -- at the very least rhetorically, and

perhaps materially as well. Since Riyadh deployed troops there to quash protest

movements in 2011, Shiite militants on the island have been involved in a series of small-

scale attacks on Bahraini state institutions, in addition to condemning the Saudi royal

family and accusing it of human rights violations. They have also portrayed their familial

connections with Shiites in the Eastern Province next door as an extension of their fight

against the Bahraini government.

Therefore, if IS continues attacking Shiites in Saudi Arabia, it will likely hope to drive a

wider wedge between them and Riyadh, spurring them to look for protection from the

outside -- namely from Iran, which could quickly provide such support via Hezbollah,

Iraqi Shiite militant groups, and/or similar elements in Bahrain. This would put the Saudi

state in a bind, forcing it to either push back against increased Iranian influence in its

neighborhood or continue trying to tamp things down -- a win-win situation from the

Islamic State's vantage point. This scenario may sound a bit absurd now, but many

observers likewise believed that Iranian influence in Iraqi Shiite politics would never

reach its current peak, so it is important to understand the worst-case developments that

IS seeks to foment in Saudi Arabia. Some Shiites in the kingdom are already beginning to

create "popular mobilization committees" (al-hashd al-shabi). While these groups are

likely unrelated to the powerful Shiite militias of the same name in Iraq, that distinction

will likely be lost on the many conservative Saudis who are already edgy about Iran and

the potential for Shiite empowerment in the Eastern Province.

Of course, none of these scenarios are inevitable. The Islamic State is gambling on three

outcomes: that it can push Saudi Shiites into the arms of militant networks and possibly

Iran, that it can gain enough Sunni support for its project by laying bare Riyadh's inability

to follow through on its founding ideology, and that it can foster more sympathy for itself

as the "true protector" of Saudi Sunnis.

CONCLUSION

The Islamic State believes it can shape future events to its advantage, and in some ways,

its strategy for the first phase of its Arabian Peninsula campaign was a success. The Qatif

attack was a bookend to its March attacks against four Houthi mosques in Sana, Yemen.

Those incidents created a domino effect of sorts: they spurred the Houthis to move

against Aden, which led the Saudis to launch their ongoing military campaign in Yemen,

which in turn gave IS a wider opening for operations in Saudi Arabia due to the resources

Riyadh is committing next door.

How this all plays out is difficult to predict, especially since so many aspects of regional

and local politics in the Middle East have become extremely fluid. Many of the old rules

have been rendered irrelevant since 2011, especially in the past year. At the very least,

the Islamic State is vying to call checkmate against the Saudi state and bring about an

even larger change that would further shake regional and global politics. The U.S.

government should not take the latest attacks or related developments lightly. Otherwise

it will once again be surprised by foreseeable outcomes that were ignored in places such

as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.