Hubis, nemesis, and the King of the Saudis

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia fears betrayal from his creation, ISIS.  He is afraid that ISIS will march across Iraq, straight into the holiest place to all Muslims, Mecca.

The fear is realistic.

The Economist, June 14, 2014, Two Arab countries fall apart

Sheiks in Anbar Province are reported to have pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader.

The web has few images of Anbar Province hat are not of war.  Here are three.

The Iraqi army, which manned posts on the Saudi border, are reported to have withdrawn to Bagdad. The Shiite government of Iraq has little interest in defending Sunni Arabia against a Sunni ISIS which Arabia created.

The Saudi army is ineffective.  For years it has tried to defeat the Shiite Houthi tribe in northern Yemen, right next to the richest of the Saud oil fields, and have lost each engagement.

he combined Pakistan Saudi army

The undefeated Houthi

There is little chance that the Saudi army could defeat ISIS if it were to invade.

The kingdom's fear is reflected in its call on Pakistan and Egypt to provide it with an army to defend it.And see here and here.  It has recently spent billions (1.5 Billion in Pakistan recently) in each country and feels that they are indebted to the Saudi.

The Business Insider, a reputable  business-oriented blog, posted in  NYC, observes:

The reason for Saudi Arabia's support of rebel groups is in opposition to Iran, which backs al-Assad. But now it appears — much like U.S. support in the 1980s for mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan — that decision may come back to bite them. 

Pakistan has denied that its army is in Arabis and has not denied that a request for armed intervention has been made.  Egypt an the kingdom have remained silent about the demand for aid.  Pakistan will heed the call if demanded; Egypt will not.

Nothing but sand and the cowardly Saudi army separates Anbar from Mecca.

There is much to fear. Saudi hubris - excessive pride or self-confidence - leads, or should lead, to NEMESIS, the goddess of indignation against, and retribution for, evil deeds and undeserved good fortune.

  One wonders if  Greek gods are effective against a self-righteous Muslim faith.  Perhaps Muslims have their own defense against  'overweening pride.  We'll see.

I would like to see the Saud Monarchy fall.  It punishes minorities and any citizen who violates a rule of Wahhabism, the form of the Muslim religion practiced by the Saudi and few others;  it has spent billions setting up and running Madrases in South Asia and Indonesia in a failed effort to win converts to Wahhabism, and to preach hatred toward the West; it is fueling the murderous ISIS, who shares its mythology; it is two-faced in dealing with Israel; it should fall.

Nothing in the Middle East is as brutal as ISIS is today.  Images abound on the Web of its brutality.  See here if you are interested in seeing how awful our kind of animal can be, when fueled by fervent religious belief, or by any other consuming belief.

And it would be interesting to see how a world dependent, still, on Saudi oil, would deal with ISIS, if it came to power in Arabia.  See the Wikipedia article after the jump.

This post does not address ISIS and the Kurds, Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, or Iran, all interesting subjects.

See Wikipedia after the jump.

From Wikipedia

Ideology and beliefs

ISIS is an extremist group that follows al-Qaeda's hard-line ideology and adheres to global jihadist principles.[97][98] Like al-Qaeda and many other modern-day jihadist groups, ISIS emerged from the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s first Islamist group dating back to the late 1920s in Egypt.[99] ISIS follows an extreme anti-Western interpretation of Islam, promotes religious violence and regards those who do not agree with its interpretations as infidels and apostates. Concurrently, ISIS (now IS) aims to establish a Salafist-orientated Islamist state in Iraq, Syria and other parts of the Levant.[98]

ISIS's ideology originates in the branch of modern Islam that aims to return to the early days of Islam, rejecting later “innovations” in the religion which it believes corrupt its original spirit. It condemns later caliphates and the Ottoman empire for deviating from what it calls pure Islam and hence has been attempting to establish its own caliphate.[100] However, there are some Sunni commentators, Zaid Hamid, for example, and even Salafi and jihadi muftis such as Adnan al-Aroor and Abu Basir al-Tartusi, who say that ISIS and related terrorist groups are not Sunnis at all, but Kharijite heretics serving an imperial anti-Islamic agenda.[101][102][103][104]

Salafists such as ISIS believe that only a legitimate authority can undertake the leadership of jihad, and that the first priority over other areas of combat, such as fighting against non-Muslim countries, is the purification of Islamic society. For example, when it comes to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, since ISIS regards the Palestinian Sunni group Hamas as apostates who have no legitimate authority to lead jihad, it regards fighting Hamas as the first step toward confrontation with Israel.[105]

Goals

From its beginnings the establishment of a pure Islamic state has been one of the group's main goals.[106] According to journalist Sarah Birke, one of the "significant differences" between Al-Nusra Front and ISIS is that ISIS "tends to be more focused on establishing its own rule on conquered territory". While both groups share the ambition to build an Islamic state, ISIS is "far more ruthless ... carrying out sectarian attacks and imposing sharia law immediately".[107] ISIS finally achieved its goal on 29 June 2014, when it removed "Iraq and the Levant" from its name, began to refer to itself as the Islamic State, and declared the territory which it occupied in Iraq and Syria a new caliphate.[4]

In mid-2014, the group released a video entitled "The End of Sykes–Picot" featuring an English-speaking Chilean national named Abu Safiyya. The video announced the group's intention to eliminate all modern borders between Islamic Middle Eastern countries; this was a reference to the borders set by the Sykes–Picot Agreement during World War I.[108][109]