within the vast royal family, and contributions from wealthy individuals and businesses in the kingdom remains murky. This isn’t a new, or an ISIS-specific phenomenon. As Patrick Cockburn notes in his book The Jihadis Return:
In 2009, eight years after 9/11, a cable from the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, revealed by WikiLeaks, complained that donors in Saudi Arabia constituted the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. But despite this private admission, the US and Western Europeans continued to remain indifferent to Saudi preachers whose message, spread to millions by satellite TV, YouTube and Twitter, called for the killing of the Shi’a as heretics. These calls came as al-Qaeda bombs were slaughtering people in Shi’a neighborhoods in Iraq. A sub-headline in another State Department cable in the same year reads: ‘Saudi Arabia: Anti-Shi’ism As Foreign Policy?’ Now, five years later, Saudi-supported groups have a record of extreme sectarianism against non-Sunni Muslims.’
The US knew, but despite it all, the Saudi monarchy – known for its tight control over its own population – remained a key Washington ally.
There was of course a long history of Saudi funding of Islamic extremists in official and unacknowledged partnerships with the US. During the 1980s it was Saudi money that paid for the Afghan mujahideen warriors, trained and backed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence services, who battled Soviet-backed forces at Washington’s behest at the height of Reagan’s Cold War. There are countless reports of Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks themselves, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens; the storied 28-page section of the official 9/11 report, which remains fully redacted and unavailable to the public, allegedly details some of that involvement. The focus on that potential scandal had waned in recent years. But it gained new prominence with the sudden announcement in February 2015 that al-Qaeda operative and so-called 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, serving a life sentence in a US prison, had testified in a related trial about the powerful Saudi princes who had funded bin Laden’s and others’ terrorist actions. He named names, including Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the US; influential billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal; and many of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful clerics. All the princes (though probably not the imams) had long experience in and with the US, some in close relationships at the highest levels of US government.
Other regional leaders have been even more direct in holding the Gulf monarchies responsible for the rise in extremism. US-backed Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki, in March 2014, blamed Saudi Arabia and Qatar. As quoted by Patrick Cockburn in The Jihadis Return, Maliki told an interviewer that ‘these two countries are primarily responsible for the sectarian, terrorist and security crisis in Iraq.’ While part of his goal was to deflect his government’s own responsibility for its sectarian, anti-Sunni repression, Maliki went on to say that the two governments were also ‘buying weapons for the benefit of these terrorist organizations.’ According to Cockburn, ‘there was considerable truth in Maliki’s charges.’
Such allegations are consistent with longstanding and now public US government unease over funding of terrorists coming from the Gulf states allied to the US. When The Guardian and other outlets were releasing the huge trove of WikiLeaks cables in 2009-10, one set dealt directly with US concerns about Saudi and other Gulf states’ funding of Islamist extremists, in the years when ISIS was still functioning as al-Qaeda in Iraq and as the Islamic State of Iraq.
According to The Guardian:
Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. ‘More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT [the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the deadly Mumbai attack of 2008] and other terrorist groups,’ says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state.
‘Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,’ she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates… Saudi officials are often painted as reluctant partners. Clinton complained of the ‘ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist funds emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority’…
In common with its neighbours, Kuwait is described as a ‘source of funds and a key transit point’ for al-Qaeda and other militant groups. While the government has acted against attacks on its own soil, it is ‘less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait’.
Saudi funding, whether from individuals, government-backed institutions, or Saudi princes themselves, would certainly fit with the religious/political support for Sunni Islamist extremism that has characterized Saudi domestic and foreign policy for decades. That policy has included a powerful anti-Shi’a component that fits easily with lethal treatment by ISIS of Shi’a in the areas it controls. Storied Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk wrote in July 2014 that:
Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: ‘The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally “God help the Shi’a”. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.’
The fatal moment predicted by Prince Bandar may now have come for many Shi’a, with Saudi Arabia playing an important role in bringing it about by supporting the anti-Shi’a jihad in Iraq and Syria…
Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasized the significance of Prince Bandar’s words, saying that they constituted ‘a chilling comment that I remember very well indeed.’ He does not doubt that substantial and sustained funding from private donors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to which the authorities may have turned a blind eye, has played a central role in the Isis surge into Sunni areas of Iraq. He said: ‘Such things simply do not happen spontaneously’…
Dearlove’s explosive revelation about the prediction of a day of reckoning for the Shi’a by Prince Bandar, and the former head of MI6’s view that Saudi Arabia is involved in the ISIS-led Sunni rebellion, has attracted surprisingly little attention.
Perhaps that refusal to pay attention is not so surprising, particularly in Washington. For much of that time, the US not only relied on Saudi Arabia as one of its most important Middle East strategic partners, but also sold tens of billions of dollars’ worth of the most sophisticated US weapons. In return, of course, the Saudis guaranteed the US access to and significant levels of influence on their enormous oil-production process.
How does ISIS treat women and what is the role of women within the organization?
Islamic fundamentalists, as is the case with most of their counterparts in other religions, do not believe women are equal to men. From ISIS to al-Qaeda, from the Taliban to the government of Saudi Arabia, women are deemed not only different from men but lesser. Although some parts of Islamic law provide (at least aspirationally) some level of social protections for women, including economic security, in the real world women have little access to basic human rights. Women are excluded from much of public life, with severe restrictions on whether and in what jobs they can work. Many basic aspects of women’s lives, including decisions regarding their children, access to healthcare and education, legal status, and passports, remain under the control of their husbands, fathers, sons, or other male relatives.
In areas under ISIS
