In
this Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015 file photo, Saudi security forces take
part in a military parade in preparation for the annual Hajj pilgrimage
in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Saudi Arabia Forms Muslim Anti-Terror Coalition
The 34-member bloc will fight terrorism in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan, deputy crown prince says
By AHMED AL OMRAN in Riyadh and ASA FITCH in Dubai
Dec. 15, 2015 9:59 a.m. ET
Saudi Arabia’s plan to form a Muslim antiterrorism coalition has underlined a new muscular foreign policy aimed at confronting the extremist group Islamic State, even at the risk of wading deeper into the region’s messiest conflicts.
Calling terrorism a “disease which affected the Islamic world first before the international community as a whole,” Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said Tuesday the coalition of 34 Muslim states would fight the scourge in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan.
Besides the 34 Muslim nations who signed up to the coalition, Riyadh said more than 10 other countries, including Indonesia, expressed their support of the new bloc. The kingdom’s main rival Iran, however, was absent from the list.
The formation of the coalition followed criticism from U.S. and European politicians that Saudi Arabia hasn’t done enough to fight Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Islamic State militants took over large swaths of Iraq and Syria last year and are the focus of the U.S.-led air campaign in which Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries are participating.
Some Saudis believe the time has come to show the government is serious about fighting Islamic State, a Sunni militant group that has roots in its own region and religion.
Islamic State “is the seed of evil that we have let out of the can in the Middle East,” Prince Turki Al Faisal, chairman of King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, told the Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai. “It’s our responsibility to vanquish it.”
But it is also unclear what Saudi Arabia is asking the other countries to do—whether it is a loose grouping to talk strategy and share intelligence or the first step to establishing an actual fighting force.
The new Saudi-led coalition will have a joint command center in Riyadh to “coordinate” and develop means to fight terrorism militarily and ideologically, Prince Mohammed told a hastily called news conference at a Riyadh air base early Tuesday morning.
Some countries that were listed as members expressed willingness to review such a proposal but didn’t appear to make any formal commitment to a military coalition.
Turkey, the only country in the alliance that is also a NATO member, welcomed the new coalition. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Tuesday that “the best response to those striving to associate terrorism and Islam is for nations of Islam to present a unified voice against terrorism”
Meanwhile, Jordanian government spokesman Mohammad Momani said the war against terrorism was “our war and the Muslims’ war,” according to a statement carried by the official Petra news agency.
William Hague, a former U.K. foreign secretary, told the Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai on Tuesday that more Arab involvement was needed to combat Islamic State and counter the extremist narrative that it was at war with the West. Making it effective required coordination, however, he said.
“To make something like NATO, you really have to decide to act together…to send people to act and die in another country,” Mr. Hague said.
For Riyadh, the risks of such aggressive military action on a broad scale have become apparent in Yemen.
The Yemen coalition, composed of mostly Sunni Muslim Arab allies, began bombing the Houthis from the air on March 26. It deployed a ground force in July, soon recapturing the southern city of Aden and pushing toward the capital, San’a.
The campaign, however, has been costly for the Saudi government, both in financial and human terms. Human rights groups have also criticized the coalition for the large number of civilian casualties caused by airstrikes and fighting on the ground. The United Nations estimates the death toll of the war at more than 5,800 people.
Many observers see the war in Yemen as the outgrowth of a regional confrontation between Sunni Muslim states and mainly Shiite Iran. Saudi Arabia and its allies support Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi while Iran gives political backing—some say military support—to the Houthis, a group whose members adhere to the Zaidi offshoot of Shiite Islam.
A seven-day cease-fire started in Yemen at noon Tuesday, local time, as United Nations-mediated peace talks began in Geneva. Fighting was still taking place in the country’s oil-rich Marib province and parts of the south in the hours leading up to the pause, according to local security officials.
Christopher Davidson, a professor at Durham University in the U.K. who specializes in Gulf affairs, said the new alliance was primarily a way for Saudi Arabia to generate positive news about its role in international affairs following recent terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Both of the assailants in the California attack had spent time in the kingdom.
Yet divisions within the participating countries of the Islamic coalition don’t bode well for its effectiveness, he said.
“The constituent members of the new coalition mostly fall on the Sunni side of the sectarian fault-line and are themselves deeply divided on a number of key policy areas,” Mr. Davidson said.
“The probability that it can become an effective international security alliance is therefore almost zero.”
—Peter Wonacott in Dubai and Emre Peker in Istanbul contributed to this article.
