Page 2 of 2 Saudis quietly go about
'business' in Iraq By Dahr Jamail
actively working to undermine his
government and of offering financial backing to
various Sunni groups inside Iraq.
Zalmay
Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Iraq and now
Washington's ambassador to the United Nations,
wrote in the New York Times recently, "Several of
Iraq's neighbors, not only Syria and Iran but also
some friends of the United States, are pursuing
destabilizing policies there."
But this is
the exception rather than the rule. The cozy
relationship between
Washington and Riyadh continues, largely
unscathed.
And destabilizing they are
... "Mosul is where the Saudis are the
most active today because it is already primarily
Sunni and there are a few Kurds," said Sureya
Sayadi, a 46-year-old Kurdish-American woman who
lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.
Sayadi, from Kirkuk, Iraq, fled to the United
States with her family when the US left Kurds in
the lurch after encouraging them to rebel against
Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 1991 war
against Iraq.
A teacher and a medical
doctor, Sayadi fills the rest of her time
facilitating the work of an international
non-governmental organization (NGO) that assists
Kurdish orphans and victims of honor killings. She
is busier than ever as the number of both has
escalated dramatically in Kurdish-controlled
northern Iraq. She believes Bush administration
policies "have empowered Islamist political
parties whose clerics promote honor killings" and
have "destroyed Iraq's judicial system and altered
its laws to justify the killings". She said, "One
of our Kurdish employees has heard from the
community that the Saudis are taking over parts of
Kurdistan by promising people education."
In recent conversations with her NGO
colleagues, Sayadi has found that within the past
two years, the Saudi government has financed the
construction of at least 50 mosques in Irbil and
Suleimaniya alone. They are also active on the
Turkish-Iraqi border and in Kirkuk and Halabja.
She explained, "They go to areas where there is
the most poverty and suffering, stepping in to
offer services that people are not getting from
the government - health care, education and
sometimes employment - and in the process
implant[ing] their fundamentalist ideology."
Sayadi believes the Saudi monarchy is
directly involved in funding "at least four new
Islamic groups in Kurdistan. They are exploiting
the fact that Kurds are mostly Sunni."
During the summer of 2005, members of
al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sunna cells were among
several extremists arrested in Irbil, and most of
them were Kurds. Prior to this, Saudi
mosque-building in the area during the 1990s
combined with the return of Kurdish militants who
had fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
is believed to have led to the emergence of such
groups as Ansar al-Sunna.
The perception
was that these men aspired to radicalize the
general population by replicating the Afghan model
in Kurdistan. Reinforcing this trend around that
time, Saudi Arabia established links with these
Kurds to counter the power of Saddam. In 1992-93,
Islamist Kurdish groups worked under the
Saudi-based International Islamic Relief
Organization and other "charities", which pumped
$22 million a month into Kurdish areas. Today,
Saudi names have been replaced with Kurdish names.
In the decade following the 1991 war, when
Saudi "charities" constructed 1,832 new mosques,
alarmed Kurdish officials instituted restrictions.
Wahhabi teachings followed in Saudi Arabia had
been translated into Kurdish and imported into the
region, accompanied by the Salafi strain, a
puritanical, strict interpretation of the Koran
adhered to by al-Qaeda.
In 2003, US air
strikes targeted bases of Ansar al-Sunna on Iraq's
northeastern border with Iran. These same radical
groups, thanks in large part to Saudi backing, are
now alive and flourishing in Kurdish-controlled
northern Iraq.
"Islamists from Saudi
Arabia are offering money to young Kurds, visiting
their schools, marrying Kurdish girls and taking
them back to the kingdom," Sayadi said. "Kurds
have always been quite secular - none of us
practiced the hijab [body covering] - but
now Kurdish women are being forced to do this.
There is segregation of men and women. People in
sheer desperation and hope for aid are turning
more fundamentalist. The environment is ripe for
fundamentalism, and Saudi influence is increasing
rapidly. They are creating a hope-filled
impression among the people that Islamic assertion
is the way to resist the West.
Kurdish
girls assisted by Sayadi's NGO have revealed that
Saudi Islamists are pressuring Kurdish women to
adopt a fundamentalist ideology in exchange for
free religious studies in Kurdish universities.
From her experience with Kurdish refugees in
southeastern Turkey, she said, "In both Iraq and
Turkey, Islamists are operating in a similar
fashion, leaving no stones unturned to convert
people to fundamental Islam. They are buying poor
Kurds desperate for survival and feeding them
ideology."
Sayadi's 35-year-old unemployed
nephew Mushtaq, with a Kurdish mother and a
Shi'ite Arab father, used to drive a taxi between
Beji and Baghdad. "A man with a Saudi dialect
called his mother, my stepsister Gailas, and
ordered her to raise $2,500 to free Mushtaq. They
called from his cell phone and had him appeal to
his mother to give them the money. She raised the
money and brought it to a suburb in Baghdad where
they had instructed her to go, only to find her
son's burned taxi and his hacked body wrapped in
his prayer rug. The men said they did it because
he was Shi'ite."
Solutions? The
Middle East is floating in the violence and chaos
bred by failed Bush administration policies.
Generations are now being raised in occupations
and war zones, which were caused, or supported by,
Washington. Anti-American sentiment in the region
is quite likely higher than it has ever been in
history.
The primary sword in the belly of
the Middle East - the US occupation of Iraq -
needs to be immediately and unconditionally
removed. The United States would simultaneously
pay full compensation to all Iraqis who have lost
a loved one or suffered damages as a result of the
US-led invasion and occupation.
Second to
this, the massive weapons packages should be
canceled; there is no need to attempt to douse the
raging fires in the Middle East with yet more
sophisticated weaponry.
In addition, if
Iran is to be sanctioned, is it not inherently
hypocritical not to be sanctioning Saudi Arabia in
the same way, since there is more than ample
evidence indicating that fighters, funding and
most likely weapons are pouring across its borders
into Iraq?
The solution must, finally,
include diplomacy and even-handed dealings among
all of the countries in the Middle East, as
opposed to the current model where countries such
as Israel and Saudi Arabia in effect have carte
blanche to do what they may.
Dahr
Jamail has reported from inside Iraq and is a
Middle East expert.
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