Analysis - Saudi role in Syria driven by fear of Shi'ite 'full moon'

A Free Syrian Army fighter walks through the rubble of damaged buildings in Aleppo's al-Sayyid Ali neighborhood, June 18, 2013. REUTERS/Muzaffar Salman By Angus McDowall (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief, Prince Muqrin, once told American diplomats the Middle East's so-called Shi'ite Crescent where the Muslim sect holds sway was "becoming a full moon" as Iranian influence spread. For the kingdom's Sunni ruling princes, that fear, revealed in a 2009 U.S. embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, now focuses on Syria. Iran-backed President Bashar al-Assad's forces are advancing with the aid of Lebanese Hezbollah Shi'ite fighters, while Riyadh supports the Sunni rebels fighting against him. It is a war increasingly seen in Riyadh as the fulcrum of a wider geopolitical struggle with Iran, a country it believes is radical, expansionist and militant, and a potential threat to Saudi Arabia itself. "If the Syrian government wins, it will prove to other Arab countries that Iran is able to protect its allies in the region. This will undermine Western alliances and Western allies," said Abdulaziz al-Sager, head of the Gulf Research Centre in Jeddah. Since the fall of Syrian rebel stronghold Qusair this month, there has been growing unease in Saudi Arabia's dusty capital Riyadh about the opposition's chances. Riyadh has been backing the mainly Sunni rebels with arms, money and political support, while Western countries, above all the United States, have given mixed signals, calling for Assad's downfall but refusing so far to send arms or use force. The Western position changed dramatically last week when U.S. President Barack Obamasignalled that Washington would arm the rebels. But he has not yet explained how or when that might begin, and Saudis are still sceptical of Western support. Two months ago, Saudi Arabia expanded its own weapons supply to include anti-aircraft missiles, a Gulf source said, adding that the world's top oil exporter had started taking a more active role in the conflict. While more Saudi-supplied weaponry is likely headed to the Syrian opposition, there is a growing view among senior Saudis that it is no longer enough to just give the rebels arms and advice, diplomats in the Gulf say. Instead, the four men running Saudi Arabia's Syria policy - King Abdullah and three of his nephews - Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan and National Security Council deputy chief Prince Salman bin Sultan - want more U.S. involvement, said the sources. "They've been saying for a while the international community is not doing enough in Syria but they thought the opposition could manage. They are really worried about the attitude in Washington," said one diplomatic source in the Gulf. STEEL CLAWS So worrying is the situation, as seen in Riyadh, that King Abdullah cut short his summer leave in Morocco to fly home on Friday, warning of the "repercussions of events in the region". The suggestion of concern prompted a sharp drop in Saudi stocks. Underpinning Saudi worries is the participation in Syria of Shi'ite militia from neighbouring countries, particularly Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iraq's Abu Fadhl al-Abbas Brigade, which Prince Turki al-Faisal, another former Saudi spy chief, this week described in an interview as Iran's "steel claws". Influential Saudi commentator Jamal Khashoggi, in an article for newspaper al-Hayat, painted what for Saudis is a frightening picture of the Gulf after an Assad victory. Iran would threaten Saudi security and angry Sunni youth would respond by turning to al Qaeda, the militant network that is as hostile to Shi'ites as it is to the West. "A nightmare, don't you think?" he wrote. Since Hezbollah started to trumpet its involvement in Syria, Sunni clerics, including some from Saudi Arabia, have used increasingly sectarian rhetoric in their attacks on Assad. Yet while Saudi Arabia's official Wahhabi school of Islam sees Shi'ites as heretical, the kingdom's rulers also see sectarian language as potentially dangerous, said one diplomatic source in the Gulf. They believe openly sectarian rhetoric can backfire by helping mobilise Shi'ites in support of Assad as much as it fires up the rebellion. Worse still, it alienates potential backers in the West and draws Sunni militants to the conflict that can later pose a threat to Riyadh. Throughout the rebellion, Saudi Arabia has feared a repeat of previous conflicts in Iraq andAfghanistan when large numbers of Saudis joined what they saw as a jihad only to return to the kingdom and take up arms against the government. Saudi officials have repeatedly warned that citizens who go to fight face prison upon their return, and have tried to funnel charitable donations for Syria through state channels to avoid cash going to militant groups. CONSTRAINTS While some Saudis, including Khashoggi, are calling for the kingdom to take tougher independent action against Assad, diplomats in the Gulf say its role is constrained by its limited capacity for sustained military action. Although the Saudi air force is well equipped, it performed poorly in a brief border war with a Yemeni rebel group in 2010, U.S. embassy cables released by WikiLeaks said at the time. And, while Saudi forces engaged Iraq's army in the 1991 Gulf War, they fought only on Saudi soil. Striking an Arab, Muslim country is problematic for the birthplace of Islam, which aims to be perceived as neutral custodian of Islam's holy places. With limits on what it can do itself, it needs Washington to help fight its battles. "Russia remains committed. Iran remains committed. The Western allies are not committed to the degree and level you would like to see. That raises an important issue. In this way Assad can win," said Sager. The desire to push Washington to take a bigger role contributed to a recent flurry of diplomatic activity, as Prince Saud and Prince Bandar travelled to Paris for top-level meetings. However Riyadh is well aware of the difficulty of persuading Obama to be tougher while Syrian rebels remain fractured and their strongest units are so ideologically militant. That means playing down the struggle's sectarian side. "You need to reduce the political risk to Obama, and that means repositioning the opposition as humanitarian, rather than Islamist. It's difficult," said a diplomatic source. (Reporting By Angus McDowall; Additional reporting by Amena Bakr in Dubai; Editing by Peter Graff)

An Imam is an Imam — and a non-imam is a non-imam

by Abu Dharr June, 2013 Imam Khomeini (ra) whose death anniversary falls this month (June 3) was an outstanding leader whose courage and convictions brought about meaningful change in Iran after the Islamic revolution. Other leaders, primarily in Egypt and Tunisia have failed to adopt bold policies. Sometimes we are forced to say the truth even when it hurts. And this month, on the occasion of the 24th anniversary of Imam Khomeini’s heavenly departure, we are forced to set the record straight as to his extraordinary leadership qualities. Today everyone is looking at the “Arab Spring” and the leaders that have stepped forward to take their countries in an Islamic direction. Currently there are three or four countries that occupy center stage in this regard: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria. We will spare ourselves the particular details about Libya and Syria as they are too numerous and too viscous to come to terms with. They are obviously not within the jurisdiction of any type of Islamic leadership worthy of its name. So we are left with Tunisia and Egypt. Here we have decision makers who belong to Islamic consciousness and Islamic ambition. So we will place these two countries side by side with Islamic Iran when it was in its formative years; that is, when Imam Khomeini was leading the people into an Islamic future. On the first count, consider how the country’s constitution was drawn up. That was done with all its requirements within the first year of the Imam’s return to Iran. And what do the detractors (Islamic ones, mind you) say about the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran? They say that one of its articles stipulates that the state religion shall be Shi‘i Islam of the Twelver persuasion (Ithna ‘Ashari). What’s wrong with that? This constitution was meant for the people in Iran who are predominantly Shi‘i Twelver Muslims. Knowing that these constitutions are meant for a particular population and not for the rest of the Muslim world, would anyone take issue with the Islamic movement in Tunisia working out its own constitution saying that the state religion shall be Islam with the Maliki fiqh as its choice? Or the Hanafi fiqh in Egypt? The problem is we don’t even have what may pass as an Islamic constitution (peculiar to Tunisia or Egypt) yet. All that was done in Egypt was to rewrite a secular constitution that has been embellished with Islamic symbolism: alphabetic characters and arbitrary (Islamic) visible clues. We need an Imam Khomeini in Egypt and in Tunisia who can summon the will of the people to endorse a constitution that invokes independence and sovereignty. Now we ask: why can’t the leadership in Egypt and Tunisia, with its top-heavy Islamic personalities, deal decisively with their opponents — some that are “Islamic” and others who are secular or averse to an Islamic state? Under the able leadership of Imam Khomeini, the mellow Muslims were weeded out. Case in point were personalities like Mahdi Bazargan, Ibrahim Yazdi, Sadeq Qutbzadeh, Abu al-Hasan Bani Sadr, etc. How come we have not heard of such a filtering process in Tunisia and Egypt? Or are the Bazargans, Yazdis, Qutbzadehs, and Bani Sadrs now the leaders themselves in Tunisia and Egypt? The Muslims in Tunisia and Egypt would be missing an Imam Khomeini if they really know what is being done to them. Then we had, within the first couple of years after Imam Khomeini instituted an Islamic state, the terrorist acts of blowing up the headquarters of the Islamic participatory party (Jumhuri Islami) with the martyrdom of over 70 leading figures, among them Dr. Sayyid Muhammad Beheshti Shaheed; this was accompanied by the targeted terrorist assassination of Ayatullah Mutahhari and Dr. Mufatteh. And there were other criminal acts that were meant to cripple the leadership of the Imam and the Islamic resolve of the people, but that did not happen. In Tunisia and in Egypt there hasn’t been any equivalent development. Would the explanation be that the leaderships in these two countries are US compatible? As we know now, most of the early assassinations and terrorist activities in Islamic Iran are traced to the US government and its proxies. On the other hand, we have violent groups and individuals in Syria, not so much in Libya, who are killing at a scale that dwarfs the killings in the early years of Imam Khomeini’s leadership. Those criminal and terrorist acts in Islamic Iran in the early days were mostly attributed to the violent and lawless organization, Muhajideen-e-Khalq (MEK). The Imam was fearless and decisive with this hooligan and condemnable bunch. They were forced to flee the emerging Islamic state and find refuge in every capital of the world that declared Islamic Iran and Imam Khomeini’s leadership enemy number one. Not to be lost on the handlers and coaches of such troublemakers, the US regime and its flunkies have metamorphosed the MEK into its al-Qa’ida clone with “Sunni-Shi‘i” divergences. We are beginning to see evidence of this in the Tunisian Ansar al-Shari‘ah battlering with the ruling al-Nahdah party. The Muslims miss the decisive character of Imam Khomeini in North Africa. One of Imam Khomeini’s first decisions was to close down the Israeli embassy in Tehran and expel the Zionist enemies from Iran. Compare that with the inability of the “Islamic” leadership in Egypt to break off diplomatic ties with the Israeli Zionist regime, which nowadays is maneuvering to physically occupy al-Masjid al-Aqsa and thwart access to the first qiblah and third haram to all Muslims. It gets worse: the Egyptian Islamic decision makers cannot open the borders between Egypt and Ghazzah. Egypt needs an Imam Khomeini. When Imam Khomeini began building an Islamic state in Iran he demanded justice be done to the fleeing Shah of Iran. The Shah had to beg for residency in different countries until he was finally appended to his American cooperator Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat in Egypt. The Islamic leadership in Iran with Imam Khomeini pursued the Shah until he finally went to his Maker where he will encounter ultimate justice. Correlate that with the official Egyptian inability to pass final judicial judgment on Hosni Mubarak the Pharaoh. Or correlate that with the disability of the Tunisian (Islamic) leadership to pursue and prosecute Zine al-Abidine bin ‘Ali who took refuge in the evil kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Why doesn’t the Tunisian government ask for the extradition of Bin ‘Ali to Tunisia to stand in a court of law where he will be answerable for his official presidential conduct and state policies, one of which forced Rachid al-Ghannoushi into exile at the behest of the security apparatus? It turns out that not all exiles are the same. Imam Khomeini was forced into exile by the Shah, but when he came back he sought the Shah and expended all that was necessary to bring him to a court of law. Rachid al-Ghannoushi was forced into exile, but when he came back to his home country he would not or could not pursue Bin ‘Ali, who had forced al-Ghannoushi into fugitive status. Then we have the eight-year war of aggression that was imposed upon the Imam and the Muslims in Islamic Iran. The leadership there did not buckle under those hard times. Imagine if such a war were imposed on any of the leaderships in the countries mentioned above; would they have the stamina to fight to the bitter end? Would they have the popular support to withstand all the trials and tribulations that come from a long and grinding war? The way things look, we seriously doubt it. The Egyptian (Islamic) leadership is not doing what is right and what is obligatory — cutting off diplomatic relations with Zionist Israel — precisely for the reason of avoiding such a war. Here we have it: the Islamic leadership of Imam Khomeini doing what is right and obligatory — come what may; and the “Islamic” leadership of the Ikhwan avoiding doing what is right and obligatory for fear of the consequences. The concept of tawakkul seems to be alien to our brothers in Cairo and Tunisia. Imam Khomeini called a spade a spade, as it were. He did not mince words when he wedged the descriptive marker Shaytani buzurg (the Colossal Satan) on the Washington regime. Compare Imam Khomeini with Mohammad Mursi in their interviews with the Euro-American press. Correspondents from the Euro-American media were scrambling to secure an interview with the Imam. But in Egypt and Tunisia interviews are by the dozen. Imam Khomeini had foreign correspondents stirred up and strained. But in interviews with al-akh Mohammad Mursi he talks to them about his years in the USA and his remarks about the film Planet of the Apes; and we have Shaykh Rachid al-Ghannoushi saying quite frankly that he is not a Khomeini. Thank you — you said it all. And, by the way, how many times have you come to Washington, DC since ascending the seat of power in Tunisia? We have lost count. What a difference between an imam whose base of popularity is the hearts and aspirations of the Muslims — Imam Khomeini — and those who are going along with an American Israeli plan executed through the agencies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, et al. to try to smother the Islamic awakening that took place between an Imam and an Ummah. And We raised among them leaders who, so long as they bore themselves with perseverance and had faith in Our authority and power messages, guided [their people] in accordance with Our behest… (32:24). Pull quote: One of Imam Khomeini’s first decisions was to close down the Israeli embassy in Tehran and expel the Zionist enemies from Iran. Compare that with the inability of the “Islamic” leadership in Egypt to break off diplomatic ties with the Israeli Zionist regime…

Implications of Qusayr's re-capture by the Syrian army

Implications of Qusayr's re-capture by the Syrian army Beirut, Crescent-online- June, 2013 Western media pundits are tearing their hair out over the rebels' defeat in Qusayr. It may prove a gram-changer in the 27-month long Syrian turmoil After the signal victory won by the Syrian army (SAA) over the rebels and merecenaries in the town of Qusayr, the global media is busy assessing the significance of the event. The Western media is busy spinning Qusayr as the insidious influence of Hizbullah over the free will of the Syrian people. In particular, the war-thirsty French media has been proliferating reports that the SAA has been dousing people with sarin gas—while ground reports suggest that NATO and rebel forces are far more likely to be the source of such chemical attacks. In strategic terms, the math is quite different. As reported by Pepe Escobar for Asia Times Online, “[t]his is a monster strategic defeat for the NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council-Israel axis. The supply lines from Lebanon to Homs of the Not Exactly Free Syrian Army (FSA) gangs and the odd jihadi are gone.” According to Sheikh Naim Qassem of Hizbullah, the fall of Qusayr is a blow to the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Sunni extremist groups. “The victory in Qusayr is a sharp blow to the American-Israeli-Takfiri project and a glowing moment for the resistance project in Syria and there is no point to the cries of the international and regional political media in trying to change the historic and geographic realities,” he said on Hizbullah’s Al Manar station. According to American and Israeli military strategists Syria was meant to be a testing ground par excellence to the explosion of the Middle East. According to their specialists, they were planning to pit Hizbullah’s fighters against Sunni extremist groups, heat up the “Persian” versus “Arab” fault line, as a way to topple the government of Bashar al-Asad. All the while, they intended to overstretch Hizbullah in order to give Israel carte blanche over southern Lebanon once more. This defeat may signal the beginning of direct war, involving the US Marines stationed in Jordan in preparation for intervention. A diplomatic report this week from a European embassy seen by the Monitor noted that Hizbullah "has given the regime a much-needed injection of fresh forces to conduct offensive operations." According to the report, "It is unrealistic that it can give the regime the opportunity to capture significant areas back from the rebels, but it may make it impossible even in the medium term for the rebels to tip the military balance." With Turkey, the other principal backer of the rebels and mercenaries, engulfed in its own internal crisis, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has his hands full and may not be able to offer any significant help. In fact, the Syrian government has been quick to offer him a dose of his own rhetoric. The retort by Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi to Erdogan to “stop the violent repression” and “respect people’s wishes” has riled the Turkish pasha considerably. Meanwhile, the people of Qusayr who had fled the fighting have started returning to their homes, many of them badly damaged due to prolonged strife. On Sunday June 9 a rally was organized in the centre of town led by Homs governor, Ahmed Munir Muhammad who vowed that he would spare no effort to rebuild the town and restore essential services as soon as possible.

Imam Khomeini: the battle for hearts and minds

by Afeef Khan June, 2013 One of the essential pre-requisites for leadership is to set a directional course and motivate people to follow it. This is what Imam Khomeini (ra) achieved and brought about the Islamic revolution in Iran. Imam Khomeini won the battle for Muslim hearts and minds. America and the Zionists lost. He feared Allah (swt) and had no fear of presidents, princes, shahs, and any other human rivals to Allah (swt). He won because he had the clarity of conviction that translates into the ability to lead, in short, to be an imam. The function of leadership is to produce transformational change. Effective leaders accomplish this by setting a directional course, aligning large groups of people to that course, and by motivating them to hold themselves accountable for their commitments of learning through action and deliberation. In the past 250 years for Muslims, no Islamic leader did this better than Imam Khomeini. True, there have been leaders of Islamic movements, but he was the only one to achieve success as a true imam. But this was no accident. Setting a new direction is fundamental to leading. A new directional course requires intellectual clarity. This is the greatest gift an imam can offer to his hungry Muslim constituencies: having the confidence to know what to do in any given situation, having the confidence to engage in a rational process that allows the best ideas to dominate, and that does not require the validation of other human beings, especially those who have divided, in a binary way, the world into inferiors and superiors where the inferiors always require the endorsement of the self-declared superiors. This is how imperialists and Zionists look at the world, driving a wedge into the natural human tendency to co-associate. In point of fact, all human beings are inferior and Allah (swt) is their superior and as such all actions are to be validated according to Allah’s (swt) revealed reference points for humanity: the Qur’an and the prophetic precedent. Truth requires no human approval and it certainly needs no behavior of a preferred class to authenticate it. Truth is self-evident to anyone who thinks about it. Human activity is to be judged by Allah’s (swt) criterion of right and wrong, and right and wrong does not “rise” to the level of palatability by the “standard” and behavior of those who hold temporal power or prominence. Setting a directional course creates a sense of urgency, produces an overall vision to strive for along with a strategy to get there, and satisfies the needs and rights of important constituencies in society. The Imam lived his entire life with a sense of urgency. All of us who remember Imam Khomeini know that in his executive capacity as head of state, he came out and immediately connected domestic oppression and degradation to its global counterpart in Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Paris, and Riyadh. Throughout his scholarly career and when he stepped onto the world stage, he rejected all Western ideological and philosophical ruminations, and thereby marginalized any governmental implementations based on these theories in the East and the West as being inconsistent with Allah’s (swt) command, the Prophet’s (pbuh) counsel, and the people’s liberation. He showed his people that capitalism and communism were cut from the same cloth, and thus he was the first modern leader to break from the ideological stranglehold the West held over ideas that translated into representative political institutions whose goal was to satisfy the needs of all the people, and not some special interests. The full force of his lifelong resistance culminating in a decade of rule over an Islamic state showed all people that divinely inspired universal principles of social justice are fundamentally incompatible with the Western discourse and practice of governance, despite the high-sounding rubric of democracy, free markets and globalization. As a world leader with a vision, he even advised, in vain, Mikail Gorbachev, to liberate his people from the obvious problems besetting all Western societies in their dissociation from God. Often when Muslims are queried about the one major problem in their societies, they say it is education, usually of a scientific, professional or technological nature, that is, medicine, engineering, information technology, environmental science, etc. Few Muslims, although this is changing, will point to unresponsive political institutions and impotent rulers. Imam Khomeini was not similarly confused. He knew that he had to separate the coordinated activities of his people from dead-end pursuits. He knew that an Islamic directional course would clarify what kind of education is essential and what kind is irrelevant. He wanted his people in particular, and all Muslims in general to understand that they need not look too far away to Oxford, Harvard, and even al-Azhar (in the depleted state it is in because of the legacy of Egyptian autocracy), that knowledge and wisdom come from the fountainhead of Allah’s (swt) guidance. The Imam did not initiate a policy to go out and build scores of universities so that his people could put a man on the moon; indeed he put his people on a collision course with those power structures who thrive on creating human conflict so that they can dominate. In this task, the nascent Islamic event in Iran found itself alone. It had no choice but to rely on Allah (swt). And in this process, it discovered and released its innate human potential.