‘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 control, women live under an extreme version of these restrictions. Aside from the limitations on their daily lives, the reports of what ISIS does to women in areas it captures are truly horrifying. Women kidnapped, raped, murdered, sold as slaves to fighters: the list goes on. Women are often taken and held as sex slaves or other roles when the men in a captured village or town are killed on the spot. The women targeted for such crimes are often non-Sunnis – Shi’a or Yazidi or Christian perhaps – but in some cases they may also include Sunnis who do not accept the extremist definitions of religion demanded by ISIS. In November 2014 CBS News reported an assault on a Sunni tribe in Iraq, in Ras al-Maa, a village near Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, now largely controlled by ISIS. In that attack, a senior member of the local Sunni al-Bu Nimr tribe described how at least 50 people were lined up and shot, one by one, of whom four were children and six were women.
So the punishments unique to women – including rape and forced ‘marriage’ to ISIS fighters – are carried out even as women suffer the non-gender-specific attacks alongside men. Women, indeed whole families, become victims of kidnappings, are forced from their homes, and face the risks inherent in US and coalition air strikes and other attacks aimed at ISIS.
Unfortunately many of the atrocities committed specifically against women are more quantitatively than qualitatively different from misogynistic traditions still in practice in some areas where ISIS has established a base and elsewhere. Forced marriage, for example, including the marriage of young girls, is a widespread phenomenon in poor rural areas of several Arab, African, and Asian countries.
The period of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and its overthrow in the US invasion and occupation that began in October 2001, provides a useful model. Treatment of women under Taliban rule was abysmal: many schools shut down, girls forced to leave school, urban women forced out of many professions, violently enforced restrictions on women’s actions, autonomy, dress, and more. Many girls and women were forced into marriages against their will. The US justified much of its anti-Taliban military engagement in Afghanistan with the language of protecting Afghan women. But it turned out that many of the warlords who had fought and lost to the Taliban, and later came back to fight with the US against the Taliban, held medieval-era views of women’s role in society that were strikingly similar to those of the Taliban.
When the US imposed a modern, more or less gender-equality-based constitution and laws, life improved for a small sector of Afghan women – those in Kabul and the few other large cities. But for the majority of women in the country, things did not get better. Forced marriages were a longstanding custom in many regions of rural Afghanistan (where the vast majority of the population lived), and they did not disappear when the US and its chosen proxies overthrew the Taliban. In fact, anti-Taliban warlords known for committing atrocities at times ended up in powerful positions in post-Taliban Afghanistan, including in the US-backed government.
Aside from the direct attacks on women, ISIS restrictions on women in public life are severe, including limits on schooling, separation of the sexes, prohibitions on many areas of work. There is no question the actions of ISIS are brutal and misogynistic. But it is also true that with the announcement of the Islamic State as a ‘caliphate’, ISIS asserted the goal of building a fully Islamic society, requiring the involvement of whole families, including women and children.
That state-building project is one of the key distinctions between ISIS and other extremist Islamist organizations. Time magazine’s Vivienne Walt described how
in al-Qaeda’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, young armed men holed up on the battlefield far from their families. But in Syria ISIS aims to install a purist Islamic state – an entire new country – as its name denotes. And so ISIS fighters are looking to build lives that are far broader than fighting the war, ones in which they can come home after a day’s battle to a loving wife and children, and home-cooked meals. As such, recruiting women into ISIS is not simply about expanding the organization. It is the essential building block of a future society. ISIS members have said their women do not fight, but are there to help build