Saudis Arrest 93 ISIS Affiliates, Help Stop Terrorist Attacks

The Saudi Arabian Interior Ministry said Tuesday that it has arrested 93 people linked to Islamic State (ISIS), stopping several planned terrorist attacks including one on the United States Embassy in Riyadh. The arrests started in December, and most of those detained are Saudis.

According to Ministry spokesman Major General Mansour al-Turki, authorities disrupted a plot by ISIS affiliates to target the U.S. Embassy with a suicide car bomb in March, but the embassy did not comment on the issue. U.S. officials, however, simultaneously stopped all consular services and diplomatic missions in Jiddah and Dhahran starting March 15^th for a week, indicating probable awareness of the threat.

Furthermore, the arrests included a cell of 65 people in March who were planning attacks on prisons, security forces, and residential compounds. Authorities stopped another group of 15 Saudis who called themselves “Soldiers of the Land of the Two Holy Mosques” and were led by a bomb-making expert.

The same day that al-Turki made his statement, Saudi police arrested suspected ISIS operative Nawaf al-Enezi, a Saudi citizen, for killing two police officers in Riyadh. He was reportedly one of two men ordered by ISIS in Syria to shoot police officers; the other one is in custody. Al-Turki said that al-Enezi’s attack was the fifth one by ISIS on Saudi soil.

Saudi Arabia is part of the U.S.-led coalition bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the jihadist group has called on its supporters to carryout attacks throughout the Sunni Arab state. Riyadh is a leading power in the Middle East as the region’s largest country by area, the world’s largest oil exporter, and the guardian of Islam’s two holiest sites – Mecca and Medina.

ISIS’s expansion throughout the region has secured it territory to operate within the failed states of Iraq and Syria, which it has used to move into Africa and central Asia. Furthermore, the threat of foreign fighters flowing in from around the world, including the West, is another destabilizing force.

Saudi Arabia, which supplied some 2,500 of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria has a vested interest in stopping ISIS and must, along with the other Arab states in the region, actively confront the threat the jihadist group poses.

However, Saudi Arabia has a record of funding terrorism, exporting jihadist ideology, and enforcing Sharia law in its territory no different to ISIS’s own reputation for brutality. In fact 92% of Saudi subjects polled stated that Islamic State “conforms to the values of Islam and Islamic law.”

If Saudi Arabia views ISIS as a national security threat and in direct opposition to its goal of regional stability then it must amend its own behavior and state ideology. Unfortunately, so far there’s little evidence they intend to do so.