Suicide Bomber Kills 13 at Mosque in Southern Saudi Arabia

Ben Hubbard, The New York Times

06 Aug 2015

Image credit: The Independent UK

ISTANBUL — A suicide bomber killed 13 people when he blew himself up on Thursday in a mosque used by security forces in southern Saudi Arabia, the Saudi state news agency reported.

The blast is the most recent in a series of attacks on mosques in the kingdom, with the timing often intended to maximize casualties.

Most of the attacks have targeted mosques belonging to the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia and have been claimed by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which considers Shiites heretics.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Thursday, but the targeting of security forces, another declared enemy of the Islamic State, suggested that the extremist group was involved.

The Saudi Press Agency, the state news service, said the attackers had struck a mosque belonging to a local security force in the region of Asir, in southwestern Saudi Arabia. Ten members of the force were killed, along with three other people.

While Saudi Arabia promotes a conservative interpretation of Islam similar to that of the Islamic State, clerics in the country have denounced the group as misguided and bloodthirsty. Saudi Arabia has joined the United States-led coalition that is waging an air campaign against the group in Iraq and Syria.

But the Islamic State movement has found support in some parts of Saudi society, and thousands of Saudis have traveled abroad to join the jihadists.

In recent months, the Saudi security services have announced the arrest of hundreds of people across the kingdom said to have been supporting the group, planning attacks or promoting its ideology.

But those crackdowns have not succeeded in stopping the attacks. Saudi officials have claimed that the Islamic State’s ability to indoctrinate aspiring militants and communicate with them through the Internet has made it even more difficult to prevent violence.

Leaders of the Islamic State consider Saudi Arabia a heretical state and have called on supporters to carry out attacks inside the kingdom and elsewhere.

An attack outside a Shiite mosque in May left four dead, and in June, a suicide bomber from Saudi Arabia blew himself up in a Shiite mosque in neighboring Kuwait, killing 27.

In July, a 19-year-old Saudi named Abdullah al-Rasheed shot and killed his uncle, Rashid al-Sufyan, a colonel in the Saudi security forces, before blowing himself up at a checkpoint, killing himself and wounding two police officers, the Saudi news media said.

In a voice message attributed to Mr. Rasheed and distributed by the Islamic State after his death, Mr. Rasheed defended the attack.

“Your brother, the apostate, was a loyalist to the tyrants and he was a soldier of theirs,” Mr. Rasheed said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks terrorist activity. “Were it not for him, the tyrants would not exist.”

Islamic State militants have also carried out smaller attacks on Saudi security forces, which the militant group sees as propping up the Saudi monarchy.

© 2015 The New York Times Company

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