Saudi Arabia in Syria: Naughty, Not Nice

Saudi Arabia, over the last year, has gone from being a relatively constructive actor in Syria to fueling a jihadist nightmare in the Levant. Information is just now starting to emerge, but reports suggest that Saudi Arabia’s Syria policy has taken a dangerous turn since the U.S. declined to launch military strikes on the Assad regime in September.

After the August chemical weapons attack that killed over 1,400 people near Damascus, the Saudis expected Washington would finally join the conflict on their side. Instead they found themselves feeling abandoned, leading the Kingdom’s intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to warn of a major shift away from the U.S. over Syria. Until recently, Bandar's threat seemed mostly like bluster given Saudi Arabia's historic wariness of foreign military entanglements and chronic dependence on the United States.

But alarmingly, Saudi Arabia has coordinated a merger of rebel battalions in the Damascus area behind a radical Islamist figure named Zahran Alloush, who advocates ethnic cleansing and whose father is a preacher in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia appears to have sustained this support even as Alloush’s group participated in a larger merger between seven radical jihadist rebel groups in late November called the Islamic Front (IF). 

Meanwhile, Saudi funding for the more moderate Free Syrian Army seems to have fallen precipitously. This week, the Long War Journal revealed that one of the IF’s seven militias, Ahrar al-Sham, has its senior ranks packed with longtime operatives for al Qaeda, including one man the U.S. Treasury Department just labeled “al Qaeda's representative in Syria.”

Western officials now indicate that in recent months Saudi Arabia let nearly a thousand individuals leave the Kingdom and join al Qaeda’s affiliates in northern Syria. Dozens of these individuals flew out of Riyadh’s main airport, even though some of them had just been let out of jail or were under travel bans. Others were high-profile Saudi extremists, including Abdullah al-Muhaysini, a Salafist preacher linked to al Qaeda. With this sudden flow of extremists, it’s no surprise that hateful Saudi textbooks appeared in a Syrian province under al Qaeda’s control in October.

Some comparatively moderate Saudi commentators have raised concerns about the Islamic Front, but these concerns have fallen on deaf ears. The Saudi ruling family appears to be actively exporting its jihadists to Syria. In other words, Saudi Arabia’s infamous jihad machine is back in business, backed by Prince Bandar, the Kingdom’s Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef, and – at least tacitly – the king himself.

David Andrew Weinberg is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.