What Goes Around Comes Around: Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti calls on Muslims to fight IS militants

Saudi Arabia's top cleric has urged confrontation with the "oppressive" Islamic State (IS) group if it fights Muslims after seizing swathes of Iraq and Syria, media reports said Sunday.

 

"This group is aggressive and oppressive. It sheds blood," Al-Eqtisadiah daily quoted Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh as saying.

 

"If they fight Muslims, then Muslims must fight them to rid people and religion of their evil and harm," he said in a response to a request from an Iraqi for a fatwa or edict on fighting IS.

 

"They have been killing ever since they began their fight. Their killing is filled with mutilations and hideousness that distort [the image of] Muslims," Sheikh said.

 

His remarks come as the United States seeks to build a broad-based international coalition to fight the IS, which has carved out a stronghold in large areas of Syria and Iraq.

 

The United States last month launched air strikes against the militant group in Iraq, in support of government forces and allied tribesmen, as well as Kurdish peshmerga fighters in the north.

 

Last month, the desert kingdom's highest religious authority branded Al-Qaeda and IS jihadists Islam's "number one enemy", and warned Muslim youths to steer clear of "calls for jihad" issued on "perverted" grounds.

 

On 29 June King Abdullah said “we will not allow a handful of terrorists, using Islam for personal aims, to terrify Muslims or undermine our country and its inhabitants."

 

Analysts said Gulf States have previously avoided confronting domestic funders of the group and are coming under increasing US pressure to confront the group.

 

“ISIS [IS’ former name] could not have come about without the Gulf States turning a blind eye to funding,” Toby Matthiesen, a Gulf expert at the University of Cambridge, told The Guardian last week. “It’s this ad hoc mentality where they do something and don’t think of the consequences. They felt they occupied the moral high ground.”

 

“They wanted Assad to go but now are confronted with people who want to take over Mecca and Medina on the basis of Salafi Wahhabi ideology. Monarchs don’t fit into that. Potentially there are a lot of ISIS supporters in Saudi. It is really tricky situation for them and they are under heavy pressure from the west to show they are fighting ISIS.”

 

IS has faced increasing condemnation from across the region, including damnation by public figures linked with Al-Qaeda.