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Since late 2014 the Islamic State has declared war on Saudi Arabia and launched a series of terrorist attacks on Saudi soil intended to start an uprising. In a further attack on the Saudi kingdom, the self-declared caliphate has claimed to be the true representative of the severe form of Islam indigenous to Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism. These two very different versions of an Islamic state are at war over a shared religious heritage and territory.

Heritage and Homeland Under Siege

• The Islamic State, which draws on the teachings of the Wahhabi school of Islam, finds inspiration in the example of the first Saudi-Wahhabi state (1744–1818), which engaged in expansionary jihad and cultivated a sectarian animus toward the Shia.
   
• The Islamic State has declared three so-called provinces in Saudi Arabia and carried out some fifteen attacks there since November 2014.
   
• The Islamic State’s rise has reignited a debate in Saudi Arabia over the intolerant and aggressive nature of Wahhabism. Liberals have called for a revisionist movement, as they describe it, to expunge certain doctrines from Wahhabism.

Conclusions

• In some ways the Islamic State’s claim to the Wahhabi heritage is not unfounded. The early Wahhabis advanced an exclusivist version of Sunni Islam that was universally seen as a heresy, founded a state that waged expansionary jihad against fellow Sunni Muslims, and killed Shia Muslims because they were seen as hopeless idolaters. The Islamic State has done the same on all three counts.
   
• Other features of the Islamic State’s ideology—from the declaration of a caliphate to the use of extraordinary violence to the group’s apocalyptic fervor—do not find a mainstream Wahhabi precedent.
   
• The Islamic State’s campaign in Saudi Arabia has slowed considerably since October 2015. Despite concerted propaganda efforts, the group appears to be making little headway against a state outfitted with one of the most advanced counterterrorism infrastructures in the world. But given the substantial Islamic State following in Saudi Arabia, more attacks, however occasional, can be expected.
   
• Saudi Arabia is a long way from pursuing meaningful reforms of Wahhabi doctrine. Saudi liberals’ criticism of Wahhabism is tolerated as of early 2016 more than ever before, despite the kingdom’s religious scholars who would prefer the government silence them. But the new political leadership is busy consolidating power, while the religious leadership is defensive and mired in conspiracy theories.

Introduction

For Osama bin Laden, the United States was the “head of the snake”—the primary target of al-Qaeda’s jihad. “Its many tails,” the authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, were deemed of secondary importance.¹

For Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however, it is the regime in Saudi Arabia that is the “head of the snake,” as he has said in a metaphorical revision worthy of note.² This revision by the leader of the Islamic State marks a significant change in the priorities of the global jihadi movement now spearheaded by that group. Notwithstanding the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, this group’s focus is on the Middle East before the West. Its slogan, “remaining and expanding,” is indicative of its foremost aims: entrenching itself in its Syrian and Iraqi territories and conquering new ones. One of those territories increasingly in its sights is Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest places and one-quarter of the world’s known oil reserves.

The competition between the jihadi statelet and the Gulf monarchy is playing out on two levels, one ideological and one material.

Ideologically, the Islamic State presents itself as the true guardian of the particular version of Islam native to Saudi Arabia—that is, Wahhabism, a variant of Salafism.³ Over the past two decades the jihadi-Salafi movement, which encompasses both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, has become more Wahhabi in orientation, its leaders and thinkers rooting their radical ideas in the Wahhabi tradition.⁴ Wahhabism has thus emerged as the most prominent feature of the Islamic State’s ideology. It follows that the conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State can be understood as one between competing models of the same idea, namely, an Islamic state. Both are self-professed Islamic polities claiming to represent Wahhabi Islam.

The competition between the jihadi statelet and the Gulf monarchy is playing out on two levels, one ideological and one material.

Materially, the Islamic State has launched a string of attacks on Saudi soil, targeting Shia civilians and Saudi security forces, and has made its presence official with the establishment of three declared provinces. The latter are, of course, provinces in name only. The Islamic State does not administer or oversee territory in Saudi Arabia; it carries out terrorist attacks in the name of an administrative fiction that it hopes one day to make reality. While for the foreseeable future the provinces will remain fictional, the terrorism intended to realize them is likely to continue.

Throughout 2015, several authors offered rather unfavorable comparisons of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State, some drawing a direct line from one to the other. They pointed out the similar educational curricula used by the two and the shared practice of beheading, among other things.⁵ Kamel Daoud, in a November 2015 New York Times op-ed, argued that “Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it,” referring to the group by the Arabic acronym for its former name—a “dressed up” form of the same thing.⁶ But for the most part these comparisons are wide of the mark, as Saudi Arabia seeks partnership with the West and does not aspire to global conquest.

The comparison worth noting is the one in the minds of the Islamic State’s jihadi thinkers, the idea that Saudi Arabia is a failed version of the Islamic State. As they see it, Saudi Arabia started out, way back in the mid-eighteenth century, as something much like the Islamic State but gradually lost its way, abandoning its expansionist tendencies and sacrificing the aggressive spirit of early Wahhabism at the altar of modernity. This worldview is the starting point for understanding the contest between the kingdom and the caliphate, two very different versions of Islamic states competing over a shared religious heritage and territory.

The Islamic State and Wahhabism

“Wahhabism” is historically a pejorative term, so its adherents generally do not identify as such. But certain words and phrases serve to indicate affiliation. Thus the Islamic State addresses its supporters in Saudi Arabia, the historical heartland of Wahhabism, as “the people of tawhid” (God’s unity) and “the people of al-wala wal-bara” (association and dissociation), appealing to them via the most prominent Wahhabi theological concepts. In doing so, it emphasizes the historical position of the Saudi people as the keepers of the Wahhabi creed. The Al Saud, the royal family, in the Islamic State’s telling, has failed to live up to expectations, selling out the creed. In the group’s imagery, the royal family has become the Al Salul, a designation referring to Abdallah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul, a leader of the so-called “hypocrites” of early Islam who are repeatedly denounced in the Quran.

Competing Models

Historically, Saudi Arabia has pinned its legitimacy on the support it gives to Wahhabism, a theologically exclusivist form of Sunni Islam that arose in central Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century. The government has conferred on the Wahhabi religious establishment the privilege of regulating social order, granting the religious scholars a large degree of control over the judicial and educational systems and allowing them to run a religious police force. In return, the rulers earn the approval of a deeply conservative Wahhabi populace.

By these means, the kingdom’s rulers have long portrayed theirs as an Islamic state, and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who acceded to the throne in January 2015, is no different. The new king has described Saudi Arabia as the purest model of an Islamic state, saying it is modeled on the example of the Prophet Muhammad’s state in seventh-century Arabia. “The first Islamic state rose upon the Quran, the prophetic sunna [that is, the Prophet’s normative practice], and Islamic principles of justice, security, and equality,” he stated in a lecture in 2011. “The Saudi state was established on the very same principles, following the model of that first Islamic state.” What is more, the Saudi state is faithful to the dawa (mission) of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, meaning Wahhabism, upholding the “banner of tawhid” and “calling to the pure faith—pure of innovation and practices having no basis in the Quran, sunna, and statements of the Pious Forbears.”⁷

The Islamic State makes the same claims for itself. It, too, models itself on the first Islamic state, as its early leadership stated upon its founding in October 2006: “We announce the establishment of this state, relying on the example of the Prophet when he left Mecca for Medina and established the Islamic state there, notwithstanding the alliance of the idolaters and the People of the Book against him.”⁸ Another early statement appealed to the Wahhabi mission, claiming that the Islamic State would “restore the excellence of tawhid to the land” and “purify the land of idolatry [shirk].”⁹

The Islamic State, like jihadi groups before it, declares the kingdom’s rulers apostates, unbelievers who have abandoned the religion and must be killed.

The Islamic State, like jihadi groups before it, declares the kingdom’s rulers apostates, unbelievers who have abandoned the religion and must be killed. The judgment derives from their perceived failure to rule in accordance with God’s law, their alliance with the West, and their tolerance of Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, among other things. The Islamic State presents itself not only as the one true Islamic polity on earth but also as the only one faithful to the Wahhabi mission. As early as 2007, the Islamic State claimed to have assumed the role of the “political authority that protects and spreads tawhid.”¹⁰ In contrast to modern Saudi Arabia, it seeks to do so via military expansion, as “Islam recognizes no borders.”¹¹

Which state, it might be asked, has the better claim to this heritage? A review of the relevant history suggests a rather mixed answer.

The First Saudi-Wahhabi State

The history of Saudi Arabia is widely understood as the history of three successive Saudi-Wahhabi states: the first (1744–1818), the second (1824–1891), and the third (1902–present). Unbeknownst to most observers, the Islamic State holds up the first of these as a model to be emulated: an example of an Islamic state that spread tawhid via military conquest, killed the heretics standing in its way, and posited no boundaries to its expansion. The Islamic State is not wrong to see much of itself in the historical first Saudi-Wahhabi state, a radical, expansionary state whose interpretation of Islam was condemned as a fanatical heresy by nearly the entire Muslim world.¹² Here, for example, is a typical description of the founder of Wahhabism by an anonymous contemporary: “He has appointed himself leader and requires that the Muslim community obey him and adhere to his sect. And he compels them to do this by the force of the sword, believing that those who oppose him are unbelievers and deeming it licit to take their blood and property even if they demonstrate the pillars of Islam.”¹³

This first Saudi-Wahhabi state was the product of an agreement reached between the chieftain Muhammad ibn Saud and the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the small desert oasis of Diriyah in central Arabia. The two leaders agreed to support each other, the Al Saud supporting the Wahhabi mission and the Wahhabi missionaries supporting Saudi political authority.

Gradually, the Saudi-Wahhabi state came to encompass most of the Arabian Peninsula, including by 1805 the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Its expansion was predicated on jihad understood as offensive religious war against all manifestations of shirk. As the Wahhabis saw it, most of the world’s Muslims had fallen into shirk, and the Wahhabis’ duty was to eliminate and replace it with true Islam.

In numerous letters, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab explained the basis of his expansionary jihad, arguing that he and his followers were calling people to turn away from idolatry. “For this we are fighting them,” he wrote. “As God Almighty said, ‘And fight them till there is no persecution,’ that is, shirk, ‘and the religion is God’s entirely’[Quran 8:39].”¹⁴ A son of his explained the Wahhabis’ right and duty to conquer all who had learned of the mission and rejected it. “Whoever has received our mission,” he said, “and refused it, remaining upon shirk . . . him we excommunicate and fight. . . . Everyone we have fought has been made aware of our mission. . . . The people of Yemen, Tihama, the Hijaz, greater Syria, and Iraq have been made aware of our mission.”¹⁵

Wahhabis mostly fought fellow Sunni Muslims, but the Shia also came under attack. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab had written that the Shia—“the accursed Rejectionists [al-Rafida]—were the first to bring shirk into this Muslim community.”¹⁶ In 1791, the Wahhabis attacked the Shia areas of eastern Arabia, pillaging towns and killing some 1,500. The court historian of the first Saudi-Wahhabi state justified the attack as a proper response to the Shia heresy—“they had raised a lighthouse for Rejectionism”—and lauded the destruction of Shia mosques—“temples of Rejectionism” (kanais al-rafd).¹⁷

Another massacre of the Shia came in 1802 when the Wahhabis invaded the Shia shrine city of Karbala in Iraq. The Wahhabi armies, according to the court historian of the second Saudi-Wahhabi state, “entered [the city] forcibly, killing most of its people in the markets and in [their] homes. . . . Nearly 2,000 of its men were killed.”¹⁸ The city was pillaged and objects of Shia devotion were destroyed. The commander of the expedition, a grandson of Muhammad ibn Saud, wrote to the Ottoman governor in Iraq to explain his actions: “As for your statement that we seized Karbala, slaughtered its people, and took their possessions—praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds! We make no apology for that, and we say: ‘And like catastrophes await the unbelievers’ [Quran 47:10].”¹⁹

In 1818, the first Saudi-Wahhabi state finally met its demise when the Egyptian army of Muhammad Ali, at the direction of the Ottomans in Istanbul, overran Diriyah after a seven-year campaign. The Saudi capital was razed and its political and religious leaders were exiled or executed. The fanatical heresy of Wahhabism seemed to meet its end.

The Second and Third Saudi-Wahhabi States

Soon after, however, the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance resurfaced in a second state formed in 1824. Growing in fits and starts, the second Saudi-Wahhabi state never attained the power and size of the first, and its political leaders were less ideologically charged. It collapsed in 1891 during a long civil war.

The third and final Saudi-Wahhabi state emerged in 1902 when Abdulaziz ibn Saud, a member of the Saudi family living in Kuwait, took Riyadh and conquered the rest of Arabia in about two decades. In 1932, Abdulaziz renamed his state the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The second Saudi-Wahhabi state never attained the power and size of the first, and its political leaders were less ideologically charged.

At first, the third Saudi-Wahhabi state looked much like the first. The basis of its expansion, as before, was jihad to spread tawhid and eliminate shirk. It took up arms against fellow Sunni Muslims on the grounds that they had apostatized from Islam. As one of the leading Wahhabi scholars in Riyadh, Sulayman ibn Sihman, wrote in a poem to Abdulaziz in 1921 about the opposition in Hail in northern Arabia: “Fight them for God’s sake, for they are an army of unbelief.”²⁰

Ibn Sihman and his colleagues also urged the king to purge the Arabian Peninsula of the Shia. In 1927, they called on him to convert or expel the Shia of the Eastern Province.²¹ Much to the scholars’ chagrin, however, the king allowed the Shia to remain. As the kingdom ceased waging expansionary jihad and began tolerating the Shia, it resembled less and less the first Saudi-Wahhabi state. They may not have liked it, but the official Wahhabi scholars of the kingdom acknowledged that the king was acting in accordance with his prerogative as ruler in calling off armed jihad.

Yet despite this acknowledgment, the Wahhabi scholars of the third Saudi-Wahhabi state held to the radical mold of their forebears for decades to come. They continued to fashion an intolerant and sectarian version of their faith. Thus the jihadis of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, though viewing King Abdulaziz as having betrayed Islam, often quote the scholars who served him, and even those who came after. For example, Turki al-Binali, the thirty-one-year-old Bahraini presumed to be the mufti of the Islamic State, begins one of his books with a poem by Ibn Sihman.²²

As a general principle, jihadis view the first Saudi-Wahhabi state as a political experiment worth emulating and the third Saudi-Wahhabi state as a betrayal.

Generally, the last scholarly authority from the Wahhabi religious establishment accepted by jihadis is Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, Saudi Arabia’s former grand mufti who died in 1969. Yet some jihadi scholars have viewed certain hardline members of the present Saudi religious establishment with favor, even studying with them. Binali, for example, is proud to have studied with the hardliner Abdallah ibn Jibreen. They spent much time together in what Binali called Riyadh’s “Tora Bora quarter,” the al-Suwaidi District, in the mid-2000s.²³ In 2004, Ibn Jibreen wrote Binali a recommendation for the Islamic University of Medina, praising the future mufti’s “commitment to learning.”²⁴

Yet as a general principle, jihadis view the first Saudi-Wahhabi state as a political experiment worth emulating and the third Saudi-Wahhabi state as a betrayal. In a 2013 lecture, Binali reminded his audience that one must differentiate among the Saudi states. “The first is not like the second, and the second is not like the third. The third is the last in sequence and the last in worth.”²⁵

The Fourth Wahhabi State

Indeed, the Islamic State is a kind of fourth Wahhabi state, given its clear adoption and promotion of Wahhabi teachings. In an essay in early 2014, Binali highlighted the resemblance between the first Saudi-Wahhabi state and the Islamic State.²⁶ After “implementing Islamic sharia in Diriyah,” he said, the first Saudi-Wahhabi state “expanded to numerous cities and villages . . . fought people identifying with Islam . . . and was stormed by a mass of accusations and confronted with a flood of lies.” With the Islamic State, he continued, “history is repeating itself in identical fashion.”

Many of the Islamic State’s official publications are classic works of the Wahhabi canon, including some by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself. One of these is a lengthy treatise on the requirement of excommunicating fellow Muslims deemed somehow wayward. In the preface, the editor praises Ibn Abd al-Wahhab for “waging war against shirk . . . in all its forms, inside Arabia and beyond, and waging jihad against all those standing in the way of the mission of tawhid.” He boasts that the Islamic State promotes the very same aqida (creed) that “Sheikh Ibn Abd al-Wahhab adopted, called to, and fought for.”²⁷

Two more official publications of Wahhabi texts include The Four Principles and The Nullifiers of Islam, both also by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The first of these teaches that “the idolaters of our time” (that is, the opponents of the Wahhabis) are “more severe in idolatry” than the idolaters whom the Prophet Muhammad fought in the seventh century.²⁸ The second is a list of ten things that can nullify one’s Islam, in effect rendering one an unbeliever.²⁹ Particularly significant is nullifier number eight, “supporting the idolaters against the believers”—a violation of al-wala wal-bara (association and dissociation). In mid-2015, a video from Deir Ezzor Province in eastern Syria showed a classroom of supposedly penitent Syrians studying the nullifiers with a Saudi teacher and admitting guilt in the matter of nullifier number eight, since they had supported the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.³⁰ Beyond these original texts,³¹ the Islamic State promotes Wahhabism in many other publications. For example, the most important text at Islamic State training camps is a lengthy explication of Wahhabi creed, apparently written by Binali.³²

Online supporters of the Islamic State, who universally embrace Wahhabi theology, have similarly likened the group to the first Saudi-Wahhabi state. The most representative publication in this regard, from mid-2014, is titled “Sheikh Baghdadi in the Footsteps of Imam Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab: The Resemblance Between the Wahhabi and Baghdadi States.” Distributed online by pro–Islamic State media outlets, this highly detailed comparison of the two state-building projects concludes that “the Islamic State is an extension of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s mission [dawa] and state [dawla]—the first Saudi state.” The mainstay of the resemblance, according to the pseudonymous author, is both states’ determination “to fight shirk in all its forms” and to “implement Islamic law immediately upon seizing territory.”³³

A similar article, distributed by the Islamic State’s semiofficial al-Battar Media Agency, described the Islamic State’s mission as “an extension of Sheikh [Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s] mission.” The author, who goes by Abu Hamid al-Barqawi, drew attention to the similar accusations made against the two states by their respective enemies, namely accusations of excess in the takfir (excommunication) and killing of fellow Muslims. He noted that both states were denounced as Kharijites, an early radical Muslim sect.³⁴

These online supporters of the Islamic State also find in the example of the first Saudi-Wahhabi state a model for the group’s current campaign of violence in Saudi Arabia, particularly its atrocities against the Shia. One of the most prominent online jihadi writers, who goes by the pseudonym Gharib al-Sururiyya, cited the first Saudi-Wahhabi state’s raids on the Eastern Province and Karbala to illustrate the continuity between those attacks and the current campaign. Quoting at length the works of the court historians mentioned above, he concluded that the Islamic State’s actions are an extension of the first state’s. “The men of tawhid were attacking and destroying the temples of the idolatrous Rejectionists, unhindered by borders,” he wrote. “And now the Islamic State, may God support it, has broken down borders and attacked the temples of the Rejectionists in the Gulf and elsewhere.” He went on to quote several Wahhabi scholars’ condemnations of the Shia.³⁵

Departures From Wahhabism

The religious character of the Islamic State is, without doubt, overwhelmingly Wahhabi, but the group does depart from Wahhabi tradition in four critical respects: dynastic alliance, the caliphate, violence, and apocalyptic fervor.

The Islamic State did not follow the pattern of the first three Saudi-Wahhabi states in allying the religious mission of Wahhabism with the family dynasty of the Al Saud. It is the fourth in this succession of states only in its Wahhabi component, viewing alliance with the current members of the Al Saud as impossible on account of their impiety. The official poetess of the Islamic State, Ahlam al-Nasr (Dreams of Victory), summed up the group’s position on the matter in a January 2016 essay: “The Al Salul today sanctify themselves by appeal to the mission of the Sheikh [Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab],” but in fact “the sheikh and his mission have nothing to do with these apostates [that is, the Al Saud].”³⁶

The aspiration to the caliphate is another departure from Wahhabism. The caliphate, understood in Islamic law as the ideal Islamic polity uniting all Muslim territories, does not figure much in traditional Wahhabi writings. The Wahhabis could have held up their state as a countercaliphate to the Ottoman caliphate, which they declared a state of kufr (unbelief) until its demise in 1924. But they never did. And in fact it is somewhat ironic that Wahhabism, which began as an anticaliphate movement, should become the instrument of a procaliphate movement.

Violence was by no means absent from the first Saudi-Wahhabi state, as has been seen. But the Islamic State’s gut-wrenching displays of beheading, immolation, and other forms of extreme violence aimed at inspiring fear are no throwback to Wahhabi practices. They were introduced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the now-deceased former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who had been introduced to them by a certain Egyptian scholar in Afghanistan named Abu Abdallah al-Muhajir. It is the latter’s legal manual on violence, popularly known as Fiqh al-dima (The Jurisprudence of Blood), that is the Islamic State’s standard reference for justifying its extraordinary acts of violence.³⁷

The Islamic State’s apocalyptic dimension also lacks a mainstream Wahhabi precedent.³⁸ As William McCants, a scholar of jihadism at the Brookings Institution, has set out in detail in a book on the subject, the group views itself as fulfilling a prophecy in which the caliphate will be restored shortly before the end of the world.³⁹ While the Saudi Wahhabis and the Islamic State Wahhabis share an understanding of end times, only the latter view themselves as living in them.

The Islamic State is, therefore, by no means the inevitable expression of historical Wahhabism. It does bear greater resemblance to the first Saudi-Wahhabi state in its commitment to fighting jihad against perceived heretics, particularly the Shia, than does the modern Saudi kingdom. Indeed, the Islamic State has wantonly killed Shia in the same places in Saudi Arabia where its Wahhabi forebears wantonly killed Shia. But in spurning the traditional alliance with the Al Saud, it has adopted certain ideas about politics, violence, and the apocalypse that the three Saudi-Wahhabi states never did. Nonetheless, those nostalgic for the more aggressive Wahhabism of old could be forgiven for seeing more of this in the Islamic State than in modern Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic State in Saudi Arabia

The Islamic State is divided into different wilayat (provinces), some more real than others. In November 2014, after receiving pledges of bayat, singular baya (fealty), from individuals in Algeria, Libya, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi heralded these territories as new “provinces.” Baghdadi was laying claim to Saudi territory and was encouraging his supporters there to join together. Whereas Baghdadi had previously ordered all the world’s Muslims to make hijra (emigrate) to Iraq and Syria, Saudis were now no longer obliged to join the thousands of their brethren who had gone there to fight. They could fulfill their duty of hijra by building up the Islamic State at home.

First the Shia

Since the November announcement, the Islamic State has indeed been active in Saudi Arabia. Administratively, the group has carved the country into three provinces: Najd Province in central Arabia, Hijaz Province in western Arabia, and Bahrain Province in eastern Arabia (“Bahrain” being an old term for eastern Arabia excluding the modern country of that name). On a popular website run by Islamic State supporters, the three are grouped together as “the Provinces of the Land of the Two Holy Places.”⁴⁰ The provinces have taken responsibility for a variety of attacks in pursuit of a strategy focused on the kingdom’s minority Shia population and Saudi security forces. Seventeen separate security incidents related to the Islamic State were reported between November 2014 and November 2015, including one carried out in Kuwait (see table 1).

The strategy in place was outlined by Baghdadi in his November 2014 announcement (see appendix). Addressing the Saudi people, he said: “Unsheathe your swords! First, go after the Rejectionists [al-Rafida, that is, the Shia] wherever you find them, then the Al Salul [that is, the Al Saud family] and their soldiers, before the Crusaders and their bases.” In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State has acted accordingly, with suicide bombers targeting Shia mosques yielding the most casualties. While there have been more security incidents involving Saudi security forces (nine) than Shia (six), the group has managed to kill more Shia (64) than security forces (25). One attack has been reported against a Western target, a Danish citizen.

The last time jihadis registered this much activity in Saudi Arabia was in 2003–2006, when al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) waged a low-scal