Research & Commentary Results

Hadi flip-flopped again. On Thursday, September 10, Yemeni President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi announced that the government would meet with the Houthi rebels directly and without any conditions at the UN-sponsored negotiating table. As the military buildup for the assault on Sana reaches its final stages, Hadi’s announcement came with a sense of relief that Sana, having endured six months of bombardment from the Saudi Air Force, would be spared a ground assault. But two days later, Hadi reversed and

Looking to capitalize on the momentum from the July 14 nuclear deal, the moderate government of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is now seeking ways to reduce tensions with its regional rivals, particularly Saudi Arabia. This is no small task. Not only must Rouhani convince his domestic critics that mending ties with their arch rival is in Iran’s interest, but he must also get a read on Riyadh’s new leader, King Salman, and the ruling elite.

In recent news from Saudi Arabia: religious police filmed berating a fully veiled woman for not wearing gloves; a cleric’s fatwa against women watching football to prevent them from staring at men’s thighs; and a woman sentenced to 70 lashes for insulting her husband on WhatsApp.^[1] At the same time, the Saudi education ministry released statistics showing that women constitute almost 52 percent of university graduates inside the kingdom, while more than 35,000 female Saudis studied abroad in 2014.

Read the full article on LobeLog.

Three months after Saudi Arabia rounded up a few allies and began an intensive bombing campaign against the rebels known as Houthis across the border in Yemen, a conventional wisdom has developed. “It has not worked,” as The New York Times put it in a front-page article, and it probably can’t work because the strategic goals are too murky, the factions are too entrenched, the rivalries are too intense, and the conflict is too complicated to be resolved by a simplistic solution.

Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-majority state and home to a significant Shi‘i minority, most of whom live in the Eastern Province. The Shi‘a there are mainly of the Twelver sect, which is also the major Shi‘i sect in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The Eastern Province Twelvers are not the only Shi‘a in Saudi Arabia—there are sizable communities of Twelvers in Medina and Isma‘ilis in Najran—but it is they who sit at the center of the Shi‘i political movement in the kingdom.

Read full article at LobeLog.

In the unending panorama of violence that is today’s Middle East, one hopeful note emerged earlier this month with a low-key announcement from Saudi Arabia that drew scant attention from the American news media.

King Salman appointed a military officer, Gen. Thamer al-Sabhan, to be the kingdom’s first resident ambassador in Baghdad since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

The terrorist group known as the Islamic State (ISIS) has its eyes set on Saudi Arabia. Months of threatening to conquer “The Land of the Two Holy Mosques” culminated in an audio message in mid-May delivered by the leader of the group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in which he referred to Saudi Arabia’s government as “apostate leaders.” Since then ISIS has begun carrying out terrorist attacks inside the Kingdom. Two weeks in a row, individuals affiliated with ISIS have conducted suicide attacks against mosques in the Eastern Province, where the majority of Saudi Shi’a live.

This paper is part of a series, titled “Understanding Deradicalization: Pathway to Enhance Transatlantic Common Perception and Practices.” Click here to view the full series, or navigate using the table of contents to the right.

Introduction

After initially rejecting the UN call for talks, the Saudi-backed Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi faction reversed its position and agreed to meetings in Geneva on June 14.

King Salman’s reign of four months has brought dramatic changes to Saudi Arabia’s succession framework. Prince Muqrin was appointed as heir before being relieved of his duties in favor of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was designated as heir to the heir. A son of the monarch, MBS carries a variety of additional portfolios, including that of minister of defense and chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA), which makes policy on non-security matters.

Whatever eventually comes of the security agreements and mutual pledges of support made at last week’s summit conference between President Obama and leaders of the Arab Gulf monarchies, one result is clear: Saudi Arabia and the others may not be enthusiastic about the pending nuclear agreement with Iran, but they will not actively oppose it.

This article was co-written by Sigurd Neubauer. Read the full article on Foreign Affairs.

In this MEI Policy Paper, Ross Harrison asserts that a new regional order is emerging out of the conflicts of the Middle East. The relationships among the pillars of this order–Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran–are crucial, as they will largely determine “whether the future of the Middle East will be a continuation of the current chaos and destruction or a more positive transition toward stability and prosperity.” Harrison argues that global powers must concentrate on creating conditions conducive to cooperation among the pillars.

This article was first published on Foreign Policy‘s South Asia Channel.

Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen is not surprising given Riyadh’s past policies and current perspectives on Gulf security. Yemen has always suffered from varying degrees of chaos and civil strife. Even in the best of times, large areas of the country lacked government control, and few if any in the region saw it as a functioning nation state. Whatever Gulf Arab leaders may have said publicly, most have viewed Yemen as a loose collection of autonomous or even independent regions, held together only by the lines drawn on a map.