Why Is Saudi Arabia Abandoning Peace?

Excerpt

Saudi Arabia is undergoing a major regional realignment, abandoning the pursuit of an integrated Middle East with a thriving knowledge economy and dusting off the kingdom’s old rhetoric against Zionism and in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood. Last week, Saudi Arabia went as far as lobbying President Donald Trump to spare the Iranian regime, Riyadh’s archrival since 1979.

This followed Saudi Arabia’s parting ways with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over Yemen. The Saudi air force struck Emirati assets and paved the way for its Yemeni allies—mainly the Muslim Brotherhood’s Al-Islah—to expand southward toward Aden. But that was only one piece of the Saudi realignment puzzle.

In Sudan, Riyadh abandoned the Quad Plan it had signed on, which stipulated that the two warring generals—Abdul-Fattah al-Burhan, the chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and Muhammad Daglo “Hemedti”, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—cease fire and hand over the country to civilian leaders.

Saudi Arabia said it would be funding Burhan’s purchase of $1.5 billion worth of Pakistani weapons, in violation of a global embargo on exporting arms to Sudan. Burhan is a holdover from Omar al-Bashir’s Muslim Brotherhood regime. Bashir hosted late Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden when the former planned his attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Nairobi and on the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden. Like Hemedti, Burhan is under US sanctions and is allied with the Sudanese Islamic Movement and its militias. 

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). He focuses on the Gulf region and Yemen.