Iraq Is New Schism for Saudis in Strained Alliance With West
By Glen Carey - Jan 8, 2014
Few goods transit the desert border between the Middle East’s two biggest oil producers, and Saudi authorities have built a fence to help ensure that political instability in Iraq doesn’t cross over either.
Dysfunctional ties between the countries have come into focus as a wave of violence sweeps Iraq, turning it into another arena where Saudi interests are diverging from those of the U.S. Fighting is centered in Anbar province, bordering Saudi Arabia, where Sunni fighters with ties to al-Qaeda are rebelling against the Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki, which is supported by Iran.
The Saudi view is that Maliki is “aggravating the feelings of marginalization that some Iraqi Sunnis have long complained about, and that are at the root of the current violence,” said Fahad Nazer, a political analyst at Vienna, Virginia-based intelligence analyst JTG, and a former analyst for the Saudi embassy in Washington.
By contrast, the U.S. has offered to help Maliki, and so has Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival. That shows how far the Saudi-American alliance has drifted since the early days of the Syrian civil war, when a similar sectarian divide saw the Saudis and U.S. on one side and Iran on the other.
While there’s no indication that the Sunni fighters in Anbar, led by the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL, are getting Saudi support, the wider Sunni community in Iraq is looking to Riyadh for assistance. Tariq Hashemi, Iraq’s Sunni former vice president, last month called on Saudi Arabia for help.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-08/iraq-is-new-schism-for-saudis-in-strained-alliance-with-west.html