Internal and external dimensions of security have become inextricably linked to regional security threats and domestic challenges in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. The policy dilemma facing officials and regimes in the Gulf is that there appears to be no easy answers to the set of profound political, economic, and security questions that have been triggered by the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The rise of ISIS particularly presents a dangerous new security threat to the GCC states in the way that it transcends national boundaries and interlinks the domestic and regional dimensions, defying easy responses.
The eruption of ISIS onto the regional security landscape in 2014 prompted a range of belated policy responses at both the national and international levels. U.S. concern with the apparent lack of control over charitable-giving and private fund-raising in Kuwait manifested itself in a blunt statement in March 2014 by Treasury Under Secretary David Cohen, in which he said that Kuwait had become “the epicentre of fundraising for terror groups in Syria.” He also noted more generally that a new financial tracking unit set up by the Kuwaiti government to investigate suspicious financial transactions and money laundering was still not operational. Moreover, Kuwait’s Justice and Endowments Minister, Nayef al-Ajmi, resigned in May 2014 after being described by Cohen as having a history of “promoting terrorism.” Ajmi’s ministry came under suspicion for allowing non-profit organizations and charities to collect donations for the Syrian people at mosques in Kuwait, which Cohen argued was “a measure we believe can be easily exploited by Kuwait-based terrorist fundraisers.”
To be sure, much of the support that extended from the Gulf to Syria was neither intended for ISIS specifically, nor necessarily ended up in the hands of militant organizations. It nevertheless remains a challenge for GCC officials to establish with any accuracy the “end-user” at the chains linking the GCC with the range of groups operating along the Syria-Iraq border. ISIS has demonstrated an ability to recruit among disaffected pockets of Muslims worldwide and raise revenues from areas under its control. These have given the organization a degree of strategic depth and operational autonomy that has proven resilient against months of U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and illustrated the weakness of hard security responses.
The ISIS “narrative” also taps into longer memories of violent Islamist contestation of Saudi monarchical power, dating back to the creation of the modern Kingdom in the 1920s. Technocratic responses taken by GCC states, such as placing ISIS (along with the Muslim Brotherhood) on lists of proscribed terror groups, as well as constructing elaborate boundary defences, struggle to address the softer ideological appeal of Sunni extremism among significant elements of Gulf societies. This was reflected in a (admittedly, unofficial) survey of Saudis on social media, which found that 92 percent of respondents believed the ideology of ISIS to be “consistent with the values of Islam and the sharia.” The challenge for ruling elites in the Gulf is that, in the absence of formal opinion polls and legal outlets for the expression of political discontent, there is no accurate gauge for the level of societal support for such extremism.
Risk of blowback has, moreover, been amplified in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, owing to the rise in sectarian identity politics and social polarization that has taken place in both countries in recent years. The uncovering of several organized ISIS-linked cells and groups in Saudi Arabia in 2014 illustrated the growing challenge to internal security in the Gulf well before the start of mass-casualty attacks in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in May and June 2015. A trend that caused alarm among Saudi officials was the discovery that between half and two-thirds of those detained had previously been arrested on terror-related charges. This figure called into question the effectiveness of the high profile de-radicalization and rehabilitation program set up by Prince Mohammad bin Naif bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud in the aftermath of the May 2003 bombings of residential compounds in Riyadh by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
