The ISIS proto-state knows how to fight a war. Following the group’s successful simultaneous assaults on Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, ISIS is pressing its advantage. On Thursday, twin car bombs exploded in the center of Baghdad. The attacks targeted the Babylon Hotel, a landmark located on the Tigris River across from the massive United States embassy facility in what used to be the city’s Green Zone. The attack killed 10 and wounded at least 30. A third car bomb that Baghdad police found in the hotel parking lot failed to detonate, or the toll would have been higher.
Foreign affairs analysts have long suspected that ISIS, a primarily Sunni insurgency, cannot capture a sprawling city like Baghdad with its massive Shia-dominated neighborhoods. ISIS’s logistical lines would be too long, the indigenous resistance too fierce, and the cost in lives suffered by the terrorist group’s relatively modest forces too staggering for the city to fall. But others have speculated that ISIS does not need a 10,000-strong occupational force to crush the Baghdad’s will to resist; its present strategy of weakening the city’s defenses with high-yield, low-tech car bombs, and the infiltration of ISIS insurgents into the city concealed in the waves of refugees displaced from Western Iraq will eventually wear down the city’s defenses until the street fighting can begin in earnest.
While ISIS’s threat to Iraq’s greatest city is of grave concern, what should perhaps be more troubling is the Islamic State’s determination to export terrorism abroad. The Sunni insurgency demonstrated that it possesses not only the will but also the capability to mount an expeditionary terrorist campaign.
Last week, ahead of Friday prayers, a Saudi Arabian citizen walked into a mosque in the Kingdom’s Shia-dominated city of Qatif and blew himself up. The suicide assault on the Shiite mosque killed 21 and injured scores more. Shortly after that, the Saudi Kingdom confirmed the accuracy of ISIS’s claim to have orchestrated that attack.
The Saudi foreign ministry soon identified the explosives used in that attack as RDX, a military-grade compound also used in commercial demolition that is the basic chemical used to make C-4 and Semtex high explosives.
It was the largest terrorist attack on the Saudi state since 2004 when al-Qaeda militants targeted a foreign workers compound. “Unlike that attack over a decade ago, Friday’s strike targeted members of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority — a sect that both the Islamic State group and ultraconservatives in Saudi Arabia regularly denounce as heretics,” Fox News reported. Also unlike 2004, ISIS was able to repeat the feat just one week later.
On Friday, another ISIS-linked Saudi man approached a Shia mosque in the city of Dammam. Heightened security ensured that he could not enter that religious facility and, faced with insurmountable adversity, the attacker detonated his suicide explosives in the mosque’s parking lot. Four were killed in that attack, but the death toll would have been much higher had the yet-unidentified terrorist been allowed to enter the mosque.
These attacks come just one month after the Saudi Kingdom reportedly foiled an ISIS-led plot to target the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh with a suicide car bomb. 77 of the 93 people arrested in connection with that attack were reportedly Saudi nationals.
The attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority are not just tactically deft; they are strategically shrewd. Saudi Arabia is presently leading what can only be described as a coalition of Sunni-dominated Middle Eastern nations in a proxy war in Yemen against forces funded, trained, and supported by Shiite-led Iran. Exacerbating internal sectarian tensions inside Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter and a key Western ally for generations, would weaken the Saudi state considerably.
It is difficult to envision the collapse of the Saudi government amid internal tension and external pressure from antagonistic insurgencies presently occupying territory on Saudi Arabia’s northern and southern borders. It is similarly hard to imagine Baghdad falling to the nascent terrorist state. But ISIS has demonstrated that it does not lack for inventiveness and vision. A strategy aimed at igniting sectarian tensions in Saudi Arabia has the same prospects for success in Baghdad, where the heavy hand of Tehran-backed Shiite militias is acutely felt in the city’s Sunni neighborhoods. By contrast, the West’s luminaries have comforted themselves only months ago with the notion that many of ISIS’s present victories were impossible to achieve. Perhaps it is time for Western leaders to start entertaining the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophies of those who write for The Daily Beast.
