ISIS Targeting Saudi Arabia

From Defense One:

But today, in Dammam, a city on the Saudi eastern coast, a man dressed as a woman blew himself up outside a Shiite mosque and killed three others. (The attack would have been far more devastating had guards not stopped the bomber from entering the mosque, forcing him back into a parking lot.) ISISnow is bragging that their man reached his target despite heightened security after the group’s first attack in the kingdom just eight days ago. That one, on another Shia mosque in a village called al Qadeeh, killed 21.

What these attacks say is that Riyadh doesn’t have the comforting control over its land that Americans like to believe it does. And if the royal family doesn’t have its territory as buttoned down as Washington assumed, what other weaknesses has it been masking? What other vulnerabilities are now on view?

From Foreign Policy:

The May 22 suicide attack in Qatif, in eastern Saudi Arabia, may indicate the impact of that shift. Late Friday morning, a suicide bomber walked into a Shiite mosque in Qatif, an oil-rich province in the country’s East, as worshippers gathered for prayer. The blast ripped through the Imam Ali mosque, killing at least 19 people and wounding dozens. Photos on social media showed casualties streaming frantically from the wreckage.According to the BBC, citing an Islamic State-linked Twitter account, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault.

 

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