Саудовская Аравия. Новые вызовы королевству

Азия и Африка сегодня. 2022. № 9. С. 53–69.

Васильев А. М.

The appearance of American troops and their allies in Saudi Arabia in 1990 and their war against Iraq in 1991 strengthened U.S. dominance in the region, but at the same time exposed internal contradictions in Saudi society. They manifested themselves in the split into supporters and opponents of the monarchy and the House of Saudis, the ideological struggle between the former Wahhabi allies and the Muslim Brotherhood both inside the kingdom and throughout the Middle East. Dogmatic disputes led to the fact that supporters of the "brothers" and the Sahwa movement (a hybrid of Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood) questioned the very legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy and led the Islamists to a harsh anti-American position. These contradictions gave rise to Al-Qaeda, which declared a global jihad against the West, and at the same time against the monarchical regimes of the Persian Gulf. The terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001 They gave Washington a pretext for invading Afghanistan, and after a successful blitzkrieg, they pushed Washington to occupy Iraq under far-fetched pretexts of creating nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein's regime. The consequences for Saudi Arabia were the intensification of Sunni-Shiite contradictions at the domestic and regional levels and the explosion of terrorism in the kingdom itself. The Sunni-Shiite contradictions after the formation of a Shiite-majority government in Iraq turned into a cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This created new hotbeds of tension in the region and prevented compromises from being reached.

Keywords: Saudi Arabia, Саудовская Аравия, the political structure of Saudi Arabia, The Gulf War, The invasion of Iraq, Wahhabis, политическая структура Саудовской Аравии, война в Заливе, вторжение в Ирак, ваххабиты