RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia’s top religious clerics issued a statement Wednesday banning travel to conflict zones as the country’s conservative religious establishment backs the Al-Saud ruling family’s efforts to defeat the Islamic State.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia’s top religious clerics issued a statement Wednesday banning travel to conflict zones as the country’s conservative religious establishment backs the Al-Saud ruling family’s efforts to defeat the Islamic State.
The scholars criticized clerics who issued religious edicts, or fatwas, justifying terrorism, saying they should be tried in court, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
The statement comes more than a week after senior Saudi scholar Abdulaziz Al Al-Sheikh called on Muslims to fight the Islamic State to “rid people and religion of their evil and harm.”
“Terrorism subjects the nation’s interests to the gravest dangers, and whoever said it’s jihad is ignorant,” the scholars said in the statement.
The committee supports government efforts to crackdown on members of militant groups that include the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, they said.
Saudi rulers have stepped up their attempt to confront the breakaway al-Qaida group at home and abroad after it rampaged through northern Iraq and eastern Syria, and started a recruitment campaign in the kingdom. Security forces have arrested supporters of the Islamic State, while courts have convicted those caught recruiting Saudis to fight abroad.
The kingdom hosted a summit last week in Jiddah with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives of 10 Middle East nations that aimed to build a coalition against the militants. At another meeting four days later in Paris, Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal backed plans to bomb the Islamic State in Syria, saying in his speech that the danger posed by the group “has exceeded its geography.”
The scholars’ statement “is the beginning of an information campaign to counter Islamic State’s religious credibility,” Theodore Karasik, director of research at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, said in response to emailed questions.
“It seems to be a direct result of the meeting in Jiddah with Kerry last week.”
After the summit, attendees vowed collective action in areas from blocking Islamic State’s financing to combating the group’s ideology. U.S. officials say Saudi Arabia has agreed to host training camps for moderate Syrian rebels fighting both Islamic State and the regime of President Bashar Assad.
Leaders of Iran, which backs Assad, and other Shiite communities have repeatedly blamed Saudi Arabia for supporting Sunni militant groups fighting in Middle Eastern conflicts, including in Syria’s three-year civil war
This isn’t the first time the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars closed ranks with the Al-Sauds to combat a threat that could weaken their 82-year rule over the world’s largest oil exporter. During the height of the Arab Spring in 2011, scholars warned that public protests wouldn’t be tolerated.
Under a pact between the Al-Saud family and Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab dating to 1744, Saudi Arabia adopted and promoted the austere Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, according to a Saudi government website.
The scholars support “what is being done by the state to track those who belong to the groups of terrorism and criminality,” including Lebanon’s Shiite-Muslim Hezbollah and Yemen’s Shiite Houthi rebels, they said in the statement. They urged citizens to “support the leadership of this country.”
Saudi security forces cracked down on al-Qaida militants after extremists started targeting foreign nationals and government officials from 2003, including the bombing of two residential compounds in the capital.
Although the last attack against a foreign citizen was in 2007, the threat from militants remains. Authorities said this month they arrested 88 members of a group planning strikes inside the kingdom and elsewhere.
“After the bombings in Riyadh in May 2003, the Saudis have been clear-eyed about the threat such radicals pose,” Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department counterterrorism coordinator who’s now director of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, said in an email.