Amid Kuwait's heightened alert to the Iranian danger- whether from Iran directly or from Iran's agents in Iraq- this astonishing item lands in front of us:
Kuwait's State Security foiled a new terrorist plot targeting one of the country's vital facilities, arresting a citizen who had joined ISIS before he could carry out his plan, following what the Interior Ministry described as meticulous security monitoring and surveillance.
According to the Kuwaiti statement, the accused had received training in the manufacture of explosives and drones- note the entry of drones into ISIS culture- and had built a drone with which to strike a vital facility.
Shortly before this, Kuwait's State Security detained two adolescents over their contacts with elements affiliated with ISIS and the training they had received in making explosives, with the aim of targeting one of the country's houses of worship. Some may ask:
How can this organization be aligned with Iranian attacks on Kuwait when it brands everyone else as an infidel?!
The answer is simpler than the riddle. In ISIS's religious literature, fighting the near enemy takes priority over fighting the far enemy- and "near" and "far" here are meant in the ideological sense, not the geographic one. I remind the reader again that we are borrowing ISIS's own literature and adopting its lexicon. This ought to go without saying, but some people entertain the strangest illusions.
The texts on the priority of fighting the near enemy over the far are many in the sources of this crowd- ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their offshoots- and it is not my purpose here to catalogue them. I wanted only to point to the theoretical basis of behavior that strikes some as inexplicable.
That is the theory. But cooperation between extremist Sunni organizations and unbridled Shiite ones is nothing new. If we go back to the very origins, we find that the relationship between the founding fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood and its thought and their Shiite counterpart- the Dawa Party, or the early Khomeinist formations, in the tie between Navvab Safavi and Sayyid Qutb- is a relationship dating from the first light of the beginnings.
Security officials in the Gulf states must therefore stay alert to the danger from al-Qaeda and ISIS now, rather than confining their thinking to the danger of Iranian cells. Each of these dangers feeds on the other; when one grows faint, the clamor of the other rises. They are like the relation between night and day, which the sage of Ma'arra captured in an exquisite image:
The gain of the one is reaped from the other's loss; and the night, when it lengthens, robs the day of its span.
The sum of the matter is this: all the tribes of revolutionary political Islam wear the same garment of solidarity and alliance, even when raids pass between them from time to time.
