In December, Mohammed al-Shamrani, a Saudi military pilot participating in a training exercise at the U.S. naval base in Pensacola, Florida, shot three American servicemen and injured eight others. According to information recently released by the Justice Department, the shooter was an al-Qaeda operative who had been planning the attack for some time. The Pentagon has responded with an effort to improve its vetting procedures for participants in such joint exercises, but John Hannah and Varsha Koduvayur argue that more must be done:
Beyond the narrow issue of vetting lies the broader problem of Saudi Arabia’s historical role as proselytizer-in-chief of Wahhabism, the ultra-conservative religious ideology that has set so many young Muslims on the path toward violent jihad. To his credit, Saudi Arabia’s de-facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, declared in 2017 that the kingdom was returning to “moderate Islam.” Since then, he’s declawed the dreaded religious police, jailed radical preachers, and implemented far-reaching reforms, including all-important efforts to empower women. By most accounts, the Saudis are now largely out of the business of pouring resources into spreading Wahhabism abroad as well.
But the Frankenstein’s monster that they did so much to create lives on. That’s why it’s important that the Saudis be pressed to do everything in their power to help fight the threats that their previous policies left behind. The fact is that Shamrani was a teenager in high school when he succumbed to al-Qaeda’s siren song, imbibing the hate-speech that still lingers today in Saudi textbooks—more than a decade after Riyadh first promised Washington that they’d be excised. Alas, as documented in a recent report, the kingdom’s texts still truck in hate-filled passages that refer to Jews and Christians as “the enemies of Islam and its people.”
[The Saudi response to the Pensacola shooting] represents a dramatic reversal from the denial and deflection that characterized the Saudi reaction to 9/11. But it’s important that the Saudis follow through with action. There’s no doubt a lot they could learn by conducting a deep dive into Shamrani’s life. . . . Indeed, rather than having to wait four months for FBI engineers to hack Shamrani’s phones to discover his al-Qaeda connections, one might have hoped that a vigorous Saudi investigation would have already uncovered such links.
Read more on The Hill: https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/501594-pensacola-shooters-al-qaeda-link-underscores-need-to-hold-saudis-to