Arab-Iran Conflict

Arts & Culture History
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Whats the history behind this conflict?

Some of my Shia friends believe that the Americans are behind this conflict, who are controlling Saudis and other Arab countries to get revenge from Iran for defeat of American supported Shah during Islamic revolution.

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Oil is the main problem.

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Yes but both Iran and Saudi Arab has enough resources of oil for their needs. So you agree that its America who want tussle between Saudi & Iran?

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Not only in Saudi & Iran but in all other countries where he see future benefits for its interest. That is why US Navy base were opened as many as US can to keep an eye on every internal / external affairs.

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How was the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arab before Islamic revolution in Iran? I was told by one of my Shia friend that after Imslamic revolution hundreds of Irani Haji were killed in Makka just because they chanted 'America Murdabad' slogan there.

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i think KSA rulers are more interested in defending their own dynasty.....as far as iran is concerned at least it tries to portray some ideals.....

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Yes the general perception of Saudi Arabia is negative when it comes to its relationship with USA. I think at the time of Shah Faisal, there was no conflict between Saudi Arab and Iran. Probably Shah Faisal was killed as he was working for harmony of Muslims.

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taking revenge is never the core approach of Americans, these are his strategic necessities and compulsion, Recently I had see joint naval exercise of Vietnam and US because Chinese are new people in the race. American interests in Iran are mainly due to Israel, best of Iran's missiles can't reach american mainland.

It is biggest curse but also it is boon of nature to them:)

Is US responsible for tussle between India and Pakistan, Persian and Arabs have history of fighting plus it is their ego which comes in between, who would blink first is matter of ego and of course US doesn't want to see any positive development either:)

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Agreed that there were ego problems between Pakistan- India & Iran-Saudi Arabia, but US exploited these differences for its own benefits. It used Pakistan against Russia and exploited it in war on terror and still interfering in Pakistan's internal matters and alleged to be the supporter of militants who are involved in sectarian killings in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia has been portrayed as a state working for the interests of US / Israel and supporting the groups killing Shias in Pakistan.

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this is why I always term Americans as smartest people, America can think like Iran,India,Arab,Pakistan etc but none of these country can think like America:) To defeat jews, hitler made germans to think like Jews. Many esteemed companies were established in Nazi Germany:), to defeat america one has to think like america, Think tanks are his biggest asset, they have expert professors, Indologists, Af-Pak specialist, while other countries are in process of learning predictions, americans calculate. It is 100% literate country what is status of above mentioned countries, we all know. Secondly, how different would be Iran,India,Pakistan,KSA if they become superpower like America??

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Persians have been an empire at one time or the other and I think the arab conquest did not sit down well with them considering they looked down upon them. I think when they were conquered in Umar (RA) time, they had dismissed him and the arabs as not worthy of being opponents, terming them as the camel milk drinkers. Before shiism conveniently worked for villifying the first 3 caliphs, the iranese always considered themselves different and even published their own works of sunni islam. It is like asking why french and english have the enmity from the start.

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you are right....we dont have guts to protest against wrong doings of our own country.....at least few americans show this courage....and american law give them freedom.......
even muslim countries do not practice freedom of speech which is allowed in islam.....

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And in entire social science of rivalry, ethnicity has always been biggest factor, whether the dispute has inter-country or domestic dimensions:)

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If we look at past history of Saudi- Iran relationships, we find that it remained friendly during 70's decade, when leaders of the both countries visited each other and agreed the issues like possession of the Islands of Arabi & Farsi. After Islamic revolution in 1979, Iranian leaders started criticising the Saudi leaders based on the sectarian differences. In Imam Khomeini's words 'these vile and ungodly Wahhabis, are like daggers which have always pierced the heart of the Muslims from the back,” and announced that Mecca was in the hands of “a band of heretics'.

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now shia population of ksa is also one of the reason ksa want to contain iran....

what happening in syria and how iran and iraq are supporting syrian regime is open truth....

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Iran is always in conflict, be it Arabs of today's era or be it Ottomans controlling the Arabia and North Africa!!! or Abbasids or Ummayads, you will see that Iran or the region which is comprised of Iran have problems with them...

The reason as i see it, Iranians are ego centric people, thinking that they are best people to rule the planet ( their 2000 year old history tells about it), they consider anyone not from their race as low life and they try to put their culture on top of every religion or culture...

Tough Arabs Under Omer Farooq (RZA) defeated the crown of Iran, their defeat was merely military one, they never gave in to the teaching and code of life of Arabs or whomever didn;t follow it, hence they have been the prime area of all anti Islamic or Anti Arab movements...

I believe this will continue till the time ends..

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Yes Irani consider them superior to others, so is the case with Arabs. When a nation is conquered it keep on striking to get rid of the conquerors, be it people of Spain or even India, they never accepted the intruders completely, so is the case with Iran.

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What ever the history of this we have paid a lot in Pakistan for that.

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Who knows they could have been killed during this event.

1979: Remembering ‘The Siege Of Mecca’ : NPR

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

Thirty years ago, hundreds of Islamic extremists walked into the Grand Mosque in Mecca. They slipped weapons into the holiest site in Islam, and they started one of the events of 1979 that still affects the Muslim world today.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

We’ve been discussing some of those events this week: Iran’s revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the hanging of a Pakistani leader. The 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca was less well known and less understood, but no less significant.

It was a blow to the Saudi monarchy and an influence on the thinking of a young man named Osama bin Laden. Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov wrote a book about a tragedy that began as a day of celebration.

Mr. YAROSLAV TROFIMOV (Reporter, Wall Street Journal): About 100,000 people appeared in the Grand Mosque of Mecca for the dawn prayer. What they didn’t know was that all of them would become hostages within minutes of the prayer beginning. A group of jihadis, several hundred jihadis, from Saudi Arabia, from Egypt, but also some Americans and Canadians - converts to Islam - had entered the mosque with weapons, overpowered the guards, shut down the gates and proclaimed the arrival of the savior, the Mahdi, that would cleanse the Muslim world from its impurities brought in by the Westerners.
It would lead to a global battle against Christianity and Islam.

INSKEEP: When you say 100,000 people taken hostage in one place, I’m trying to think of the American equivalent. It would be like somebody seized control of the Rose Bowl.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Exactly. It’s an enormous space, which is surrounded by a colonnade and a wall. And so there was just physically no way out. It looked like a stadium, in a way. And so the parallel of the Rose Bowl is very accurate.

INSKEEP: So, what happened then?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, the Saudi army took a while to realize what’s going on. The problem was that the Kaaba at the Grand Mosque is a place so sacred to Muslims everywhere in the world, that it’s forbidden to bear arms there. It’s forbidden, according to the Muslim Hadith, the Muslim tradition. They didn’t kill a bird there.

So, the Saudi military really was - the soldiers were really reluctant to even point the weapons towards troubles unless there was an authorization, a fatwa, from the leading Muslim clerics. And it took a while for the Saudi royal family to secure that.

INSKEEP: How had the gunmen gotten their weapons in there?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Some of them smuggled them in coffins, because it’s a practice to bring in your dead relatives to receive a blessing in the Grand Mosque before the burial. Others were able to bribe the guards of the mosque and to drive a few pickup trucks into the basement of the mosque, taking advantage of the fact that there was construction work there at the time, carried out by no one else by the bin Laden construction company, which built…
INSKEEP: Excuse me, did you say the bin Laden construction company?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Absolutely. The construction company of Osama bin Laden’s father. And, in fact, when the Saudi government had to storm the compound later, they had to rely on the blueprints and the maps provided by the bin Laden family.

INSKEEP: You said they stormed the compound. How did this end?

Mr. TROFIMOV: It took about two weeks for the Saudi Interior Ministry and special forces and the regular army and the national guard to seize both the above-ground structures of the Grand Mosque and the labyrinth that is underneath. There were about a thousand rooms connected with corridors in the basement, called the kabu(ph).

And there were hundreds, maybe more than a thousand casualties. A large part of the structure was severely damaged. Saudi government had to use tanks, artillery. At the very end, they had to bring in the help of the French special forces. And the French special forces brought this poison gas that was pumped in the basement of the Grand Mosque, flushing out the last rebels.

INSKEEP: You know, I want to mention: I wasn’t very old at all then in 1979, but I remember some of the events we’ve been talking about. I remember the invasion of Afghanistan. I remember the Iranian Revolution. Why do you suppose it would be that I, as an ordinary American, don’t have very much memory - any memory, really, at all - of this dramatic seizure of 100,000 hostages at a pilgrimage site that affects Muslims around the world?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, first of all, this was the age before Al-Jazeera, before cable television, before satellite films, and non-Muslims are forbidden from even visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. So the outside world didn’t really know what was going on for well over a day after this started.
Saudi Arabia instantly cut international phone communications, closed the borders. And the first news of something going wrong in Mecca came out in a press statement at the State Department in Washington, infuriating the Saudis who had hoped that the blackout of this news would last long enough for them to take control of the mosque again.

Now, at the time, nobody knew about the existence of this Sunni jihadi fundamentalist ideology that later evolved into what is known today as al-Qaida. In fact, the assumption in Washington at the time was that the Shiites, the Iranian Shiites, had taken over the mosque and is also part of the Iranian revolutionary expansion to the rest of the Muslim world.

The State Department pointed the finger at Ayatollah Khomeini. What happened, of course, is that Ayatollah Khomeini, within hours, went on the radio saying, no, it’s the Americans and the Jews, the hated Zionists who have taken over the holiest of holies of Islam. And he was believed by millions of Muslims across the Middle East.

In Pakistan, within hours, a vast crowd assembled in front of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, stormed it, burned it down, killing a number of Americans and Pakistani personnel at the embassy. Demonstrations were held throughout the Muslim world, many of them violent.

INSKEEP: After your exhaustive investigation of this, you concluded the real culprits were Sunni Muslim fundamentalists. And can you draw a fairly straight line from those Sunni Muslim fundamentalists to the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists who form the leadership of al-Qaida today?

Mr. TROFIMOV: There is a very direct connection. First of all, this was the first time that the two components of al-Qaida today - the Wahabi zealots from Saudi Arabia and the jihadi extremists, the outgrowth of the Islam Brotherhood in Egypt - have come together. Just as today’s al-Qaida is lead by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, a veteran of the jihadist groups there, so was this movement in Mecca. The senior leaders there were Egyptians.

And, of course, Osama bin Laden himself was shocked by what happened there.

INSKEEP: At this point, Osama bin Laden would’ve been a very rich young man, unknown to the world.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Exactly. He was just leaving college at the time. And he later remembered these times. And when he was reminiscing about this time, he said that he was shocked to see the tanks rolling into the holiest shrines of Islam, and he had thought that the Saudi government was behaving criminally by this by desecrating the shrine instead of just starving out the rebels.

And for him, this was the moment when his loyalty to the Saudi regime, which has done so much for his father and his family, began to crumble.

INSKEEP: Yaroslav Trofimov is the author of “The Siege of Mecca,” and he’s helping us understand one of the events from 1979 - 30 years ago - that still reverberate for us today. Thanks very much.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Great to be on the show. Thank you.

(Soundbite of music)
INSKEEP: This is NPR News.

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So who were the people involved in the siege of Kaba? I heard that there was a commando action by Pakistani forces.