Saudi vs Iran: The Rivalry That Shapes The World
This Is Not A Drill with Gavin Esler
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The Saudi State at Home - The First Saudi State
The seizure of the grand mosque in Mecca is perhaps the most significant for the very fabric of the Saudi state at home. The Saudis have long endured this type of rhetoric and from outsiders but this time it comes from within. So they start to feel like they need to burnish their credentials, to proselytize, to push back against the Iranians. And one of the ways in which they start doing that is by supporting this war in Afghanistan. They killed two birds with one stone. One is they export their own fundamentalists to Afghanistan to go and die over there, not in Saudi Arabia. And they take on this role of the defenders of the cause. No one thought about the unintended
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