Compare and contrast.
I am looking here, and I don’t see a whole lot of differences between the two of them. Of course, ISIS has always been a Saudi project. It was the pet of Prince Bandar for a long time. I doubt if the Saudis are funding them anymore though. There are way too many of them in the Kingdom. Though I have heard that the Saudis are offering their troublemakers a choice between prison or jail and temporary exile in Syria, where they will go guess where?
Yes, that is correct, Saudi Arabia is full of ISIS sympathizers. When the first ISIS tweets started coming out, software noted that ~80% of them were coming from Saudi Arabia. Now ISIS has attacked the Saudis on the border of Iraq, killing a Saudi general. They also attacked Shia in the oil zone on the coast. The Saudis have a monster on their hands and they don’t know how to deal with it.
I understand that at the moment, the Saudis are going to great pains to explain to their people the differences between Wahhabism and ISIS. Problem is there is not a large difference in ideology, so this tortured explanation is not going much of anywhere.
I can assure you that a very large number of ISIS members in Syria and Iraq are Saudis. The Saudi attitude is probably to cut a deal with ISIS to not attack the Kingdom and the state will leave them alone.
This was the deal that the Kingdom had with Al Qaeda until AQ started carrying out attacks on foreigners in the Kingdom. After that, all bets were off and a major insurgency took place. AQ had a tremendous number of sympathizers in the security forces and they pulled off some amazing attacks that could not have been done without inside help. Once the war was on, it was all-out. Many died on both sides in a guerrilla war that went on for 2-3 years.
The Saudis finally defeated AQ, with many of them ending up in prison. In prison, the Saudis had a program of preachers to “convince the AQ fighters of the error of their ways.” Many of them were released after they had “seen the light.” After that, Saudi AQ packed up and left for Yemen, where they merged with Yemen AQ to form AQ in the Arabian Peninsula.
This ISIS folks are pretty funny. You should hear them going on and on about how Saudi Arabia is this horrible, debauched, Westernized, non-Islamic, infidel state. No really, this is how ISIS people really talk, men and women.
So all of you who feel that the world center of sin, depravity and debauchery is in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi fake Muslims are an outrage to the umma and need to be overthrown so a true Islamic state can be put in the birthplace of the prophet, all I have to say is you should definitely go sign up for ISIS right now.