DUBAI: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the powerful U.S. ally who was an absolute ruler of the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom died Friday at the age of 90.
A royal court statement said the king died at 1 a.m. on Friday. Saudi Arabian state television reported that Abdullah would be succeeded by his brother, Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, 79.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Egypts Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb joined the leaders of Gulf Arab states for the funeral prayer at the Imam Turki bin Abdullah mosque.
Bahrain’s King Hamad Al-Khalifa, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim and Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah were at the funeral, state television showed on Friday.
In keeping with the kingdom’s traditions, the king was buried in an unmarked grave as was his predecessor King Fahd, who died in 2005.
More than his guarded and hidebound predecessors, Abdullah assertively threw his oil-rich nation’s weight behind trying to shape the Middle East. His priority was to counter the influence of rival, revolutionary Iran wherever it tried to make advances. He and fellow Sunni Arab monarchs also staunchly opposed the Middle East’s wave of pro-democracy uprisings, seeing them as a threat to stability and their own rule.
He backed extremist Muslim factions against Tehran’s allies across the Muslim world, but in Lebanon for example, the policy failed to stop Iranian-backed Hezbollah from gaining the upper hand. And Riyadh’s colliding ambitions with Tehran stoked proxy conflicts that enflamed Sunni-Shia hatreds from Pakistan to Nigeria. Hiked Sunni militancy due to Saudi backing has now returned to threaten tightly controlled kingdom.
King maintained the historically close alliance with Washington and he consistently pushed the Obama administration to take a tougher stand against Iran and to more strongly back the mainly Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
President Barack Obama expressed condolences and offered sympathy to the people of Saudi Arabia.
“As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions,” Obama said. “One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.”
Abdullah was born in Riyadh in 1924, one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud’s 7th wife. Like all Abdul-Aziz’s sons, Abdullah had only rudimentary education. Tall and heavyset, he felt more at home in the Nejd, the kingdom’s desert heartland, riding stallions and hunting with falcons.
Abdullah was selected as crown prince in 1982 on the day his half-brother Fahd ascended to the throne. The decision was challenged by a full brother of Fahd, Prince Sultan, who wanted the title for himself. But the family eventually closed ranks behind Abdullah to prevent splits.
Abdullah became de facto ruler in 1995 when a stroke incapacitated Fahd. Abdullah inherited the kingdom where resentment against the deployment of US tropops following 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had given birth to new militancy.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States Abdullah steered the new alliance with the US led coalition. The kingdom was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, and many pointed out that the baseline ideology for al-Qaida and other groups stemmed from Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.
When al-Qaida militants in 2003 began a wave of violence in the kingdom aimed at toppling the monarchy, Abdullah cracked down hard. For the next three years, security forces battled militants, finally forcing them to flee to neighboring Yemen. There, they created a new al-Qaida branch, and Saudi Arabia has played a behind-the-scenes role in fighting it.
After the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in particular, Saudi Arabia clamped down on any dissent. Riot police crushed street demonstrations. Dozens of activists were detained, many of them tried under a sweeping counterterrorism law by an anti-terrorism court Abdullah created. Authorities more closely monitored social media, where anger over corruption and unemployment and jokes about the aging monarchy are rife.
In 2000, Abdullah convinced the Arab League to approve an unprecedented offer that all Arab states would recognize the state of Israel if it withdrew from lands it captured in 1967.
However he faced severe Iranian rebuke for the move.
Now Abdullah’s biggest priority was to confront rising Iran.
Worried about Tehran’s clout, Abdullah told the United States in 2008 to consider military action to “cut off the head of the snake” and prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic memo.
In Lebanon, Abdullah backed Sunni allies against the powerful anti-Israeli party the Hezbollah and in a proxy conflict that flared repeatedly into potentially destabilizing violence. Saudi Arabia was also deeply opposed to longtime Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom it considered a tool of Iran.
In Syria, Abdullah stepped indirectly into the civil war that emerged after 2011. He supported and armed rebels battling to overthrow President Bashar Assad, Iran’s top Arab ally, and pressed the Obama administration to do the same. Iran’s allies Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia volunteers rushed to Syria after Saudi backed militants began blasting holy Islamic shrines particularly revered by Shia Muslims including that of Zainab bint Ali granddaughter of Prophet Muhammad, and the resulting conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead and driven millions of Syrians from their homes.
From the multiple conflicts, Sunni-Shia hatreds around the region took on a life of their own, fueling Sunni militancy that is now plaguing the world from Peshawar to Paris.
Syria’s war helped give birth to the Islamic State (ISIS) group, which burst out to take over large parts of Syria and Iraq. Fears of the growing militancy prompted Abdullah to commit Saudi airpower to a U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremists.
Toby Matthiesen, author of “Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t,” said “Saudi Arabia plays a huge role in fueling sectarian conflict.”
Wary of the rising influence of pro democracy movements, Saudi Arabia backed military coup led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi against popularly elected Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and dispatched troops to crush popular uprising in neighbouring Bahrain.
Abdullahs successor faces multiple challenges like the impact of plunging oil prices domestically, the rise of militancy, and an assertive Iran whose influence is growing across the Mideast as its allies take on increasingly powerful roles in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.
He also face an intensifying crisis in Yemen, whose Saudi-backed government has been effectively overthrown by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. A Saudi official said in a recent interview that Riyadh sees the future of Yemen as an existential threat.
Abdullah had more than 30 children from around a dozen wives.
