The Sunday News
Kano – Northern Nigeria has become the latest battleground in the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, after violent clashes between supporters of rival groups from the two main branches of Islam.
Members of the Izala movement, backed by mainly Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, last month attacked the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), which is sympathetic to Shiite majority Iran.
IMN ceremonies in at least four northern cities to mark the annual Shiite day of mourning, Ashura, were targeted, with the worst riots in Kaduna, an Izala stronghold. At least two IMN supporters were killed.
Witnesses and local media said mobs who looted and set fire to homes and businesses over two days shouted “No more Shiites”.
Sectarian tensions in Nigeria’s Muslim-majority north had already been running high, especially in Kaduna, after the state government banned the IMN as an unlawful group and a security threat days earlier.
That followed a recommendation from the judicial inquiry it commissioned to investigate clashes in Zaria city last December in which soldiers killed more than 300 IMN members.
Those clashes and the recent escalating tension indicate that the proxy Saudi-Iran conflict – well-known in places such as Lebanon, Yemen and Syria – is now being played out in Nigeria, experts said.
“It is a fact that Saudi Arabia has been financing anti-Shia campaigns in many areas of the world,” political scientist Abubakar Sadiq Mohammed, from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, told AFP.
“If the attacks against the Shiites escalate, of course Iran will support them and Saudi Arabia will support the attacks on Shiites.”
Izala leader Abdullahi Bala Lau has been accused of stoking anger by declaring that Nigeria’s constitution only recognises Sunni Islam.
His group has close relations with Riyadh and Nigeria’s government while its satellite television station, Manara, also broadcasts fiery anti-Shiite rhetoric.
Leaders from Saudi Arabia and Iran both contacted Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari after the Zaria attacks. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani called for restraint and accused “a group” of “sowing the seeds of discord among Muslims in Islamic countries” in what was seen as a clear reference to Saudi Arabia.
Nigerian media reported that Saudi King Salman backed Abuja’s crackdown on the IMN, describing it as a “fight against terrorism”.
The Sunni jihadists of Boko Haram have killed at least 20 000 people in northeast Nigeria since taking up arms against the government in 2009. – AFP
