ISIS has returned to strike by attacking a Shiite mosque in Kuwait. Twenty-five people were killed in the attack in Kuwait City, the capital of Kuwait. According to the Interior Minister, at least 202 people were injured. At the time of the attack, which occurred during the time of Friday prayers, there were about two thousand people at the Imam Sadiq mosque.
The ISIS militants have claimed responsibility for the attack. Kuwait is a predominantly Sunni country - the same orientation as Islam that ISIS refers to - and is governed by a Sunni ruling house but has a significant Shia minority.
It is the first attack carried out by ISIS in the country. The history of the small Persian Gulf State is however very complex and is also accustomed in some respects to the attacks.
In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait claiming it as the nineteenth province of his country. Over the years the young and small State of Kuwait has become a US based sine die in the Persian Gulf. From Kuwait the USA, with their troops and the various bases of the Army, Air Force and Navy have projected their logistic, military and economic control over the region.
In the wake of aircraft carriers, tanks and B-52, in fact, many US multinationals have been placed in Kuwait related to the trade in crude oil and other areas such as telecommunications, electricity, high-tech, military equipment and consumer goods. All this has fomented the strong presence of bin Laden's network in Kuwait.
Several cells would have acted through a series of terrorist attacks. We remember in 2002 the attack on the island of Failaka, off the Kuwaiti coast, which led to the death of the twenty-year-old corporal of the Marines Antonio Sledd. The connection with the terrorists of Osama bin Laden was immediately reported by the Pentagon. In the circumstances, the Kuwaiti police arrested 50 people linked to Islamic fundamentalism and the two responsible for the attack. Died during the action against the Marines, the two Kuwaiti cousins Jassem al Hajiri (28 years) and Anas al-Kandari (21), had spent long periods in the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and were related to some prisoners detained by Americans in the Guantanamo base camp, on the southern shores of Cuba
There are still many local cells today, some of which are still "dormant", which aim to destroy the national political system. Almost as in Kuwait, over the years a sort of "deisoration" has been developed, wished by the Westerners, with the US in the first place.
The faults are attributed to the religious establishment of Kuwait responsible for political attitudes of connivance with the US. A country certainly more modern than those of the Gulf area but opposed by Sunni petronarchies.
So behind the umpteenth attack this time by ISIS, there could be the strong US presence in Kuwait in an institutional structure too modern for the region in question, the attitude of religious leaders targeted by the same sleeping cells and the supply of oil wells to which the militias of the alleged Islamic Caliphate could point.
(photo: IRNA)
