RIYADH, Saudi
Arabia (AP) -- Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the powerful U.S. ally
who joined Washington's fight against al-Qaida and sought to modernize
the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom with incremental but significant
reforms, including nudging open greater opportunities for women, has
died, according to Saudi state TV. He was 90.
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, mainly Shiite 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 Sunni Muslim factions against Tehran's allies in several
countries, but in Lebanon for example, the policy failed to stop
Iranian-backed Hezbollah from gaining the upper hand. And Tehran and
Riyadh's colliding ambitions stoked proxy conflicts around the region
that enflamed Sunni-Shiite hatreds - most horrifically in Syria's civil
war, where the two countries backed opposing sides. Those conflicts in
turn hiked Sunni militancy that returned to threaten Saudi Arabia.
And
while the king maintained the historically close alliance with
Washington, there were frictions as he sought to put those relations on
Saudi Arabia's terms. He was constantly frustrated by Washington's
failure to broker a settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He
also 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.
Abdullah's
death was announced on Saudi state TV by a presenter who said the king
died at 1 a.m. on Friday. His successor was announced as 79-year-old
half-brother, Prince Salman, according to a Royal Court statement
carried on the Saudi Press Agency. Salman was Abdullah's crown prince
and had recently taken on some of the ailing king's responsibilities.
Abdullah
was born in Riyadh in 1924, one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabia's
founder, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. 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. His strict upbringing was exemplified by three
days he spent in prison as a young man as punishment by his father for
failing to give his seat to a visitor, a violation of Bedouin
hospitality.
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
was believed to have long rankled at the closeness of the alliance with
the United States, and as regent he pressed Washington to withdraw the
troops it had deployed in the kingdom since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait. The U.S. finally did so in 2003.
When President George W. Bush came to office, Abdullah again showed his readiness to push against his U.S. allies.
In
2000, Abdullah convinced the Arab League to approve an unprecedented
offer that all Arab states would agree to peace with Israel if it
withdrew from lands it captured in 1967. The next year, he sent his
ambassador in Washington to tell the Bush administration that it was too
unquestioningly biased in favor of Israel and that the kingdom would
from now on pursue its own interests apart from Washington's. Alarmed by
the prospect of a rift, Bush soon after advocated for the first time
the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The
next month, the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks took place in the United
States, and Abdullah had to steer the alliance through the resulting
criticism. 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.
The
tougher line helped affirm Abdullah's commitment to fighting al-Qaida.
He paid two visits to Bush - in 2002 and 2005 - at his ranch in
Crawford, Texas.
When Fahd died in 2005, Abdullah officially rose to the throne. He then began to more openly push his agenda.
His
aim at home was to modernize the kingdom to face the future. One of the
world's largest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia is fabulously wealthy, but
there are deep disparities in wealth and a burgeoning youth population
in need of jobs, housing and education. More than half the current
population of 20 million is under the age of 25. For Abdullah, that
meant building a more skilled workforce and opening up greater room for
women to participate. He was a strong supporter of education, building
universities at home and increasing scholarships abroad for Saudi
students.
Abdullah for the first time gave
women seats on the Shura Council, an unelected body that advises the
king and government. He promised women would be able to vote and run in
2015 elections for municipal councils, the only elections held in the
country. He appointed the first female deputy minister in a 2009. Two
Saudi female athletes competed in the Olympics for the first time in
2012, and a small handful of women were granted licenses to work as
lawyers during his rule.
One of his most
ambitious projects was a Western-style university that bears his name,
the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened in
2009. Men and women share classrooms and study together inside the
campus, a major departure in a country where even small talk between the
sexes in public can bring a warning from the morality police.
The
changes seemed small from the outside but had a powerful resonance.
Small splashes of variety opened in the kingdom - color and flash crept
into the all-black abayas women must wear in public; state-run TV
started playing music, forbidden for decades; book fairs opened their
doors to women writers and some banned books.
But
he treaded carefully in the face of the ultraconservative Wahhabi
clerics who hold near total sway over society and, in return, give the
Al Saud family's rule religious legitimacy.
Senior
cleric Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan warned against changes that could snap
the "thread between a leader and his people." In some cases, Abdullah
pushed back: He fired one prominent government cleric who criticized the
mixed-gender university. But the king balked at going too far too fast.
For example, beyond allowing debate in newspapers, Abdullah did nothing
to respond to demands to allow women to drive.
"He
has presided over a country that has inched forward, either on its own
or with his leadership," said Karen Elliot House, author of "On Saudi
Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines."
"I
don't think he's had as much impact as one would hope on trying to
create a more moderate version of Islam," she said. "To me, it has not
taken inside the country as much as one would hope."
And
any change was strictly on the royal family's terms. After the 2011
Arab Spring uprisings in particular, Saudi Arabia clamped down on any
dissent. Riot police crushed street demonstrations by Saudi Arabia's
Shiite minority. 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.
Regionally, perhaps Abdullah's biggest priority was to confront Iran, the Shiite powerhouse across the Gulf.
Worried
about Tehran's nuclear program, 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 Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah
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
oppressing Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.
In
Syria, Abdullah stepped indirectly 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 Shiite
militias rushed to back Assad, and the resulting conflict has left
hundreds of thousands dead and driven millions of Syrians from their
homes.
From the multiple conflicts,
Sunni-Shiite hatreds around the region took on a life of their own,
fueling Sunni militancy. Syria's war helped give birth to the Islamic
State 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 Abdullah was not "particularly sectarian
in a way that he hated Shiites for religious reasons. ... There are
other senior members of the ruling family much more sectarian." But, he
said, "Saudi Arabia plays a huge role in fueling sectarian conflict."
Abdullah had more than 30 children from around a dozen wives.
----
Batrawy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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