SAIHAT, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 18 (UPI) — An Islamic State-linked gunman attacked a Shia holy event in Saudi Arabia Friday, killing five people and injuring another nine.
The BBC reports the attack occurred in the city of Saihat, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, during Ashura, a holy event for Shia Muslims.
A group identifying itself as IS’s wing in Bahrain — a reference to when Bahrain used to extend into current Saudi lands — claimed responsibility for the attack, saying one of its men used an automatic weapon to assault “a Shia infidel temple” and that “infidels will not be safe in the island of Mohammed.”
Saudi Arabia’s Shia population has absorbed a series of IS-linked suicide attacks at mosques this year, including in the city of Damman, also in Eastern Province, where at least four people were killed in May when a car bomb was detonated outside the al-Anoud mosque.
The first IS-claimed suicide attack in Saudi Arabia came one week earlier in al-Qadeeh, in the east of the country, where a blast killed up to 20 worshippers during Friday prayers at the Imam Ali mosque.
In July, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Interior said it had arrested 431 suspected IS members who were planning suicide attacks on mosques across the country.
IS considers Shia Muslims to be heretics and has in the past threatened Saudi Arabia, which is a member of the U.S.-led international coalition bombing the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria.
In late June a group known as “Islamic State in the Province of Najd,” a reference to central Saudi Arabia, claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Shia Imam Sadiq mosque in Kuwait, which killed 27 people and injured more than 200. The Kuwaiti Interior Ministry said the bomber was a Saudi citizen known as Fahd Suleiman Abdulmohsen al-Qaba’a.
Meanwhile, an August suicide bombing at a mosque in southwestern Saudi Arabia killed 13 people, including 10 Saudi security personnel. No groups claimed responsibility for the attack, but the mosque was located near the border with Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition is conducting an air campaign against a Shia insurgency.
