RIYADH – Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has warned Saudi Arabia’sreformist Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over his “sinful projects”, in abulletin released today.
Prince Mohammed has spearheaded a string of policy changes inultraconservative Saudi Arabia, including reinstating cinemas and allowingwomen to drive.
“The new era of Bin Salman replaced mosques with movie theatres,” theYemen-based jihadist group said in its Madad news bulletin, picked up bythe SITE Intelligence Group.
He “substituted books that belonged to the imams… with absurdities of theatheists and secularists from the east and the west and opened the doorwide for corruption and moral degradation,” it said.
The Sunni jihadist group AQAP has flourished amid a complex war in Yemen,where Saudi Arabia heads a military alliance battling Shiite Huthi rebels.
In its statement, AQAP slammed April’s WWE Royal Rumble event in the Saudicoastal city of Jeddah, near the Islam’s most holy sites in Mecca.
“(Foreign) disbelieving wrestlers exposed their privates and on most ofthem was the sign of the cross, in front of a mixed gathering of youngMuslim men and women,” it said.
“The corruptors did not stop at that, for every night musical concerts arebeing announced, as well as movies and circus shows,” SITE quoted it assaying.
AQAP in southern Yemen is the target of a long-running drone campaign bythe United States, which regards it as the most dangerous branch of theextremist group.
Yemen’s conflict has left nearly 10,000 people dead, tens of thousandswounded, and millions on the brink of famine.
The United Nations has called Yemen world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in the war between Yemen’s Huthirebels and the government of now-exiled President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi in2015.
They have landed on a United Nations blacklist over the killing and maimingof children.
The Huthi rebels, linked to Iran, have also come under fire for neglectingto protect civilians and targeting the press and minorities.
The rebels have controlled the capital Sanaa since 2014. -APP/AFP