On Feb. 4, Saudi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asiri announced that Saudi Arabia is now ready to send ground troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State (IS). Saudi Arabia is part of the international anti-IS coalition led by the United States since September 2014. However, when it launched the war in Yemen to fight the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels almost a year ago, its priorities shifted and its airstrikes on IS subsided. In December, it launched a new Muslim anti-IS coalition, but this, too, remains ambiguous as a strategy and may be interpreted as yet another attempt by the Saudi regime to seek Islamic backing against its rival and archenemy, namely Iran. It is important to understand why the Saudis announced they are now willing to venture into the troubled waters of Syria with ground troops, allegedly to fight IS.

The 2014 Saudi airstrikes on IS were viewed by many as a symbolic gesture to convince the international community of its commitment to fight terrorism. Saudi support for various radical rebel groups in Syria, together with the ideology of IS that resembles radical Saudi religious interpretations, had prompted some observers to doubt Saudi commitment to fight terrorism. Hence the announcement to launch airstrikes on IS came at a time when the Saudi regime became increasingly suspicious in the eyes of some international commentators. The occasional airstrikes took place when King Abdullah was still king, but by the time he died in January 2015, they became extremely rare and hardly publicized in the domestic and international press.

The war on IS remained a sidelined priority for the Saudi regime as long as it was engaged in a more important southern war in Yemen. The rise of King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud to power in January 2015 inaugurated a new era of direct military intervention in Yemen, which became the primary focus for his son, Mohammed bin Salman, the newly appointed young minister of defense and deputy crown prince.

It is doubtful that serious Saudi ground troops will be deployed in Syria despite the announced and heavily publicized promise. It must be mentioned that the regime struggled to assemble an Arab coalition willing to send ground troops to Yemen and seemed unwilling to go to war in Yemen alone. The regime counted on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, and only a handful of willing countries outside the GCC promised support. Saudis seem to have failed to convince major Arab countries such as Egypt to actively participate in any ground offensive in Yemen. Similarly, Pakistan was reluctant to join the Saudi war efforts for its own domestic reasons. So Saudi Arabia ended up fighting this war with the help of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and countries in Africa. The main strategy of this war remains airstrikes rather than ground offensives, perhaps because of the fear of serious casualties among Saudi troops should they be heavily deployed on the ground. Without substantial ground troops, the war in Yemen is still far from achieving its declared objectives, mainly the return of the exiled Yemeni government to Sanaa and the end of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebellion. Instead, the war has led to serious Yemeni civilian deaths and the near total destruction of the meager Yemeni infrastructure.