The suicide bombing at a Shi’a mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia is a direct result of the Kingdom’s own sponsorship of radical elements in Sunni Islam.

21 Shi’a worshippers were killed on May 22nd in a suicide bombing in eastern Saudi Arabia perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Currently controlling large swathes of territory across Iraq and Syria and holding the allegiance of groups operating in North Africa, ISIS has claimed that this is only the first of many attacks to come against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

In response to the attack, many of the country’s leaders have spoken out to try to prevent more sectarian problems. Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, the leading cleric in the Kingdom, declared that “this totally criminal plot aims to split our ranks and sow chaos in our country but, God be praised, it will not find a way. The nation and society are united and under a wise leadership.”

His comments must have seemed like a cruel joke to Saudi Arabia’s Shi’as. The Saudi government has demonized and repressed its Shi’a population, and helped its ally Bahrain do the same. Living mostly in the eastern parts of the Kingdom, Saudi Shi’a are looked upon with ill-concealed suspicion, a juicy target for Iran to turn into a fifth column to destabilize their rival.

Saudi Arabia’s strategy to counter Iranian influence in the Middle East is coming back to haunt them. For years they have stoked sectarian tensions, backing whoever was facing off against Iran or an Iranian proxy (in particular Sunni groups). Their war in Yemen against adherents of the Houthi sect of Shi’a Islam has served to only heighten tensions between Saudi Arabia’s Sunnis and Shi’a.

Most importantly, though, they’ve spread their version of Islam across the world through royal family-funded religious schools. Those schools fed the jihadist movements in Chechnya and the North Caucuses, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and even further eastward, in Indonesia and the Philippines.

In addition to the horrific atrocities committed by ISIS against the people of the region, they have taken it upon themselves to not just rewrite history, but erase it. Across the areas of Iraq under their control they have demolished important historical and archaeological sites. The remains of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud were bulldozed and blown up. Nineveh, the capital of that same empire and largest city in the world for a time, was similarly destroyed. Armed with sledgehammers, ISIS militants entered the Mosul museum and smashed the priceless artifacts it held.

Now they stand before the great ancient Roman (among others) city of Palmyra in Syria and, if precedent holds, the world could be witnessing the last hours of that magnificent place.

These events were nothing short of an egregious assault on humanity’s shared history. The Cradle of Civilization is threatened by a group that seeks to obliterate the traces of the many great cultures who have lived there.

Where did they learn their respect for history? Saudi-funded mosques and schools. The history of the House of Saud is replete with the destruction of historic sites, both Islamic and non-Islamic. The Wahhabist strain of Salafist Islam that they rode to power took relish in combating what they viewed as the heresy embodied by the various shrines, tombs, and other religious structures scattered throughout the Arabian Peninsula. In the early 19th century this same religious group sacked Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam, tore down the great Shi’a holy sites in Karbala and Najaf, and even destroyed the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife.

Saudi Arabia has destroyed many holy sites on its territory since it was established in 1932. The Kings of Saudi Arabia also serve as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques (Mecca and Medina), but this has not stopped them from tearing down once-important religious structures, especially in order to help make room in Mecca for more development.

The Saudis rode the Wahhabist tiger to power, and now they are in peril of ending up inside. Saudi Arabia has been bitten before, by Al-Qaeda attacks on its territory and, much more dramatically, the siege of the Great Mosque in Mecca in 1979. In that event, Messianic terrorists, some students of leading clerics in Saudi Arabia, took over the holiest site in Islam, only being driven out after a number of bloody assaults by government troops (with a lot of Pakistani and French help, it is told). Now it’s not Al-Qaeda or the fringe of the fringe attacking the people of Saudi Arabia, its ISIS.

None of this is to say that the Kingdom should be blamed for the suicide bombing, or for ISIS in general. What can, and should, happen though is for the Saudi government to accept the role it has played in fostering the ideological foundations of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. It needs to accept that its ties to and support for Wahhabism have helped sow seeds of terrorism across the Middle East and Islamic world in general. It also needs to realize that it cannot keep hiding behind the Iranian threat in order to distract attention away from the many problems that the Kingdom has helped create.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has an obligation to combat groups like ISIS both militarily and ideologically, and the government will have to do a great amount of soul-searching and looking in the mirror in order to do so effectively and honestly. ISIS has the ability to take advantage of the very same strain of Islam that helped build Saudi Arabia in an effort to destroy it. Fighting ISIS isn’t just a favor to the United States, it is part of taking on a real threat to the Kingdom. ISIS is just as much of a threat to Saudi Arabia as Iran. If anything, it is more of a threat than Iran due to its relationship to the existential underpinnings of the Saudi state and Saudi society.

King Salman and the Saudi Government have vowed to strike back and punish ISIS. How much they can do when they are increasingly bogged down in Yemen is unclear, though.

“We were pained by the enormity of the crime of this terrorist aggression,” said the King in a message, “which contradicts Islamic and humanitarian values.”

Where did they learn their values, though? From Saudi-funded schools and mosques, or from clerics trained there. They learned it from you, Saudi Arabia.

Garrett Khoury, a graduate of The George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs and an MA Candidate at Tel Aviv University, is the Director of Research and Content for The Eastern Project. Garrett has previously worked with The Israel Project in Jerusalem and The American Task Force on the Western Sahara in Washington, DC. Contact at: garrett.khoury@gmail.com