Haaretz:

The Islamic State’s double attack in Tehran this month wasn’t in the least surprising. What is genuinely surprising is the fact that this terrorist organization has only now gotten around to attacking its principal enemy. Previously, it made do with murdering enemies who were comparatively marginal even from its own perspective: Yazidis, Kurds, Sunnis, Arab tribesmen in Iraq and Syria who refused to join its ranks, and sometimes Christians.

Even Iraqi Arab Shi’ites, whom Islamic State views as loathed enemies that must be annihilated, aren’t its principal enemies. Its principal enemies are the Persian Shi’ites, whom it calls Safavids, after the Safavid dynasty that forcibly imposed Shi’ite Islam on Iran in the early 16th century. After all, the political and strategic leadership of the global Shi’ite community is located in Iran, not Iraq, so logic demands that Iran be attacked first and foremost. But that isn’t what happened.

Islamic State’s hatred of Shi’ite Islam stems from two complementary sources. The first is religious and theological. The organization is a Salafi Sunni movement that is close to Wahhabi Islam, which comes from Saudi Arabia, and to this day, the Wahhabi movement sees Shi’ites as people who left the fold of Islam.

Thus in the view of Islamic State, whose first of several incarnations arose in 2003 and whose hallmark is taking many principles of early Islam to their greatest possible extremes, the Shi’ites deserve death. The community’s principal religious centers — Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, Qom and Mashhad in Iran — must be razed, its adherents eliminated...

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