Saudi Arabia’s top cleric urges businessmen to help troops

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Saudi Arabia’s most senior cleric has urged businessmen and banks to set up a fund to help soldiers stationed along the southern border with Yemen to pay their bills back home, Saudi media reported on Thursday.

The call reflects growing criticism of the Saudi business community seen as not doing enough for the country at a time when a drop in oil prices has slashed the kingdom’s revenues and started to affect living standards.

Saudi Arabia waded in Yemen’s civil war last year at the head of an Arab coalition trying to restore the recognised government to power. Hundreds of people, many of them Saudi soldiers and civilians, have been killed in cross-border raids by Houthi rebels since March last year.

Speaking in a weekly radio broadcast from the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al al-Sheikh said Saudi soldiers were risking their lives “to defend their religion and country.”

“Businessmen … must come forward as donors and contribute from their wealth to help those at the border,” al-Sheikh said, according to the semi-official al-Riyadh newspaper.

The grand mufti said the state was doing its part. “It has … spent money on the children of those fighters in the defence of the homeland … and cared for their families, especially the martyrs,” he said.

“Non-governmental institutions of all kinds, including banks, must also show an honourable stand,” he added.

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