In an era of fluid and contested borders and indirect and proxy conflicts, the temptation for states to use radical groups for their own policy purposes is substantial.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan, Israel in supporting Hamas at its inception, Iran in sponsoring various bodies named “Hezbollah” in the 1980s, and Pakistan with the Haqqani group among others, all have given in to this temptation. In most cases they have regretted the subsequent “blowback” when these groupings prove volatile, unpredictable and independent.

Since 2001 fear of general (as opposed to local or national) terrorism has come to the fore. Groups such as Al-Qaeda, using Islam as a cover for a broader global agenda, are often termed “jihadist” in allusion to their attempts at religious justification for their acts of violence. Yet even Al-Qaeda, which has local chapters in Yemen and the Maghreb, and which appears to be in eclipse, has noticed that excessive violence alienates its potential constituency in the dispossessed, confused and angry Sunni world. Hence its expulsion of ISIS in April as too barbaric to merit further cooperation.

It is a matter of contention whether jihadists are motivated by religion or by identity crises, economic and social marginalization and the attractions of a harsh simplistic faith which acts as personal and group reassurance. Although the “religious” component is undoubtedly secondary to others, it is an intrinsic element in the recruitment and validation of volunteers. And this raises the question of where the responsibility for the growth and manifestation of jihadism lies.

Saudi Arabia, which practices a particularly conservative form of Islam, Wahhabism, and which promotes Salafist Islam politically and financially throughout the Muslim world, is often depicted by outsiders as the treasurer and mastermind, and above all the inspiration, behind the global jihadist movement.

The reality is more complicated. As the Custodian of the Two Holy Places, Saudi Arabia uses Islam in its diplomacy, promoting and funding Salafism in Pakistan, the Caucasus, Maghreb and Southeast Asia. Since the challenge for leadership of the Muslim world posed by revolutionary Shiite Iran in 1979, Saudi Arabia has sought to weaken its rival by playing the sectarian card and diminish Iran’s claims to Muslim leadership. Inevitably this has led to communal strife and tensions in places such as Pakistan, and later Iraq. Extremist Sunni groupings were not discouraged and private funding for such groupings were not controlled.

It was the war in Iraq and the emergence of a Shiite-led government that kept this trend alive. With disturbances in Shiite-majority Bahrain and later the Syrian civil war, which saw Iranian support for Bashar Assad’s regime against a largely Sunni opposition, the situation deteriorated further.

However, there is another side to the story. Already in the 1990s Saudi Arabia found that its funding of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan was a two-edged sword when these militants returned home. Unable to control such groups, inevitably the kingdom was associated to the bombings in the U.S. in 2001.

Thereafter Saudi Arabia itself came under terrorist attack in 2005 and 2006. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula turned out to be a mortal enemy. More recently the more extreme ISIS shows few signs of limiting its activities to Shiite Iraq (or Iran), but has wider, territorial ambitions.

Saudi Arabia has already moved to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and take its distance from Hamas. Recent disclosures suggest that only 5 percent of the revenues of ISIS are from the Gulf. The kingdom has contributed $100 million to a U.N. anti-terrorism center. King Abdullah told foreign ambassadors on Aug. 31, “Terrorism at this time, is an evil force that must be fought with wisdom and speed.”

The temptation to use radical groups for national policies may now be resisted. However bad are relations with Iran, the fact is that both states (and others) share an interest in containing and disbanding militant, transnational extremists and preventing the kind of widespread violence that threatens the entire region from Turkey to Pakistan. That is a shared interest and it should not have taken the rise of ISIS to have demonstrated it.

The recent lesson of Nouri al-Maliki’s Iraq is that stability requires broader inclusive policies of representation for all communities. Saudi Arabia could practice this to its advantage at home with its minority Shiite population.