Sadly, I wonder if someone wanted this to happen. Did a Saudi with Iranian connections want hundreds of dead so they could overthrow the King? Did a Saudi trigger it without Iranian help either for domestic instability or to increase conflict with the Iranians? Did the Iranians trigger it to destabilize the Saudi government? I haven’t seen any evidence, but it seems like the sort of thing that Islamic extremists would do. They don’t mind a few hundred dead innocents if it gives them an excuse to kill a few hundred thousand more innocents.
The Saudis and Iranians have been going back-and-forth on this issue for years. Riyadh blames Iranian agitators for causing these stampedes, while Tehran accused the Saudis of failing to ensure the “pilgrims’ safety.”
Truth be told, both sides are probably guilty. The Saudis have expanded walkways and other facilities around these “shrines,” but they remain crowded and if there is a sudden panic, you can get a disaster like the one that unfolded last week. And there is some evidence that Iran tries to provoke such incidents, to prove that the House of Saud is unfit to protect the most important sites in the Islamic world.
As someone else observed, it’s rather sad (and ironic) that most of the victims of these stampedes are not from Saudi Arabia (or Iran), but from places like Bangladesh or African countries. There is a certain pecking order among the faithful, and the dead are usually at the bottom of the heap, literally and figuratively.