As the Saudis were out of the picture, exiled in Kuwait, the House of Rashīd sought friendly ties with the Ottoman Empire to its north.

Following the death of the Emir, Jabal Shammar gradually went into decline, being further pressed with the demise of its Ottoman patron in World War I. Ibn Saud, allied with the British Empire as a counterweight to the Ottomans' support for Jabal Shammar, emerged far stronger from the First World War.

"The inhabitants of Kaseem, weary of Wahhabee tyranny, turned their eyes towards Telal, who had already given a generous and inviolable asylum to the numerous political exiles of that district.

Secret negotiations took place, and at a favourable moment the entire uplands of that province—after a fashion not indeed peculiar to Arabia—annexed themselves to the kingdom of Shammar by universal and unanimous suffrage."

But Telal [sic] affected not to perceive their religious discrepansies, and silenced all murmurs by marks of special favour towards these very dissenters, and also by the advantages which their presence was not long in procuring for the town".