Behind a Saudi Prince’s rise, two loyal enforcers

When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia convened an outdoor banquet this spring for his fellow Arab rulers, seated among the kings, princes and presidents were two friends with few qualifications other than their closeness to the young prince himself: a poet who has become known for orchestrating ferocious social media campaigns, and a former security guard who runs the Saudi sports commission.

The two men had each played pivotal roles in many of the brazen power plays that have marked Prince Mohammed’s sprint to dominance of the kingdom — the ouster of the previous crown prince, the detentions of royals and businessmen in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, the kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister, and the kingdom’s diplomatic spats with Qatar and Canada. Even Saudi royals have come to fear the prince’s two friends — Saud el-Qahtani, 40, and Turki al-Sheikh, 37 — and the Arab potentates around the table could scarcely object to their presence.

Now the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents has focused attention on their roles as enablers of the crown prince’s impulsiveness and aggression, and Saudi watchers consider the men’s fate a bellwether of the royal court’s direction as it grapples with the international outrage over the killing.

“They are the closest people to the crown prince,” said Kristin Smith Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “They are his political enforcers and the face of the brash new ‘Saudi first’ posture at home and abroad, and those opposed to the hypernationalist, thuggish direction in Saudi foreign policy would be happy to see them cut down to size.”

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, right, pictured with Saad Hariri, the prime minister-designate of Lebanon, in Riyadh last month. The Saudis briefly kidnapped Mr. Hariri last year.CreditCreditTasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

Neither man is among the 18 people Saudi Arabia says it has arrested in the course of its investigation into Mr. Khashoggi’s killing.

But the kingdom has already assigned some blame for the killing to Mr. Qahtani, the social-media czar. He lost his title as an adviser to the royal court because he contributed to the vitriolic rhetoric toward the kingdom’s critics that led to Mr. Khashoggi’s death, a Saudi official said. It is unclear which of his many duties Mr. Qahtani has relinquished.

Mr. Sheikh, the sports commissioner, was in New York for medical treatment during the killing, according to Saudis who know him, and has since avoided the spotlight.

Mr. Khashoggi, who was a Saudi insider before fleeing the kingdom last year to live in Virginia and write columns for The Washington Post, had said the two men exemplified what was dangerous about Prince Mohammed.

The crown prince “does not have political advisers except Turki al-Sheikh and Saud al-Qahtani,” Mr. Khashoggi said in private comments published by Newsweek after his death. “They are very thuggish. People fear them. You challenge them, you might end up in prison.”

Mr. Qahtani did not respond to messages seeking comment. Mr. Sheikh did not respond to a request for comment sent to the sports commission.

Both men run portfolios — social media and sports — that resonate with the large population of young Saudis whom Prince Mohammed has courted as his base. Both have sought to fire up the fierce nationalism that the prince has encouraged by pouring money into battles against rivals in stadiums or on the internet.

Although neither portfolio relates to foreign affairs, foreign envoys often seek out the two men because of their influence, said Dennis Horak, the former Canadian ambassador to Riyadh who was expelled in August after other Canadian diplomats called for the release of detained rights activists.

Saudi Arabia’s sports minister, Turki al-Sheikh, right, interrupts a training session of the Saudi national soccer team to talk to players in Moscow in June.CreditAbedin Taherkenareh/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Sheikh was approachable while Mr. Qahtani “had a much fiercer reputation,” Mr. Horak said. The pair, he said, was “not so much good cop-bad cop, more bad cop and lesser-bad cop.”

Like Prince Mohammed, neither was well known before the prince’s father, King Salman, ascended the throne in 2015. Both were educated inside the kingdom with scant experience abroad.

Critics in the kingdom say that they sometimes failed to understand the dynamics of Western politics and culture, like when Mr. Qahtani orchestrated the plastering of billboards and trucks in London with his boss’s photo during the crown prince’s visit there last spring — to the derision of Londoners unaccustomed to foreign personality cults.

But each man had skills the prince treasured.

Mr. Qahtani, who held an undergraduate law degree and wrote poetry, had been recruited to work in the royal court more than a decade ago. He gained a deep understanding of the royal family’s secrets that members and associates of the royal family say he later exploited to help Prince Mohammed plot his rise and eliminate his rivals.

He also appears to have developed an interest in hacking. As early as 2009, someone using credentials associated with Mr. Qahtani was trawling amateur hacking forums to learn about surveillance software, according to images of the posts captured by other forum members.

In 2012, someone using Mr. Qahtani’s government email address solicited services from the Italian spyware company Hacking Team, according emails later released by WikiLeaks. In one email, the writer sought a visit by people with “high technical knowledge” to “explain the solutions you offer and training and costs.”

“Will bear all the costs of the trip from A-Z,” the author of the email added.

Mr. Qahtani has become Prince Mohammed’s chief propagandist. With a Twitter following of 1.36 million users, he solicited names for a blacklist of enemies of the kingdom and then marshaled mass social media attacks against them, commanding followers his critics have called “electronic flies.” His work has earned him the nicknames Lord of the Flies, Mr. Hashtag and “Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon.”

Mr. Sheikh was a bodyguard in Prince Mohammed’s security detail who charmed the prince with his sense of humor and intense loyalty, said associates of the royal family who know both men. Roughly the same age, they developed a personal rapport, and the prince rewarded Mr. Sheikh with a seemingly limitless budget to make the kingdom an international contender in tennis, boxing, soccer and other sports. He has welcomed wrestling legend Hulk Hogan to Riyadh and last April, he joked in the ring about keeping for himself the championship belt for the WWE’s Greatest Royal Rumble.

                                        The moment when Turki al-Shaikh handed over
                                         Saudi Arabia and Brown Stroman's Saudi Cup
                                         CreditVideo by كل شي

In an extension of his royally financed campaign to build a sports empire, Mr. Sheikh became the honorary president of one of the most successful and popular soccer teams in Egypt, an honor widely believed to reflect heavy investments of money from the crown prince. But Mr. Sheikh resigned in a dispute with the board after just a few months and instead bankrolled his own rival franchise, Pyramid. He recruited three star Brazilian players and launched a sports channel dedicated to his team, reportedly pouring in as much as $33 million.

But he complained publicly that Egyptian referees, fans and commentators were failing to appreciate his investments, and said he had asked Egypt’s president to intervene. In September, a stadium of Egyptian soccer fans broke out in vulgar chants denouncing Mr. Sheikh and the Saudis, and he responded by abandoning the team.

“Strange attacks from everywhere, and a new story every day,” he wrote on Facebook. “Why the headache?”

Mr. Sheikh also splurged last September on a $4.8 million limited edition Bugatti Chiron sports car, according to a sales contract obtained by The New York Times. The seller, the Emirati businessman Saeed Mohammed Butti Alqubaisi, declined to comment.

When an entertainment program on the Saudi-owned satellite network MBC last year seemed to hint at a rumored affair between Mr. Sheikh and an Egyptian singer, Mr. Sheikh ordered the network to fire the production team, according to industry executives familiar with the case. The show remains off the air.

Electronic billboards in London showing Prince Mohammed in ads with the hashtag #ANewSaudiArabia.CreditChris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Both men played signal roles in Prince Mohammed’s rise. In June 2017, Mr. Sheikh and Mr. Qahtani were among a handful of Prince Mohammed’s loyalists who forcibly detained the previous crown prince and interior minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, holding him overnight and threatening him until he agreed to give up his claim to the throne, according to members and associates of the royal family.

In a video made the next day, Mr. Sheikh can be seen hovering behind the ousted prince as he pledges allegiance to Mohammed bin Salman. A social media campaign spread rumors that a cocaine addiction had made the ousted prince unfit to rule, and people close to the royal family said Mr. Qahtani fueled the rumors.

Both men sprang into action again when Saudi Arabia led a blockade of its tiny neighbor Qatar in June 2017, over its support for political Islam. They unleashed insults and promoted hashtags bashing Qatar, and Mr. Qahtani forced MBC to stop airing Turkish soap operas because of Turkey’s support for Qatar, costing the network millions in losses, according to industry executives.

He also persuaded Prince Mohammed to spend more than $100,000 on American television commercials denouncing Qatar, evidently unaware of how few Americans were following the Gulf dispute.

A Qatari-owned network, BeIN Sports, had acquired the exclusive rights to broadcast this year’s World Cup in the Arab world. So Mr. Qahtani helped promote BeoutQ, a bootleg operation beamed from Riyadh-based Arabsat. BeoutQ ripped live events from BeIN’s feed and broadcast the games without paying for rights, spurring international lawsuits. The Saudi government has denied any relationship to the pirate network.

Both men also played key roles again last fall when Crown Prince Mohammed arbitrarily detained hundreds of the kingdom’s richest businessmen and several of his royal cousins in a Ritz-Carlton hotel in what was billed as a crackdown on corruption — just a few weeks after Mr. Sheikh had picked up his $4.8 million Bugatti.

Both men acted as interrogators, demanding that the captives confess to corrupt self-enrichment and pledge to surrender vast sums, according to relatives and close associates of several detainees. Although blindfolded during some interrogations, detainees told relatives that they saw the two men or recognized their voices from broadcast interviews. Others said that through hotel room windows, they saw Mr. Sheikh coming and going surrounded by armed guards.

Several former detainees have reported physical mistreatment during the interrogations, including beatings, electrical shocks and suspension upside down for long periods.

Some have shown their family members lasting scars from the beatings and shocks, and in one case photographs of the bruises and scars have been shared with The New York Times; some of the pictures included the electronic monitoring bracelet that the government has forced released detainees to wear to track their movements. One was forced to make his consent to a forced confession with only a thumb print because he was too incapacitated to write out his signature, according to a relative informed by the detainee.

Although no evidence has emerged that either man directly abused the captives, both questioned detainees who had been abused.

The government of Saudi Arabia has called the allegations of physical abuse “absolutely untrue.”

A few weeks after his release from the Ritz, Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, once the kingdom’s wealthiest investor, made a donation of more than a half-million dollars to a Saudi soccer club, writing on Twitter that he was “responding to the invitation of my brother Turki al-Sheikh.”

Neither Mr. Qahtani nor Mr. Sheikh have commented publicly on the killing of Mr. Khashoggi. But Mr. Qahtani, who lost his title as a royal court adviser, appears to believe his days of serving the prince are not over.

After his dismissal, he tweeted his thanks to the king and crown prince for “this great opportunity to have the honor to serve the homeland.”

“I will remain a loyal servant of my country forever,” he added.

(Source: NYT)

How Jamal Khashoggi got caught in the crossfire between two rival nations

News of Jamal Khashoggi’s death has reverberated around the world. But, as Borzou Daragahi explains, at the heart of his murder is the intertwined story of a prince and a populist

Jamal Khashoggi felt safe in Turkey, comfortable enough to buy an apartment in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul and make plans to partially settle down there. Turkey was not only his Saudi clan’s ancestral home, but also the nation of his future wife, Hatice Cengiz.

The 59-year-old Saudi journalist also felt an affinity for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, despite what critics describe as Turkey’s authoritarian drift, and appreciated his Justice and Development Party’s brand of populist, Islamist-rooted politics far more than that of Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

A marked man? ( AFP/Getty )

“He felt real simpatico with Erdogan,” says Maggie Mitchellhe Salem, a friend of Khashoggi. “There was some kind of bond there. In how he viewed Erdogan, it was with an eye towards what he had been during his earlier political career. Jamal saw there was some of that still there, in a way many of us don’t. That’s how he was, though. Jamal was always full of hope.”

There was just one crimp in Khashoggi’s plans. To marry Cengiz, Turkish law required Khashoggi obtain what is called a Certificate of Celibacy, a document confirming that a person is either single, divorced, or widowed. That meant flying back home and getting a document from his own country’s civil registry, a trip to Saudi that would likely land the dissident in jail.

The other option was to obtain it from a Saudi diplomatic mission in Turkey – the embassy in Ankara, or the consulate in Istanbul, which in normal traffic, is only about a 30 minute taxi ride away from Zeytinburnu. He decided to go for it. He walked in unannounced on 28 September to request the certificate, and was told to return the following week.

***

Khashoggi entered the consulate to obtain a Certificate of Celibacy so he could marry his fiancee (Hatice Cengiz)

The moment he walked inside that Friday, Khashoggi set in motion a series of events that would lead to his death on 2 October by a Saudi kill team dispatched from Riyadh. Sources told The Independent he was murdered in a gruelling torture session and interrogation about his personal connections, overseen via streaming internet video from Riyadh.

On Thursday, Saudi prosecutors announced that based on evidence presented by Turks, they had concluded Khashoggi’s killing was “premeditated”, suggesting that the team had flown to Istanbul with the express purpose of snuffing him out. Saudis did not disclose who gave the order to kill him.

The crisis over the killing continues to reverberate around the region, potentially changing the political dynamics of the Middle East. And it is one which threatens to weaken a political dynasty in the Arabian peninsula that is the cornerstone for the US strategy while strengthening the hand of Erdogan, who in some ways represents the opposite political brand as the Saudi royals.

‘His attacks on the crown prince made him an enemy in Riyadh, and his political approach a friend in Turkey’ (EPA)

“Jamal was a target of opportunity in Istanbul because they couldn’t get him elsewhere,” says W Robert Pearson, a former US ambassador to Turkey, now a fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. “His attacks on the way the crown prince was operating made him an enemy in Riyadh and his political approach made him a friend in Turkey.”

Khashoggi’s murder, the subsequent uproar and investigation, and the ongoing geopolitical convulsions, are at the heart of an intertwined story of two world leaders, a prince and a populist, as well as an idealistic man caught in the machinery of political rivalries across the Middle East in battlefields that include Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, as well as the Arabian peninsula.

***

Few know yet what was said or done in Riyadh when Khashoggi walked into the consulate in the Levent district of Istanbul that initial Friday. But alarm bells must have gone off in a capital seething with mistrust and intrigues amid the rise of a young crown prince with big ambitions and many opponents. A Saudi attache immediately boarded a plane from Istanbul to Riyadh, returning that Monday with two other Saudis. Together they began scouting out rural and wooded areas around the city. The following day 15 more Saudis arrived on private jets, with some heading to the consulate just before Khashoggi’s scheduled arrival.

Saudi officials have admitted there exists a standing order to try to lure dissidents such as Khashoggi back to the kingdom.

Saudi critics and human rights activists say those charged with the task were given permission to use any means necessary, including the use of deception, blackmail, drugs, and violence. The crown prince’s entourage had already tried to draw back numerous dissidents, including Ottawa-based student Omar Abdelaziz, whose family members have been jailed in Saudi Arabia in attempts to silence him or get him to return.

The 33-year-old crown prince, the favoured son of his father King Salman, has blown apart the consensus-based system of rule that spread power across the royal family branches, and put himself at the helm of almost all the country’s security apparatuses, moves that gave him more power but also more enemies, feeding into his paranoia.

Khashoggi’s interrogation and torture inside the consulate was reportedly live-streamed to Riyadh (AP)

Khashoggi, well-connected to journalists, scholars, and even policymakers in the Beltway, New York and London, was writing increasingly critical columns in The Washington Post in articles published in both Arabic and English, which proved to be more than a nuisance, but an actual threat to the crown prince’s plans to revamp the image of Saudi Arabia and strengthen relations with US institutions and government.

“The Post was blown away by the response in Arabic,” says a friend. “They had no idea there was going to be so much traffic.”

Karen Attiah, opinions editor at the paper, confirmed that “responses and traffic to our pieces published in Arabic over the last year outdid our expectation”, attributing it to Khashoggi’s popularity on social media.

The attention his columns generated must have rankled the ambitious crown prince, who sought to strengthen his hand in the region and the world. He also saw Turkey as more than just a rival, but an increasingly hostile force. As recently as March, the crown prince described Turkey as part of a “triangle of evil” that includes Saudi arch-rival Iran and hardline Islamist groups.

The crown prince or his adjutants might have calculated that even if Khashoggi disappeared and everyone suspected Saudi Arabia was behind it, relations were so bad with Turkey that he could afford alienating Ankara. What he certainly did not count on was a sophisticated surveillance system that detected the crime and a communications operation that helped turn Khashoggi into a global phenomenon and turn much of the world against the kingdom.

***

Turkey itself has suffered regional problems galore, chief among them the smouldering war in Syria, where Ankara seeks to remove separatist-minded Syrian Kurds backed by the US and Saudi Arabia, first to fight Isis but now as a potential hedge against Iran.

The journalist had an affinity for the brand of Islamist-rooted populist politics practised by Erdogan (AFP/Getty)

But more generally, Turkey is fighting off a rolling back of its influence across the Middle East. Since the 2013 coup in Egypt, Turkey had seen Muslim Brotherhood allies across the region crushed and disenfranchised by a coalition that included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Bahrain.

They had not only supported and helped crush Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which had led to the country’s first and only freely elected government, they sought to sideline like-minded groups and figures in Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Qatar, and Palestine.

All are lands formerly under Ottoman influence or control, but also strongly swayed by the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, which espouses a puritanical Wahhabi or Salafist version of Sunni Islam considered anathema in Turkey.

“Erdogan is a religious nationalist, and the Ottoman heritage no doubt inspires him greatly,” says HA Hellyer, a London-based scholar at the Atlantic Council and the Royal United Services Institute. “Erdogan seeks to project Turkish influence in the region, and sees Riyadh under Mohammed bin Salman to be a problem in this regard.”

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are locked in a game of pure geopolitics masked by cultural and religious differences, another neglected overlay of tension and hostility atop the Iran-Saudi and Israeli-Arab conflicts that have also riven the region.

His increasingly critical columns proved to be a threat to the crown prince’s plans (Washington Post)

Turkey’s worries about the crown prince are manifold. He has pushed Saudi closer into the neo-conservative US camp than ever before, signing on to Donald Trump’s crusade against Iran, which Turkey opposes as potentially leading to yet another war on its border.

“Turkey has a flexible relationship with Iran and does not see it as destructive and destabilising as the Saudis see it,” says Nader Habibi, a specialist in Middle East economics and politics at Brandeis University.

Erdogan and his supporters also strongly oppose the Saudi-led war in Yemen. It is considered the worst ongoing humanitarian disaster in the world, and has rankled the conscience of pious Muslims who make up Erdogan’s base.

Turkey and Saudi both actively proselytise across the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the west, lavishing funds on mosques and cultural centres. Saudi mosques are austere and sometimes featureless houses of worship. Turks build ornate Ottoman-era edifices with bulbous domes and colourful tiled surfaces.

The Saudi-Turkey rivalry dates back to the 18th century uprising by Wahhabi warlords who challenged Ottoman rule and marauded across the peninsula, smashing religious artefacts and shrines as idolatrous.

“Everyone seems to be so fixated on the Saudi-Iran business they’re missing the much bigger struggle between Turkey and Saudi for the soul and future of Sunni Islam,” says Graham Fuller, a former CIA officer specialised in Turkey.

But in the division between modern Saudi Arabia and Turkey, there is also a clash of political visions. The Saudi leadership sees the future of the region in stolid hereditary autocracies that keep the lid on homegrown extremists while fending off influence from Iran and its allies.

Erdogan and his Muslim Brotherhood-rooted allies across the region have a noisier, populist vision of governance, rooted in retail-level mass politics with an Islamic identity.

Turkey’s AK Party, Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party, Tunisia’s Nahda, Yemen’s Eslah Party, Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development, and even Palestinian Hamas are all rooted in a similar brand of Islamist politics characterised by a stated commitment to public service, recruitment of party cadres from all walks of life, and the building up of grassroots political networks.

Khashoggi was deeply inspired by the Arab Spring uprising protests and saw them as a sign of hope (Getty)

All have also frequently shown strong authoritarian tendencies. Months before the 2013 coup, Erdogan himself even warned Egypt’s Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, that he was courting disaster with his rigid ways. But the populist Islamists also pay lip service to democracy, and enthusiastically embrace electoral politics.

“The focus is on using elections and saying that Muslim societies must have political processes and that even non-Islamist parties must have a role,” says Habibi, of Brandeis. “Erdogan sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate political force rather than a radical force that destabilises the region.”

Often the populist Islamists understand the dynamics and mechanics of grassroots politics too well for the military men and monarchs who have been in charge of the Middle East and North Africa, a tension that has resulted in violence over the decades, in Syria and Algeria as well as Egypt.

“Those who rely on the guns in their hands, those who rely on the power of the media cannot build democracy,” Erdogan had said, shortly after the coup in Egypt. “Democracy can only be built at the ballot box.”

***

Khashoggi had a strong affinity for the brand of Islamist-rooted populist politics practised by Erdogan and his allies, at least much more so than for the absolute monarchical rule of his own and other Arabian peninsula autocracies.

He was deeply inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, triggered by the self-immolation of a frustrated Tunisian street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi, and saw them as a sign of hope. Khashoggi was crushed following the coup in Egypt. “Bouazizi was every young man in the Middle East and Jamal recognised that,” says Salem.

Once he moved to Washington in 2017 after fleeing the kingdom and the restrictions imposed on him, he appeared at forums sponsored by organisations and wrote for publications considered close to the Muslim Brotherhood, in addition to writing columns for The Washington Post. “The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes,” he wrote in August in The Post.

By the summer of 2018, Khashoggi had grown increasingly despondent about his nation, and his articles had taken an even more critical turn. In dark conversations, he described Saudi Arabia becoming like North Korea.

Salem said he had received messages from a member of the Saudi advisory council about another figure who had been arrested. The council member, cowering inside Saudi, was afraid he was next.

“This really upset Jamal,” says Salem. “Someone might have said something at a dinner party and then it got back to the leadership and this guy was arrested.”

Turkish police crime scene investigators are still looking for possible clues into the killing (AP/Emrah Gurel)

Even as he gave up on Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi also longed to be closer to the action. Istanbul, a commercial and cultural hub filled with residents and visitors from across the Arab world, seemed a good compromise. Though Turkey under Erdogan has jailed hundreds of journalists and dissidents, Khashoggi had cordial ties with figures close to the leadership and argued there was still some political space, especially for those working in Arabic or English instead of Turkish.

On 2 October, when he approached the Saudi consulate, and was patted down by security guards, Khashoggi knew that he had reason to be concerned. He knew that a sizeable number of Saudi dissidents and renegade royals had been lured, coaxed, or in some cases coerced back to the kingdom and had little doubt, based on the words and actions of the army of Twitter trolls the crown prince’s adjutant had deployed, that he was a prominent target. Since Mohammed bin Salman’s ascent to power, there have been numerous reports of renditions of regime critics back to the kingdom, but no reports of assassinations. He likely expected little more than a stern telling off or interrogation.

But Khashoggi, the optimist, couldn’t have in his wildest nightmares imagined what lay in store, that three Saudis had already scouted out what Turks describe as potential burial sites for his remains, and that members of a 15-man kill team that had already arrived in Istanbul were waiting to ambush him inside the building. Instead, he told his fiancee that he thought everything would be alright. The consulate had rung him shortly before noon to confirm his 1pm arrival.

Saudi intelligence officials revealed to Reuters several days ago that Khashoggi’s interrogation and torture before his death inside the consulate was live-streamed to Riyadh, with Saud al-Qahtani, the crown prince’s closest aide, possibly overseeing some of the confrontation.

A source briefed on the matter by an Arab intelligence official with knowledge of the investigation and a source briefed by a senior Turkish official confirmed that the interrogation was overseen by Riyadh.

Turkish officials speaking to local and international journalists say they managed to obtain audio or visual recordings of the session, which they have described as brutal, with Khashoggi being drugged and dismembered even while he was still breathing.

The Independent’s Arab source, who is not being identified for security reasons, said the session stretched on for two hours. It alternated between beating and questioning. The source briefed by a Turk said it was closer to an hour.

As Khashoggi was physically and verbally assaulted by men half his age, he was grilled about his associations abroad. He was asked about other dissident Saudi and Arab activists he had met with. He was questioned about his ongoing projects. His tormentors also pressed him on whether he had started on a memoir or kept any written account of a life that had included stints as an adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief.

The Independent was unable to corroborate the allegations made by the two sources or the Reuters report. The sources have both in the past provided accurate information about the Khashoggi case. A figure close to the Saudi leadership dismissed the interrogation narrative as “total BS”.

***

Erdogan probably learned of Khashoggi’s brutal murder shortly after it happened. Turkey’s intelligence likely had the building bugged, and even if the Saudi murderers swept the place for listening devices, Turks likely have access to sophisticated technology used by law enforcement and spy outfits to listen in on buildings from a few hundred metres away.

Erdogan and his advisers likely saw in the killing an attack on Turkey’s sovereignty but also on a fellow political traveller, someone who shared similar ideas and even mutual friends. An emotional politician who frequently speaks off-script and wades into crowds of working-class supporters, Erdogan undoubtedly felt a personal attachment to Khashoggi, who was after all of Turkish ethnic stock and was about to marry a Turk and make Istanbul his home. “Covering up such an atrocity will injure the conscience of all humanity,” he declared in a speech to parliament on Tuesday.

But Erdogan also sees in the killing and cover-up a potentially fatal mistake by the crown prince, whose vision of a “modern Islam” he sees as code for supplanting Turkish-backed political parties and figures across the region.

“The Turks don’t want the Saudis to blunt the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood by coming up with a modified form of Wahhabism,” says Pearson, the former US ambassador to Turkey.

From the start it was clear that Turkey had a lot of dirt on the crown prince. Possibly aided by a new communications team retrofitted into the presidency after decades under a prime minister, Turks masterfully launched a war of leaks that steadily eroded Saudi credibility.

Before he entered the consulate, Khashoggi told his fiancee that everything would be alright (AFP/Getty)

There was the day of the revelation, when anonymous Turkish officials began whispering to Reuters and other news organisations that they believed Khashoggi was dead. There was the day of the bone saw, when The New York Times cited an unnamed official likening the gruesome scene inside the consulate to Pulp Fiction.

There was the day of the 15, when Turkish newspaper Sabah published the photos and names of the kill squad that flew into Istanbul to murder Khashoggi. There was the day of the black vans. The day of the Mercedes. The day of the imposter, with photos and videos released showing a 57-year-old operative, wearing Khashoggi’s clothes and a fake beard, Saudis included in the kill team to throw off investigators.

There was the day of the scouting operation, with leaked footage showing Saudi operatives a day before the murder visiting remote wooded sites on Istanbul’s outskirts. Each leak undermined an element of the Saudi narrative, forcing it to constantly change its story and confess to ever deeper and more sordid levels of criminal behaviour.

The crown prince had spent tens of millions of dollars to deploy scores of high-brow public relations strategists to revamp the image of Saudi Arabia abroad. But all the crown prince’s crisis-management teams and his flacks couldn’t counter the power of the Khashoggi narrative, as trickled out by the Turkish populist with a keen ear to the ground and an instinctive understanding of media.

“Turning the screws on the crown prince in this fashion using US media must be delicious for Erdogan,” says Aaron Stein, a Turkey and Middle East specialist at the Atlantic Council. “And of course, the Saudis know that it’s the Turks doing this.”

***

Turkey had already begun reaping the benefits of the crown prince’s erratic behaviour, drawing Qatar into its ranks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain imposed a blockade on the small gas-rich country. Kuwait and Oman, too, have begun looking to Turkey as a counterweight to the crown prince’s unpredictability and adventurism.

But now the crown prince was having his wings clipped inside the kingdom and out, with western countries already talking about imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia and murmurs of discontent among royals already alienated by his abuse, imprisonment and sidelining of rival royals. It remains unclear whether the crown prince will be replaced or whether the blows to his reputation will undermine his alliance with the Trump administration or even imperil his status as heir to the Saudi throne.

But already there are signs that Turkey is winning geopolitical concessions from Saudi Arabia.

In his speech at a major Riyadh economic forum on Wednesday, the crown prince went out of his way to praise Turkey and Erdogan, and even made a conciliatory remark towards Qatar. And before the speech, the crown prince rang Erdogan and vowed to get to the bottom of the Khashoggi affair.

Despite their differences, Turkey and Saudi have strong commercial ties and mutual interests. At the very least Erdogan can use the matter to push the young prince to be more deferential towards him.

“It may be a new start of good relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia,” says Vehbi Baysun, a specialist in Turkey-Gulf relations at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. “Relations went down and suffered a lot, over Syria, over the Muslim Brotherhood, over the US, over Yemen.”

Many originally thought Erdogan wanted to use the Khashoggi murder to knock the crown prince off the chessboard. But a chastened crown prince beholden to Erdogan may put the president in a stronger position to exact other concessions.

Taking money from Saudi Arabia to smooth over the matter would damage Erdogan’s reputation in Turkey and abroad. But Erdogan might calculate that he could have his cake and eat it too. Getting Saudi Arabia to relieve pressure on Qatar might result in a windfall from the gas-rich country. Convincing Riyadh and Washington to pull the plug on the Kurdish experiment in northern Syria would please Turkish nationalists. And convincing the crown prince to get Egypt and the UAE to ease pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups would help Turkey retain influence across the region, as well as honour Khashoggi’s ideals, and his hopes for democracy in the Arab world.

“Jamal was a Saudi champion of the Arab Spring,” says Salem. “And that’s where he ran afoul of the regime.”

(Source: The Independent)

Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at last

The crown prince has big plans for his society, writes Thomas L. Friedman in the NYT. Read on: 

I never thought I’d live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia. Yes, you read that right. Though I came here at the start of Saudi winter, I found the country going through its own Arab Spring, Saudi style.

Unlike the other Arab Springs — all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia — this one is led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and, if it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its success — but only a fool would not root for it.

To better understand it I flew to Riyadh to interview the crown prince, known as “M.B.S.,” who had not spoken about the extraordinary events here of early November, when his government arrested scores of Saudi princes and businessmen on charges of corruption and threw them into a makeshift gilded jail — the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton — until they agreed to surrender their ill-gotten gains. You don’t see that every day.

We met at night at his family’s ornate adobe-walled palace in Ouja, north of Riyadh. M.B.S. spoke in English, while his brother, Prince Khalid, the new Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and several senior ministers shared different lamb dishes and spiced the conversation. After nearly four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth, pointing out that I was exactly twice his age. It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country.

We started with the obvious question: What’s happening at the Ritz? And was this his power play to eliminate his family and private sector rivals before his ailing father, King Salman, turns the keys of the kingdom over to him?

It’s “ludicrous,” he said, to suggest that this anticorruption campaign was a power grab. He pointed out that many prominent members of the Ritz crowd had already publicly pledged allegiance to him and his reforms, and that “a majority of the royal family” is already behind him. This is what happened, he said: “Our country has suffered a lot from corruption from the 1980s until today. The calculation of our experts is that roughly 10 percent of all government spending was siphoned off by corruption each year, from the top levels to the bottom. Over the years the government launched more than one ‘war on corruption’ and they all failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up.”

So when his father, who has never been tainted by corruption charges during his nearly five decades as governor of Riyadh, ascended to the throne in 2015 (at a time of falling oil prices), he vowed to put a stop to it all, M.B.S. said:

“My father saw that there is no way we can stay in the G-20 and grow with this level of corruption. In early 2015, one of his first orders to his team was to collect all the information about corruption — at the top. This team worked for two years until they collected the most accurate information, and then they came up with about 200 names.”

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh. Credit Faisal Al Nasser/Reuters

When all the data was ready, the public prosecutor, Saud al-Mojib, took action, M.B.S. said, explaining that each suspected billionaire or prince was arrested and given two choices: “We show them all the files that we have and as soon as they see those about 95 percent agree to a settlement,” which means signing over cash or shares of their business to the Saudi state treasury.

“About 1 percent,” he added, “are able to prove they are clean and their case is dropped right there. About 4 percent say they are not corrupt and with their lawyers want to go to court. Under Saudi law, the public prosecutor is independent. We cannot interfere with his job — the king can dismiss him, but he is driving the process … We have experts making sure no businesses are bankrupted in the process” — to avoid causing unemployment.

“How much money are they recovering?” I asked.

The public prosecutor says it could eventually “be around $100 billion in settlements,” said M.B.S.

There is no way, he added, to root out all corruption from top to the bottom, “So you have to send a signal, and the signal going forward now is, ‘You will not escape.’ And we are already seeing the impact,” like people writing on social media, “I called my middle man and he doesn’t answer.” Saudi business people who paid bribes to get services done by bureaucrats are not being prosecuted, explained M.B.S. “It’s those who shook the money out of the government” — by overcharging and getting kickbacks.

The stakes are high for M.B.S. in this anticorruption drive. If the public feels that he is truly purging corruption that was sapping the system and doing so in a way that is transparent and makes clear to future Saudi and foreign investors that the rule of law will prevail, it will really instill a lot of new confidence in the system. But if the process ends up feeling arbitrary, bullying and opaque, aimed more at aggregating power for power’s sake and unchecked by any rule of law, it will end up instilling fear that will unnerve Saudi and foreign investors in ways the country can’t afford.

King Salman praying at Quba mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, this month. Credit Reuters

But one thing I know for sure: Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive. The Saudi silent majority is clearly fed up with the injustice of so many princes and billionaires ripping off their country. While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”

But guess what? This anticorruption drive is only the second-most unusual and important initiative launched by M.B.S. The first is to bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation — whence it diverted in 1979. That is, back to what M.B.S. described to a recent global investment conference here as a “moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples.”

I know that year well. I started my career as a reporter in the Middle East in Beirut in 1979, and so much of the region that I have covered since was shaped by the three big events of that year: the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Saudi puritanical extremists — who denounced the Saudi ruling family as corrupt, impious sellouts to Western values; the Iranian Islamic revolution; and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

These three events together freaked out the Saudi ruling family at the time, and prompted it to try to shore up its legitimacy by allowing its Wahhabi clerics to impose a much more austere Islam on the society and by launching a worldwide competition with Iran’s ayatollahs over who could export more fundamentalist Islam. It didn’t help that the U.S. tried to leverage this trend by using Islamist fighters against Russia in Afghanistan. In all, it pushed Islam globally way to the right and helped nurture 9/11.

Men entering Alrajhi Mosque for noon prayer last month. Credit Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

A lawyer by training, who rose up in his family’s education-social welfare foundation, M.B.S. is on a mission to bring Saudi Islam back to the center. He has not only curbed the authority of the once feared Saudi religious police to berate a woman for not covering every inch of her skin, he has also let women drive. And unlike any Saudi leader before him, he has taken the hard-liners on ideologically. As one U.S.-educated 28-year-old Saudi woman told me: M.B.S. “uses a different language. He says, ‘We are going to destroy extremism.’ He’s not sugar-coating. That is reassuring to me that the change is real.”

Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me: “Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam — we are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins — and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979.” At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical theaters, there was mixing between men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia. “The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman!” So if the Prophet embraced all of this, M.B.S. asked, “Do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”

Then one of his ministers got out his cellphone and shared with me pictures and YouTube videos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s — women without heads covered, wearing skirts and walking with men in public, as well as concerts and cinemas. It was still a traditional and modest place, but not one where fun had been outlawed, which is what happened after 1979.

If this virus of an antipluralistic, misogynistic Islam that came out of Saudi Arabia in 1979 can be reversed by Saudi Arabia, it would drive moderation across the Muslim world and surely be welcomed here where 65 percent of the population is under 30.

One middle-age Saudi banker said to me: “My generation was held hostage by 1979. I know now that my kids will not be hostages.” Added a 28-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur: “Ten years ago when we talked about music in Riyadh it meant buying a CD — now it is about the concert next month and what ticket are you buying and which of your friends will go with you.”

Participants at the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, in October.
Credit Tasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

Saudi Arabia would have a very long way to go before it approached anything like Western standards for free speech and women’s rights. But as someone who has been coming here for almost 30 years, it blew my mind to learn that you can hear Western classical music concerts in Riyadh now, that country singer Toby Keith held a men-only concert here in September, where he even sang with a Saudi, and that Lebanese soprano Hiba Tawaji will be among the first woman singers to perform a women-only concert here on Dec. 6. And M.B.S told me, it was just decided that women will be able to go to stadiums and attend soccer games. The Saudi clerics have completely acquiesced.

The Saudi education minister chimed in that among a broad set of education reforms, he’s redoing and digitizing all textbooks, sending 1,700 Saudi teachers each year to world-class schools in places like Finland to upgrade their skills, announcing that for the first time Saudi girls will have physical education classes in public schools and this year adding an hour to the Saudi school day for kids to explore their passions in science and social issues, under a teacher’s supervision, with their own projects.

So many of these reforms were so long overdue it’s ridiculous. Better late than never, though.

On foreign policy, M.B.S. would not discuss the strange goings on with Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon coming to Saudi Arabia and announcing his resignation, seemingly under Saudi pressure, and now returning to Beirut and rescinding that resignation. He simply insisted that the bottom line of the whole affair is that Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, is not going to continue providing political cover for a Lebanese government that is essentially controlled by the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia, which is essentially controlled by Tehran.

He insisted that the Saudi-backed war in Yemen, which has been a humanitarian nightmare, was tilting in the direction of the pro-Saudi legitimate government there, which, he said is now in control of 85 percent of the country, but given the fact that pro-Iranian Houthi rebels, who hold the rest, launched a missile at Riyadh airport, anything less than 100 percent is still problematic.

His general view seemed to be that with the backing of the Trump administration — he praised President Trump as “the right person at the right time” — the Saudis and their Arab allies were slowly building a coalition to stand up to Iran. I am skeptical. The dysfunction and rivalries within the Sunni Arab world generally have prevented forming a unified front up to now, which is why Iran indirectly controls four Arab capitals today — Damascus, Sana, Baghdad and Beirut. That Iranian over-reach is one reason M.B.S. was scathing about Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s “supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,” said M.B.S. “But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.” What matters most, though, is what Saudi Arabia does at home to build its strength and economy.

But can M.B.S. and his team see this through? Again, I make no predictions. He has his flaws that he will have to control, insiders here tell me. They include relying on a very tight circle of advisers who don’t always challenge him sufficiently, and a tendency to start too many things that don’t get finished. There’s a whole list. But guess what? Perfect is not on the menu here. Someone had to do this job — wrench Saudi Arabia into the 21st century — and M.B.S. stepped up. I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Credit Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

And so are a lot of young Saudis. There was something a 30-year-old Saudi woman social entrepreneur said to me that stuck in my ear. “We are privileged to be the generation that has seen the before and the after.” The previous generation of Saudi women, she explained, could never imagine a day when a woman could drive and the coming generation will never be able to imagine a day when a woman couldn’t.

“But I will always remember not being able to drive,” she told me. And the fact that starting in June that will never again be so “gives me so much hope. It proves to me that anything is possible — that this is a time of opportunity. We have seen things change and we are young enough to make the transition.”

This reform push is giving the youth here a new pride in their country, almost a new identity, which many of them clearly relish. Being a Saudi student in post-9/11 America, young Saudis confess, is to always feel you are being looked at as a potential terrorist or someone who comes from a country locked in the Stone Age.

Now they have a young leader who is driving religious and economic reform, who talks the language of high tech, and whose biggest sin may be that he wants to go too fast. Most ministers are now in their 40s — and not 60s. And with the suffocating hand of a puritanical Islam being lifted, it’s giving them a chance to think afresh about their country and their identity as Saudis.

“We need to restore our culture to what it was before the [Islamic] radical culture took over,” a Saudi woman friend who works with an N.G.O. said to me. ”`We have 13 regions in this country, and they each have a different cuisine. But nobody knows that. Did you know that? But I never saw one Saudi dish go global. It is time for us to embrace who we are and who we were.”

Alas, who Saudi Arabia is also includes a large cohort of older, more rural, more traditional Saudis, and pulling them into the 21st century will be a challenge. But that’s in part why every senior bureaucrat is working crazy hours now. They know M.B.S. can call them on the phone at any of those hours to find out if something he wanted done is getting done. I told him his work habits reminded me of a line in the play “Hamilton,” when the chorus asks: Why does he always work like “he’s running out of time.”

“Because,” said M.B.S., ``I fear that the day I die I am going to die without accomplishing what I have in my mind. Life is too short and a lot of things can happen, and I am really keen to see it with my own eyes — and that is why I am in a hurry.”

I will return Saudi Arabia to moderate Islam, says crown prince

Mohammed bin Salman tells the Guardian that ultra-conservative state has been ‘not normal’ for past 30 years. Read on: 

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has vowed to return the country to “moderate Islam” and asked for global support to transform the hardline kingdom into an open society that empowers citizens and lures investors.

In an interview with the Guardian, the powerful heir to the Saudi throne said the ultra-conservative state had been “not normal” for the past 30 years, blaming rigid doctrines that have governed society in a reaction to the Iranian revolution, which successive leaders “didn’t know how to deal with”.

The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, told the Guardian the rigid doctrines of the past three decades were the result of not knowing how to deal with the Iranian revolution. Photograph: Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images

Expanding on comments he made at an investment conference at which he announced the launch of an ambitious $500bn (£381bn) independent economic zone straddling Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, Prince Mohammed said: “We are a G20 country. One of the biggest world economies. We’re in the middle of three continents. Changing Saudi Arabia for the better means helping the region and changing the world. So this is what we are trying to do here. And we hope we get support from everyone.

“What happened in the last 30 years is not Saudi Arabia. What happened in the region in the last 30 years is not the Middle East. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, people wanted to copy this model in different countries, one of them is Saudi Arabia. We didn’t know how to deal with it. And the problem spread all over the world. Now is the time to get rid of it.”

Earlier Prince Mohammed had said: “We are simply reverting to what we followed – a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions. 70% of the Saudis are younger than 30, honestly we won’t waste 30 years of our life combating extremist thoughts, we will destroy them now and immediately.”

The crown prince’s comments are the most emphatic he has made during a six-month reform programme that has tabled cultural reforms and economic incentives unimaginable during recent decades, during which the kingdom has been accused of promoting a brand of Islam that underwrote extremism.

The comments were made as the heir of the incumbent monarch moves to consolidate his authority, sidelining clerics whom he believes have failed to support him and demanding unquestioning loyalty from senior officials whom he has entrusted to drive a 15-year reform programme that aims to overhaul most aspects of life in Saudi Arabia.

Central to the reforms has been the breaking of an alliance between hardline clerics who have long defined the national character and the House of Saud, which has run affairs of state. The changes have tackled head-on societal taboos such as the recently rescinded ban on women driving, as well as scaling back guardianship laws that restrict women’s roles and establishing an Islamic centre tasked with certifying the sayings of the prophet Muhammed.

A woman sits behind the wheel of a car in Riyadh last month. Photograph: STR/EPA

The scale and scope of the reforms has been unprecedented in the country’s modern history and concerns remain that a deeply conservative base will oppose what is effectively a cultural revolution – and that the kingdom lacks the capacity to follow through on its economic ambitions.

The new economic zone is to be established on 470km of the Red Sea coast, in a tourist area that has already been earmarked as a liberal hub akin to Dubai, where male and female bathers are free to mingle.

It has been unveiled as the centrepiece of efforts to turn the kingdom away from a near total dependence on oil and into a diverse open economy. Obstacles remain: an entrenched poor work ethic, a crippling regulatory environment and a general reluctance to change.

A promotional video for Neom, a new economic zone on the Red Sea coast

“Economic transformation is important but equally essential is social transformation,” said one of the country’s leading businessmen. “You cannot achieve one without the other. The speed of social transformation is key. It has to be manageable.”

Alcohol, cinemas and theatres are still banned in the kingdom and mingling between unrelated men and women remains frowned upon. However Saudi Arabia – an absolute monarchy – has clipped the wings of the once-feared religious police, who no longer have powers to arrest and are seen to be falling in line with the new regime.

Economically Saudi Arabia will need huge resources if it is to succeed in putting its economy on a new footing and its leadership believes it will fail to generate strategic investments if it does not also table broad social reforms.

Prince Mohammed had repeatedly insisted that without establishing a new social contract between citizen and state, economic rehabilitation would fail. “This is about giving kids a social life,” said a senior Saudi royal figure. “Entertainment needs to be an option for them. They are bored and resentful. A woman needs to be able to drive herself to work. Without that we are all doomed. Everyone knows that – except the people in small towns. But they will learn.”

A screengrab from the promotional video for Saudi Arabia’s new economic zone. Photograph: YouTube

In the next 10 years, at least five million Saudis are likely to enter the country’s workforce, posing a huge problem for officials who currently do not have jobs to offer them or tangible plans to generate employment.

The economic zone is due to be completed by 2025 – five years before the current cap on the reform programme – and is to be powered by wind and solar energy, according to its founders.

The country’s enormous sovereign wealth fund is intended to be a key backer of the independent zone. It currently has $230bn under management. The sale of 5% of the world’s largest company, Aramco, is expected to raise several hundred billion dollars more.