Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks on his cellphone at the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (Virginia Mayo/AP)
By David Ignatius
Columnist
November 27, 2018
Behind the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi lies a power struggle within the Saudi royal family that helped feed the paranoia and recklessness of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Eventually, this rage in the royal court led to the death and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist.
The opening scenes of this family feud took place in January 2015 in a VIP hospital suite in Riyadh, as King Abdullah lay on his deathbed. According to a Saudi who was at the hospital at the time, Abdullah’s sons and courtiers briefly delayed informing his successor, King Salman, that the monarch had passed — perhaps hoping to control the court’s stash of money and sustain powerful positions for Abdullah’s wing of the family.
The cutthroat scheming within the House of Saud over the following years matches anything in the fantasy series “Game of Thrones.” The fallout extended to the United States, China, Switzerland and other countries, as the two most powerful clans of the royal family jockeyed for power. As the tension increased, the royal court around Mohammed bin Salman, the new king’s favorite son, even dared to try to kidnap a member of the Abdullah faction in Beijing in a brazen operation in August 2016 that reads like a chapter in a spy thriller.
MBS, as Salman’s son is known, became increasingly anxious and aggressive toward those he considered enemies. Starting in the spring of 2017, a team of Saudi intelligence operatives, under the control of the royal court, began organizing kidnappings of dissidents abroad and at home, according to U.S. and Saudi experts. Detainees were held at covert sites. The Saudis used harsh enhanced interrogation techniques, a euphemism for torture, to make the captives talk. They were forced to sign oaths that if they disclosed any of what happened, they would pay a severe price.
This real-life drama was described to me in a series of interviews by prominent Saudis and U.S. and European experts, in the United States and abroad, in the weeks since Khashoggi’s death. These sources had firsthand knowledge of events but asked not to be identified …
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Categories: The Muslim Times