1 March 2021 If Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, were a burglar, he wouldn’t be George Clooney in ‘Ocean’s Eleven’. He’d be a cartoon burglar in a carnival mask and a top with black-and-white horizontal stripes, carrying a sack labelled ‘SWAG’. He’s not a burglar, of course. He’s …
Khashoggi and the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight Read More »
On Monday the public prosecutor of Saudi Arabia announced that justice has been done. Five people have been sentenced to death for the murder of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a team of Saudi agents inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. Unfortunately, he didn’t say who they were. No problem. They will probably be …
Big shifts in the military balance happen quietly over many years, and then leap suddenly into focus when the shooting starts. It happened to classic blitzkrieg tactics in the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when both sides lost half their tanks, mostly to cheap, infantry-fired anti-tank missiles, in just three weeks. And it happened to ‘air …
Now is the moment of maximum danger for Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS). He has weathered the immediate storm over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi two months ago. He even went to the G20 summit in Buenos Aires a week ago and persuaded several other national leaders to stand …
If Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), really did sent a hit team to Turkey to murder dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul ten days ago, what will happen next? Perhaps history can help us here. A little over two centuries ago, in 1804, the …
The men who carried out Saturday’s attack on the parade in Ahvaz, in Iran’s southwestern province of Khuzestan, were well trained: four of them killed 25 people and wounded 70 others before they were shot dead. The question is whether they were trained by ‘Islamic State’, or by the backers of the low-profile Ahvaz National …
Joy and pride among Saudi women who are at last allowed to drive. Delight in the car dealerships that anticipate a lot of new business. And dismay in the families of the 1.4 million chauffeurs, almost all from South Asia, who have been earning around $1,000 a month driving Saudi women around. But it will …
“…One orb to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” Five months ago, during Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, he was invited to open the “Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology”. (I’m not making that up.) The huge, darkened room they were in looked like a cross between a starship bridge and …
The media mostly missed it (or chose to ignore it as a piece of meaningless rhetoric), but Donald Trump proclaimed a new doctrine in his speech to the assembled leaders of the Muslim world in Saudi Arabia on Sunday. It goes by the name of Principled Realism, although it didn’t offer much by way of …
“They hit everything, hospitals, orphanages, schools,” Hisham al-Omeisy told The Guardian newspaper six months ago. “You live in constant fear that your kids’ school could be the next target.” No, he’s not talking about the wicked Russians bombing the eastern side of Aleppo in Syria, which is stirring up so much synthetic indignation in Washington …