Who would have imagined this?
By Habib Siddiqui
Who would’ve imagined that
Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Washington
Post columnist who had been living in the U.S, would be killed inside
the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul? But now we know better. Thanks to Saudi
Arabia’s crown prince MBS, such has become a reality.
According
to the CNN, the Turkish officials suspected within hours of Jamal
Khashoggi's disappearance that he might have been
killed. They raced to Istanbul airport to intercept -- a
chartered Gulfstream (a private Saudi) plane -- that was waiting to take off. Disguised
as airport staff, officers searched the plane while seven Saudis including
one with a diplomatic passport waited in the airport. But they found nothing
suspicious, and the flight in question was allowed to leave at about 11 p.m.
local time. The other Saudi plane had taken off before investigators arrived
at the airport.
In the
two weeks since, authorities have been trying to piece together what happened
on that fateful afternoon when Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate to
obtain paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancée -- and was never seen again. Khashoggi's
fiancée Hatice Cengiz raised the alarm just before 5 p.m. on October 2 -- three
hours and a half after the journalist entered the consulate. At that time, she
was still waiting outside.
Turkish
officials now say they believe that 15 Saudi men who arrived in Istanbul in two
private planes on October 2 were connected to Khashoggi's death. At least some
of them appear to have high-level connections in the Saudi government.
When Saudi
Ambassador Waleed Al Khereiji was contacted by an adviser to Turkish President
Recep Erdogan, he told him that he had not heard anything about Khashoggi.
However, grisly details from an audio-visual feed from inside the consulate suggest
that Khashoggi was tortured and then killed soon after entering the consulate,
according to Turkish media. Turkish officials believe that his body was
dismembered inside the consulate.
Time-stamped
surveillance images from October 2, which the newspaper Sabah published after obtaining
such from Turkish security sources, captured Saudi intelligence officer and
former diplomat Maher Abdul-Aziz Mutreb outside the Saudi consulate, leaving
the consul general's residence, at a nearby hotel, and arriving at the airport
shortly before the chartered plane departed for Riyadh.
Mutreb,
who was the first secretary at the Saudi embassy in London and has been
described as a colonel in Saudi intelligence, is now believed to have played a
"pivotal role" in the apparent assassination of Saudi journalist
Jamal Khashoggi. He is closely connected to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman (MBS), and photographs have emerged of the two together during the Crown
Prince's tour of the United States earlier this year.
Under
pressure from international media, Saudi Arabia, which has changed its
narratives several times - on the mysterious disappearance of one of its loyal and
yet disgruntled voices, now claims that Khashoggi was accidentally strangled
Oct. 2 in a fight with 15 Saudis employed by the nation’s security services and
military inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
The Saudi
government said it has arrested the entire team and three others. It blames two
of the Saudi crown prince’s key aides – the deputy director of Saudi
intelligence and his top communications adviser – for Khashoggi’s death. And
the kingdom appointed that same crown prince to head a committee to review the
incident and restructure the nation’s intelligence agency.
Many
analysts find the Saudi report as an all-too-convenient cover story that is
aimed at trying to protect MBS by blaming Khashoggi’s murder on Maj. Gen. Ahmed
al-Assiri (MBS’s senior military adviser) and Saud al-Qahtani (the crown
prince’s top communications adviser).
As
noted by Fox News, the last-ditch effort by the Saudi announcement, made in the
dead of night over a weekend, appears to be a pathetic attempt not only to
salvage the vital strategic U.S.-Saudi relationship but to exonerate the man
responsible directly or tacitly for Khashoggi’s brutal murder. That man is
Crown Prince MBS,
who is now described, perhaps deservingly, on Twitter by his critics as “Mr.
Bone Saw”.
Fox
News reporter Judith Miller writes, “But
the
Saudi government’s explanation of how Khashoggi was killed – offered 18 days
after insisting that he had left the consulate alive – is dismal. For strategic
reasons, it may pass muster with the White House. But it shouldn’t. And if
initial reaction is any indication, Congress may not buy in.” I pray and hope
that she is right.
Can this MBS
monster be tamed? Can he be brought to justice in a world when monsters and
demons seem to feel invigorated, if not rule? As a newly minted 29-year-old
defense minister in 2015, MBS promoted Riyadh's intervention in the Yemeni
civil war against the Zaydi Shi’ite Houthis.
The intervention that resulted in deaths of tens of thousands and wanton destruction has been a
humanitarian and public relations disaster for the desert kingdom.
MBS has also
led the effort to boycott Qatar for its ties to Iran, Riyadh’s strategic
competitor, and for its support for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is
a rival Islamic movement despised by Saudi Wahhabis, who promote their own
brand of extremist Islam, which many see as a resurrection of the much-despised
Khariji movement of the early Islamic Caliphate.
MBS was also
known to have been responsible for the temporary detention and possible beating
of Lebanese Prime Minister Sa'ad al-Hariri, whom MBS saw as too close to Iran
and the Hizbullah, which is now Lebanon's leading political force.
MBS talked
about reforming the Saudi society and dragging the kingdom into the 21st
century by, among other things, letting women drive. But he arrested several of
the Saudi women who had led the campaign for which he claimed credit. Under his
rule, the number of jailed dissidents has grown. He touted Vision 2030, a
campaign to shift the base of the Saudi economy away from oil. But that vital
effort to employ young, frustrated Saudis in real, non-government jobs is yet
to see its first daylight.
Last year
MBS imprisoned some 400 Saudi officials and businessmen in a five-star
Ritz-Carlton Hotel without formal charges to extort what he claimed were their
ill-gotten gains. Don’t the Saudis have right to know about his own wealth?
How did MBS,
a
33-year old prince, amass so much wealth in such a short time? What entitled him to
buy Salvator
Mundi, the most expensive painting ever sold,
for $450 million? He lectures Saudis about working
harder and tightening their belts while he buys $300 million villas in France
and $450 million yachts with their money. Is he a hypocrite or a robber? Or,
both?
Obviously,
MBS, like his mentor and cheer leader in the White House, won’t share such
vital information. With friends like Kushner and Trump, he thinks he can get
away with murder of dissidents and even hire mercenaries to do his dirty job
outside the kingdom.
By the
way, MBS is not the only one in our time doing such heinous acts. Since Israel’s
birth, its leaders have used Mossad agents to kill Palestinian leaders, and
even Iranian and Iraqi scientists. Kremlin has done the same thing with its own
dissidents. For years, the monarchs in the Middle East have hired mercenaries
to do their unfinished tasks of silencing dissidents that live outside their
reign of authority. Since 9/11, we have already seen Erik Prince’s American
mercenaries deployed in places like Iraq, the UAE and
even in Africa, carrying out targeted assassinations and wanton massacre of
civilians in war-torn countries.
For months in war-torn
Yemen, some of America’s most highly trained soldiers worked on a mercenary
mission of murky legality to kill prominent clerics and political figures.
On December 29, 2015
Anssaf Ali Mayo,
the local leader of a political party Al-Islah in Yemen, was the target of
assassination by a group of former American Green Beret and Navy SEALs. The UAE
considers Al-Islah to be the Yemeni branch of the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood,
which the UAE calls a terrorist organization. [Many experts insist that
Al-Islah, one of whose members Tawakkul Karman won the Nobel Peace Prize, is no terror group. They say it's a
legitimate political party that threatens the UAE not through violence but by
speaking out against its wrong and illicit ambitions in Yemen.]
The US mercenaries’ plan
was to attach a bomb laced with shrapnel to the door of Al-Islah’s
headquarters, located near a soccer stadium in central Aden, a key Yemeni port
city. The explosion, one of the leaders of the expedition explained, was
supposed to “kill everybody in that office.” Just imagine the magnitude of the
criminal intent – killing everyone including Mayo!
The company that hired the
soldiers and carried out the attack is Spear Operations Group, incorporated in the
state of Delaware, USA and founded by Abraham Golan, a charismatic Hungarian
Israeli security contractor who lives outside of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. He
led the team’s strike against Mayo. “There was a targeted assassination program
in Yemen,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I was running it. We did it. It was
sanctioned by the UAE within the coalition.” [The
Mayo assassination was ultimately unsuccessful. Mayo disappeared from Yemeni politics for a while, and the Spear crew
even thought he was dead, but he is currently serving in the Yemeni government,
alive and well.]
Based on credible reports,
Spear Operations Group arranged for the UAE to give military rank to the
Americans involved in the mission, which might provide them legal cover for
their otherwise illicit activities, including war crimes.
Interestingly, the deal
that brought American mercenaries to the streets of Aden was hashed out over a
lunch in Abu Dhabi, at an Italian restaurant in the officers’ club of a UAE
military base. Their host was Mohammed Dahlan, the
fearsome former security chief for the Palestinian Authority. [Dahlan has been living in exile in Abu Dhabi,
where he "works closely" with the ruling Al Nahyan family (being described as "the UAE's favorite Palestinian") and is also aligned with Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi.]
What a messy world that we
are living in that brings in former archenemies to conspire to assassinate
politicians and dissidents whose only crime is to speak their mind and demand
better for their people! In this newly found fondness, the ends justify the
means blurring the difference between the right and the wrong.
Nearly 14 centuries ago,
Muhammad (S), the Prophet of Islam famously said, “A time will come upon the
people when adhering to one’s religion will be like holding on to hot coal.” [Tirmizi,
narrated by Anas ibn Malik (RA)] The sad fact is: in our time, even an agnostic
is not safe!
It is a difficult time
indeed for conscientious human beings who dare to speak the truth. Betrayed by
their own government they often live under insecurity. No place is safe for
them unless they either become cheerleaders for the despots and thugs or are nonchalant
and mum about their own sufferings and surroundings.
But the struggle for a
just society must go on whether the despots like it or not. The guys like MBS
may need people like Sisi and Trump to protect them. But for how long will such
unholy honeymoon last? Let the lessons of history awake them to amend their
ways before it is too late.
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