Behind Saudi Prince’s Crackdown Was Confidant Tied to Khashoggi Killing

As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pushed through ambitious social reforms, he also ordered a zero-tolerance campaign against dissent spearheaded by his most trusted confidant, who is now implicated in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

People with knowledge of the work of Saud al-Qahtani say he was intimately involved in the kingdom’s targeting of Mr. Khashoggi—from efforts to persuade him to return to Saudi Arabia from the U.S., to the planning and execution of the operation that ended with his death in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2. He is under criminal investigation, these people say, and has been fired from his job as the crown prince’s media adviser.

The alleged role of Mr. Qahtani in the murder is complicating Saudi Arabia’s efforts to separate its de facto leader, Prince Mohammed, from a killing that has triggered a diplomatic crisis for the kingdom and caused deep angst among the country’s rulers.

“Whether or not he knew about it,” a Western official said of the crown prince, “this happened under his watch.”

Mr. Qahtani and Saudi government representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Saudi government has repeatedly denied that Prince Mohammed had any direct knowledge of the operation, despite persistent suspicions by Turkish and Western officials that he must have known about it. The prince condemned the killing as a “hideous incident” and vowed to deliver justice.

This account of Mr. Qahtani’s role in the targeting of Mr. Khashoggi and other dissidents is based on interviews with members of the Saudi royal family, government advisers, Western officials, activists and other people familiar with Qahtani and his work.

The 40-year-old, though nominally the prince’s media adviser, was effectively Prince Mohammed’s right-hand man, with extensive sway over domestic and foreign affairs, people familiar with the matter said.

No big fan of the Saudis am I, but I also am equally no big fan of the theocratic mullahs in Tehran or the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Kashoggi was a member.

I know the Saudi royals, as much as they see themselves as representing the Sunni side in the ongoing international internal battle within Islam, in opposition to the Shia theocrats in Iran, they also see the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat to them within Sunni Muslims.

They can be not nice guys when they feel threatened or against internal opposition, and the same is true of the theocrats in Tehran, Erdogan in Turkey, the head of government in Egypt, or the head of government in Jordan or the heads of government in many other Middle East places.

What the Wall Street Journal and many other western journals appear to be doing all the time with regard to the Kashoggi matter, is (a) paying lip service to Kashoggi’s Muslim Brotherhood ties, while serving the Muslim Brotherhood’s interests to denigrate the Saudis at every opportunity; leaving the affair out of what I believe is its root matter - civil war within the Saudi Arabia between the Saudi royals and extremely wealthy Saudis who have always been funding Sunni violent extremists, and who themselves are sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood. I think that is the least understood and the least investigated aspect of what the Kashoggi affair is part of.

Were the west able to fulfill what Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood want, the total down grade of the Saudi’s as worthy of any kind of “alliance” with the west, the Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood would be Egypt’s leader as next on the list, and on and on until they were the nominal heads of Sunni Islam in the Middle East. That cooperation would last all the way until their joint reign but only then as long as it took for one to eliminate the other. Their goal is the same, but their desires for power are individual and their own. They would use each othwer only as long as necessary.

Some things in Islam, its politics and the internal political stuggles within it, have been the same since shortly after Mohammed’s death - just the names of the major players, titles, and their home nations have shifted from time to time.

At the end of the day, neither the Mullahs in Tehran, Erdogan, the Muslim Brotherhood or the Saudis are our deep down friends. We are left with a choice among many evils, and it is a choice we have to admit is for a convenience within a current context, which can change.

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