Black Wave

by Kim Ghattas

  “My understanding is he entered and he got out after a few minutes or one hour. I’m not sure. We are investigating this through the foreign ministry to see exactly what happened at that time,” said the crown prince. The reporters followed up: “So he’s not inside the consulate?” “Yes, he’s not inside,” MbS responded. In Istanbul, the Saudi consul organized an elaborate tour of the building for a few journalists, jokingly opening cupboards to prove Jamal was not hiding in them.

  Jamal was long dead, murdered within minutes of entering the consulate. Hatice was a widow before even being a wife. For days, the Saudis continued to deny knowledge of Jamal’s whereabouts. After two weeks, they admitted that Jamal was dead, claiming he had died in a fistfight that had gone wrong. But the Turks had it all on tape. The Saudi consulate was bugged, like most diplomatic missions—though it is a breach of diplomatic conventions, most countries engage in such espionage. Turkish officials could not publicly reveal where the recordings were coming from, so they leaked the stomach-churning details of Jamal’s death to the media, slowly, bit by gruesome bit. Jamal’s fatal mistake had been to agree to return to the consulate after a first visit. Someone inside had alerted the powers that be in Riyadh—most likely Saud al-Qahtani. A team of fifteen men had traveled to Istanbul on private jets and lay in wait for him. The leader of the squad was a colonel in the Saudi army who knew Jamal from the days they both served at the London embassy. The men initially told Jamal they were taking him back to Saudi Arabia. Jamal had resisted, saying there were people waiting outside for him. Several of the men set upon Jamal, apparently suffocating him with a plastic bag. Within seven minutes, he was sedated, then dismembered with a saw. A five-month-long UN investigation into the killing later found that the team had discussed dismembering Jamal just thirteen minutes before he entered the building. They referred to Jamal as a “sacrificial lamb.” There was a forensic doctor among the hit squad who put on his headphones while he cut Jamal to pieces. “When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do that too,” he told the others. The Saudis tried to cover up their crime. There was footage of a man walking out the back door of the embassy that was meant to mislead people into thinking Jamal had left the building; this was a body double who had donned Jamal’s clothes, warm off his back, and walked around town, then entered a building, discarded the clothes in a trash can, and walked back out wearing different clothes to scramble the tracks. The UN investigation also found that the crime scene had been thoroughly scrubbed by the Saudis.

  After more than a year in exile, Jamal had underestimated how much Saudi Arabia had hardened, how brazen and evil those at the top had become. He had also underestimated his own importance. As had the Saudis, in a monumental way, expecting that they could make him disappear without anyone noticing. But Jamal wasn’t just any columnist, though that’s perhaps how he was perceived by some royals—he was their subject, their property to dispose of as they wished. His body was never found. But his disappearance and the news of his gruesome killing received wall-to-wall coverage on television news worldwide, capturing the attention of American audiences in a way that few foreign stories ever do. He was a resident of Virginia, a columnist for a top American paper, and there was something more immediate about his death than any distant war, more gruesome and depraved in its horrific details.

  The initial Saudi obfuscation and the details of the murder unleashed global furor. European ministers, bankers, and businessmen canceled visits to the kingdom. Investors suspended their plans for joint ventures. The US-Saudi relationship was in limbo, training programs on hold, visits by government officials postponed. There were talks of sanctions against the kingdom. The immediate assumption was that such an intricate plot to kill a Saudi citizen on foreign soil in a consulate could not have been hatched without the knowledge or tacit consent of the all-powerful crown prince. Republican senator Lindsey Graham called MbS a wrecking ball and said he had to go. Congress prepared to vote to end American support for the Saudi war in Yemen. Saudi Arabia’s archenemy Iran rubbed its hands at this self-inflicted wound, the latest folly of a paranoid thirty-three-year-old prince. Young Saudis, hopeful about the future, suddenly awoke to the possibility that their country could become a pariah.

  There was no undoing what had happened. For a few weeks, it looked as though MbS would not survive Jamal’s murder. Rumors circulated that the king was bringing in another royal to replace the young crown prince. Promises were made that there would be accountability and a trial. But the ruling family was only circling the wagons. Nationalism peaked as Saudi journalists and commentators decried what they said was a plot to weaken the kingdom. Some issued veiled threats, warning that destabilizing Saudi Arabia would turn it into another Syria. Religion was deployed along with nationalism to shore up the crown prince. Barely two weeks after the killing, the officially appointed preacher of the Holy Mosque in Mecca stood at his pulpit and delivered a sermon heard by the millions of Muslims around the world who tuned in every Friday. The criticism of the kingdom in the wake of Jamal’s killing was a conspiracy, and “the attack against these blessed lands” a provocation to a billion Muslims, he declared. But the reform program pursued by the “young, ambitious, divinely inspired reformer crown prince, continues to blaze forward guided by his vision of innovation and insightful modernism.” The scripts of these sermons were always approved beforehand by Saudi security forces, and they always ended with a blessing for the royal family. But seldom had religion been bent so far for royal political expediency. Worse, the preacher had proclaimed that the crown prince was divinely inspired, thus sheathing him in an unassailable protective layer—as if he were a Supreme Leader.

  MbS survived. Qahtani, his adviser, was momentarily pushed aside, as was another high-ranking officer. “I may have caused some of our people to love our kingdom too much,” the crown prince would later say, trying to absolve himself of any responsibility and offering a justification for why some of those close to him might have wanted to kill Jamal. His words were met with disbelief. The UN special rapporteur who conducted the investigation, Agnes Callamard, would later declare that the murder had been premeditated and said there was credible evidence linking the murder to high-ranking state officials, including the crown prince. A year after the killing, in an attempt to rehabilitate his credibility, MbS would tell CBS News that “I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia, especially since it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government” but he denied he had ordered the murder. The statement was a layer of protection shielding him from direct accountability, as the crown prince pressed on with his Vision 2030. Investors and world leaders were flocking to the kingdom again. But the new authoritarianism went well beyond a desire to silence Jamal. Reports would surface of other dissidents, as far away as Canada, who had been targeted for possible abduction. Qahtani had formed a hit squad in 2015 to monitor and silence dissent, online and in real life. He had overseen the interrogations of those detained in November 2017 at the Ritz-Carlton. He had also overseen the torture of the women activists arrested in May 2018, according to their relatives. Loujain al-Hathloul’s family had initially feared divulging details about her treatment, but after a year in prison and trials shrouded in secrecy, her brother spoke out, describing how his sister had been broken by waterboarding and electrocution, while Qahtani laughed and threatened her with rape. Loujain’s husband, Fahad, the stand-up comic, had been abducted from Jordan and brought back to the kingdom, then forced to divorce his wife. There would be many more arrests.

  The social changes continued, too. Clothing restrictions were loosened and women ventured out without an abaya. Music played in restaurants. Crucially, the guardianship system was changed, granting single mothers the right to be guardians of their children and all women the ability to get a passport and travel without permission from a male guardian (after the age of twenty-one). But a cloud still hung over many in the kingdom as they waited for relatives to be released from jail, and
details of torture leaked from prisoners’ cells. Gone were the days of fatherly kings sending women off with a warning. This was a new Saudi Arabia that instilled fear in its citizens, at home and abroad and beyond. The prince’s initials were given a new meaning: Mr. Bone Saw. Arab dissidents, already wary of their own governments, became fearful of what could happen if they crossed the Saudi crown prince or criticized his regional policies. The kingdom’s neighbors and nearby allies could see that MbS was reckless and vengeful, not hesitating to kidnap the prime minister of another country and send hit squads to kill his own citizens, but they also knew he would most likely be the next king, potentially for fifty years.

  MbS was being compared to Saddam Hussein—a brutal dictator stoked and backed by America as long as he kept supplying oil and fighting Iran. But the young Saudi prince’s ways were also the ways of the Islamic Republic of Iran, hunting down its dissidents everywhere, imprisoning and torturing women, instilling fear in its neighbors. And this was what MbS wanted, something the kingdom had never quite managed to attain, despite the billions of dollars it had spent over decades to buy friends, something that revolutionary Iran had mastered with strategy and thuggery: he wanted to be respected and feared. Jamal may have been a bothersome critic for the thin-skinned crown prince, his elimination a domestic affair, but his death was also the latest, most unexpected, and macabre twist in the competition between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The rivalry was older than the crown prince, but he was not letting it go. And he was intent on making sure that, unlike the older generation of Saudi royals such as King Abdallah or the Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal, he wouldn’t be deceived by Iran’s promises of engagement and moderation. He believed that the smiles of Iran’s centrists and reformists were only a front for the radicals and that Iran’s hegemonic designs knew no bounds.

  “We know that the main goal of the Iranian regime is to reach and control the Holy Shrine of Islam,” MbS once declared. “We won’t wait for them to bring the fight to Saudi Arabia, we will make sure that it occurs there in Iran.” There was even a war game video circulating online, probably produced by Qahtani’s army of bots, showing the Saudi armed forces striking Iran after a provocation at sea. Saudi missiles hit an Iranian military air base and troops land to take over a position held by the Revolutionary Guards. At the end of the video, a defeated, haggard Qassem Suleimani falls to his knees and surrenders to the Saudi soldiers. This is perhaps the kind of victory MbS aspires to. In reality, the kingdom remains unable to win an outright victory in Yemen or find a way to make peace in the devastated country. In September 2019, a drone attack on one of its major oil installations briefly cut Saudi production by five million barrels, shaking the global energy markets and exposing yet another of the kingdom’s vulnerabilities. Iran was accused of carrying out the attack. And so, the rivalry continues, the two countries still hostage to 1979.

  CONCLUSION

  They imprisoned us in the name of religion

  They burned us in the name of religion

  They humiliated us in the name of religion

  They blocked us in the name of religion

  Religion is innocent, Oh Mother.

  —Sudanese folkloric poem, chanted during the 2019 Sudan uprising

  Differences [of opinion] amongst my nation is mercy.

  —Hadith of the prophet Muhammad

  “What happened to us?” That question propelled my research. It was the North Star that guided me from one country to the next, unpacking layers of history and politics with the help of many people who in their own ways were also trying to understand the transformation of their lives and their countries. Each person offered clues to the larger puzzle; each brought me closer to understanding the question that loomed so large. Along the way I encountered another recurrent question, one that surprised me, one that young Saudis and Iranians in particular were asking of their parents: “Why didn’t you do anything to stop it?” In the eye of the storm, in those countries from which the ripples had emanated and life had been blunted since 1979, there was resentment toward the generation that had allowed it to happen.

  For Iranians, 1979 is an obvious turning point in the country’s history. For them, it wasn’t so much the slow realization of what had happened as the growing disbelief at the naivete of their parents and grandparents who had cheered on a revolution that replaced the tyranny of monarchy with the even worse tyranny of religion, one that was politically but also socially and economically repressive, effectively freezing the country in time and disconnecting it from the world seemingly forever. In December 2017, when demonstrations erupted across Iran, the weeks of unrest were the most serious threat to the Islamic Republic since the Green Movement of 2009. Angry at the blood and money spent overseas, Iranians chanted, “Let go of Syria, think about us!” In a video that circulated online, one young woman also addressed the older crowd of mostly men around her during a night protest with this remonstration: “You raised your fists [in 1979] and ruined our lives. Now we raise our fists [to fix your mistake]. Be men, join us. I will stand in front of you and protect you. Come represent your country.”

  In Saudi Arabia, awareness of what the year 1979 had meant for the kingdom was not as obvious. Juhayman’s siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca that year, though shocking, had not been a countrywide event, and the kingdom excels—then as today—at camouflaging internal dissent. Awash with cash during the 1980s, Saudis could travel anywhere to go to the cinema and the theater or to sit in cafés in Paris if they wanted to escape the darkness engulfing their country. There was no clear turning point to stand against; there were many smaller ones. But now their children want to know why. Why hadn’t their parents protested when the music was silenced, when the male guardianship system was tightened, when the religious police started cracking their whips in public malls? How could they have let this happen without a word? This generation of Saudis do not know that Iranians are asking the same questions about 1979; nor do Iranians know that some in Saudi Arabia are fueled by similar feelings of betrayal. Iran and Saudi Arabia are echoing each other, once more, in subtle ways.

  There was a brief moment in 2018 when it looked as though the two foes were going to compete to undo the damage of 1979: the Saudis from the top down, thanks to a crown prince opening up his country to the twenty-first century; and the Iranian people, thanks to their own determination to chip away at the system. Instead, the competition continued to be a race to the bottom, as though nothing and nobody was equipped to dissuade the leadership of either country from its own worst instincts. Syria, Yemen, and Iraq paid the price, as did those who raised their voices against their respective leaders in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The most dangerous opponents were those who spoke softly and who presented the most credible alternative to the absolutism of the leaders, such as Jamal Khashoggi. Or Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian human rights lawyer sentenced to thirty-eight years in jail and 148 lashes for defending the women campaigning against the mandatory veil.

  Traveling around the region to conduct my reporting for this book, I oscillated between despair and hope. The challenges are so immense, the dynamics seemingly so intractable, the players so entrenched, that it is easy to conclude there really is no way out. After four decades of rivalry between two foes in constant competition for influence, both abusing religion, both weaponizing sectarian identities, the past is no longer history for some. Rather, it is alive in the boiling rancor of the present, and there is no chance of forgiveness. Once obscure, forgotten historical wrongs have been turned into fresh memories in the collective consciousness, as a result of the relentless crescendo of sectarian spin created by Iran and Saudi Arabia. In 2018, Hezbollah did well in legislative elections in Lebanon while Saad Hariri’s coalition suffered losses, even in Beirut. The sentiment of victory was expressed by a Hezbollah supporter in a statement on Facebook: “We will not vote for the candidates of the Yazidi state, the killer of the children in Yemen, the supporter of Daesh and Nusra, but most importantly, the
destroyer of the tombs of the Imams, peace be upon them.”

  Yazid was the caliph who faced off with Imam Hussein in the battle of Karbala in 680 AD, and the term “Yazidi state” was being used to refer to Saudi Arabia, now seen as the ultimate embodiment of oppression of the Shias; the mention of the destruction of tombs was a reference to the cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi, leveled by the Al-Sauds at the turn of the twentieth century. The candidate of this Yazidi state was Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, who had made many compromises with Hezbollah and had been humiliated by his Saudi patrons precisely for this reason in his bizarre, televised forced resignation in November 2017. After the 2018 election results were announced, Hezbollah supporters on mopeds or hanging out of their cars drove through the city waving the yellow flag of the party, stamped with a fist raising a Kalashnikov. They chanted: “Beirut is Shia, Beirut is Shia”—an echo of the 1980s when young men with beards and women in chadors went on a rampage on Hamra Street, smashing liquor bottles and laying claim to that part of the city. The men on mopeds made a frenzied spectacle of pulling down posters of Saad. They drove up to the Saint George Hotel, site of the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri, Mr. Lebanon. A bronze statue of him stood near the spot where the bomb had cratered the road and changed the political trajectory of the country. Hezbollah supporters attached their yellow party flag to it, declaring their final victory over a dead man.

  For those no longer interested in religion, the leadership of both Iran and Saudi Arabia now resorts to nationalism. In the kingdom, the crown prince’s Machiavellian aide Saud al-Qahtani deployed an army of Twitter trolls to defame the women activists who had been jailed, branding them traitors to the nation. When Saudi Arabia faced the ire of the international community after the killing of Jamal, social media and television portrayed the kingdom as a victim of an outside plot and called on citizens to close ranks. In Iran, the Supreme Leader has repeatedly entreated Iranians to support the state even if they don’t support its Islamist ideology. The IRGC now promotes itself as the guardian of the nation. Nationalist sentiments run so high in some sections of society that those who rally around the flag in Iran or Saudi Arabia lack the perspective to reflect on what their governments are inflicting and imposing on the rest of the region.