Saudi arabia

From an Israeli army base on the border with Lebanon, I can see the village of Maroun al-Ras. An Iranian flag flies from the dome of the mosque. Nearby, strapped to a post, is a 20ft cutout of the late Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, which was put there earlier this year by Hezbollah after he was killed by an American air strike. His right arm and index finger are stretched out, pointing menacingly over the valley at Israel. Hezbollah, backed by Tehran, control Maroun al-Ras, and I can hear the buzz of a drone watching them. Some Israeli officials say Iran could have enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb in just a few weeks. I’m here with Bicom, the Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre.

In April, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi embarked on a six-nation Middle Eastern tour to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman. ‘Belt and Road’ cooperation, economic development and the Covid pandemic were the topics of discussion. The treatment of China’s Muslim Uighur population in detention camps, which some in the West have described as genocidal, didn’t come up. Both China and Saudi Arabia cleave to the belief that internal affairs are nobody else’s business — or at least as long as there are overriding economic interests at stake. Compare the silence of Muslim countries on the Uighur issue with the loud faux anger when the Danish newspaper Jyllands--Posten published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman is desperate to shake Saudi Arabia’s addiction to oil. Its price has still not recovered from an American fracking boom seven years ago, and decades of excess have left the world’s largest exporter now needing £55 a barrel to balance the books — more than Iraq, Libya, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. Looking to reinvent his kingdom, MBS is building a new city, NEOM. Sold as a rival to neighbouring Dubai, which has long been the capital of business and tourism in the Middle East, the city will cost £360 billion, will be the size of Belgium and is expected to be completed by 2030. Or at least that's the idea.

Today, after pressure from senior US lawmakers and staring at an impending statutory deadline, the Biden administration authorised the release of a declassified intelligence report on one of the most grisly state-sanctioned murders in recent history. The killing of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi may have occurred 16 months ago, but the murder has hung around the US-Saudi relationship like a wet blanket. The US intelligence community’s assessment that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the throne, was intricately involved in Khashoggi’s death was a bombshell heard around the world. And yet media reactions notwithstanding, MbS’s role in Khashoggi’s demise was hardly a surprise. This was the worst-kept secret on the planet.

The Israeli-Saudi peace deal is, to coin a phrase, oven-ready, a source close to the negotiations told me this week. After many months of covert meetings, the detail has been agreed and the Israelis are ready to commit. All that’s needed is for the Saudis to sign on the dotted line. This means that an alliance could be sealed within six months. Of all the Arab-Israeli peace agreements, a Saudi deal would be the most significant. The Gulf kingdom is a huge country that comes close to bordering Israel, and, as such, is of great strategic weight. It is the largest economy in the Middle East. And as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites – Mecca and Medina – it is a serious contender for the title of leader of the Muslim world, and the main counterweight to Iran.

We have both proudly served Her Majesty’s government — one of us as an army officer and defence attaché to the British Embassy in Saudi Arabia, the other as a lawyer advising successive foreign secretaries on arms exports to Saudi Arabia. We did not undertake this work with illusions about the reality and cost of armed conflict. We did however work on the understanding that the relevant law — including in the Geneva Conventions and long-standing rules on arms exports — would be adhered to by our government. But that is not currently the case, and we are shocked at the British government’s conduct when it comes to arms sales.

To complete the Hajj is the pinnacle of Islamic worship, required once in the lifetime of every able-bodied Muslim who can afford the journey. In its 1,400-year history, the annual pilgrimage has been cancelled dozens of times, by wars, political strife and pandemics. As I found out when I made the journey, it is a swirling sea of humanity: some 2.5 million visiting Mecca over a few days, from all over the world. When the Covid crisis came, worship was suspended. But then something was attempted that would have once seemed impossible: carrying on the tradition, but under digitally monitored social distancing. The results were extraordinary.

Donald Trump said in October 2018 that the Saudi royal family ‘wouldn’t last two weeks’ without American military support. Last week, on the back of the collapse of the US fracking industry, he finally acted on his long-standing anti--Saudi instincts. He ordered the immediate withdrawal of two patriot air defence batteries, sent to defend the kingdom’s oil infrastructure in September after a missile attack blamed on the Iranians. He also recalled hundreds of US troops and said the US Navy presence in the Persian Gulf would be scaled back. Leaving with the ships were dozens of US fighter jets, which would have been crucial for defending against any full-scale Iranian assault.

In a dramatic move even by his own mercurial standards, Donald Trump has authorised the withdrawal of two Patriot missile systems guarding Saudi Arabia's oil facilities, accompanied by hundreds of American military troops operating them. They were deployed last September after a massive cruise missile and drone attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure – blamed on the Iranians but claimed by their allies the Houthi rebels in Yemen – that knocked about half of the kingdom's production capacity offline. Now Saudi Arabia has just two Patriot batteries, located at Prince Sultan Air Base in the middle of the Saudi desert. They are not there to protect the royal family and its economic resources, but rather the estimated 2,500 American soldiers stationed at the remote military hub.

For the first time in months, the coronavirus panic was briefly demoted as the main news story on Sunday when OPEC and oil-producing non-OPEC nations agreed a deal to cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels a day – initially to stabilise and then hopefully increase prices. It is the most dramatic production cut in history and of course not unrelated to the pandemic itself. Last month, demand collapsed as the global economy began to shut down but Russia shot down a Saudi opening proposal fearing it would give a boost to the American fracking industry.