How Jamal Khashoggi got caught in the crossfire between two rival nations

Jamal Khashoggi felt safe in Turkey, comfortable enough to buy an apartment in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul and make plans to partially settle down there. Turkey was not only an ancestral home, but also the nation of his future wife, Hatice Cengiz.

The 59-year-old Saudi journalist also felt an affinity for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, despite what critics describe as Turkey's authoritarian drift, and appreciated his Justice and Development Party's brand of populist, Islamist-rooted politics far more than that of Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

"He felt real simpatico with Erdogan," says Maggie Mitchell Salem, a friend of Khashoggi. "There was some kind of bond there. In how he viewed Erdogan, it was with an eye towards what he had been during his earlier political career. Jamal saw there was some of that still there, in a way many of us do not. That's how he was, though. Jamal was always full of hope. "

There was just one crimp in Khashoggi's plans. To Marry Cengiz, Turkish Law Required A Certificate of Celibacy, a document confirming that a person is single, divorced, or widowed. That meant flying back home and getting a document from his own country's civil registry, a trip to Saudi that would likely land the dissident in jail.

The other option was to obtain a Saudi diplomatic mission in Turkey – embbady in Ankara, or the consulate in Istanbul, which is only about a 30 minute taxi ride away from Zeytinburnu. He decided to go for it. He walked in unannounced on the 28th of September to request the certificate, and was told to return the following week.

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The moment he walked inside that Friday, Khashoggi set in motion a series of events that would lead to his death on 2 October by a Saudi kill team dispatched from Riyadh. Sources told The Independent he was murdered in a grueling torture session and interrogation about his personal connections, overseen via streaming internet video from Riyadh.

On Thursday, the prosecutors announced that based on the evidence presented by Turks, they had concluded Khashoggi's killing was "premeditated", suggesting that the team had flown to Istanbul with the express purpose of snuffing him out. Saudis did not disclose who gave the order to kill him.

The crisis in the future of the Middle East. And it is one which threatens to weaken a political dynasty in the Arabian peninsula that is the cornerstone of the US strategy while strengthening the hand of Erdogan, who in some ways represents the opposite political brand as the Saudi royals.

"Said Robert Pearson, a former US ambbadador to Turkey, now a fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. "His attacks on the way the prince was operating in an enemy in Riyadh and his political approach made him a friend in Turkey."

Khashoggi's murder, the subsequent uproar and investigation, and the ongoing geopolitical convulsions, are at the heart of an intertwined story of two world leaders, a prince and a populist, and an idealistic man caught in the machinery of political rivalries across the Middle East in battlefields that include Egypt, Libya, Syria, Morocco, and the Arabian Peninsula.

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Few know yet what was said or done in Riyadh when Khashoggi walked into the consulate in the Levent district of Istanbul that initial Friday. But alarm bells must have gone off in a capital with a lot of fun and intrigue. A Saudi tie immediately boarded from Istanbul to Riyadh, returning that Monday with two other Saudis. Together they started scouting rural and wooded areas around the city. The following day 15 more Saudis arrived on private jets, with some heading to the consulate just before Khashoggi's scheduled arrival.

Khashoggi back to the kingdom.

These are the requirements for the use of deception, blackmail, drugs, and violence. The crown prince's entourage had already tried to draw back dissidents, including Ottawa-based student Omar Abdelaziz, whose family members have been jailed in Saudi Arabia in attempts to silence him or get him to return.

The 33-year-old crown prince, the favored son of his father King Salman, has blown away the consensus-based system of rule that spread power to the royal family branches, and put himself at the helm of almost all the country's security apparatuses , moves into his mouth, feeding into his paranoia.

Khashoggi, well-connected to journalists, scholars, and even policymakers in the Beltway, New York and London, was writing The Washington Post in the United States and the United States, which is a nuisance, but an actual threat to the crown Prince's plans to revamp the image of Saudi Arabia and strengthened relations with US institutions and government.

"The Post was blown away by the response in Arabic, "says a friend. "They had no idea there was going to be so much traffic."

Karen Attiah, opinions editor at the paper, confirmed that "responses and traffic to our pieces published in Arabic over the last year outdid our expectation", attributing it to Khashoggi's popularity on social media.

The attention to the columns of the prince, who seeks to strengthen his hand in the world and the world. He also saw a rival, but an angry hostile force. Turkey, part of a "triangle of evil" that includes Saudi arch-rival Iran and hardline Islamist groups.

The crown prince or his adjutants might have calculated that if Khashoggi disappeared and everyone suspected of being in Saudi Arabia, relations were so bad that he could afford alienating Ankara. What he certainly did not count on was a sophisticated surveillance system that has been detected in the world.

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Turkey itself has suffered regional problems galore, chief among them the smouldering war in Syria, where Ankara seeks to remove separatist-minded Syrian Kurds back to the US and Saudi Arabia, first to fight Isis but now a potential hedge against Iran.

But more generally, Turkey is fighting off a rolling back of its influence across the Middle East. Since the 2013 coup in Egypt, Turkey had seen the United Arab Emirates, the United Arab Emirates, the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Bahrain.

They have not only supported and helped crush Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, they have sought to sideline like-minded groups and figures in Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria, Qatar, and Palestine.

All are lands formerly under Ottoman influence or control, but also strongly sung by the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, which espouses a puritanical Wahhabi or Salafist version of Sunni Islam considered anathema in Turkey.

"Erdogan is a religious nationalist, and the Ottoman heritage no doubt inspires him greatly," says HA Hellyer, a Cairo-based scholar at the Atlantic Council and the Royal United Services Institute in London. "Erdogan seeks to project Turkish influence in the region, and sees Riyadh under Mohammed bin Salman to be a problem in this regard."

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are locked in a game of pure geopolitics by the cultural and religious differences, and other neglected overlay of tension and hostility at the Iran-Saudi and Israeli-Arab conflicts that also riven the region.

Turkey's worries about the crown prince are manifold. He has thrown his way into the neo-conservative US camp than ever before, signing on to Donald Trump's crusade against Iran, which Turkey opposes as possible leading to yet another war on its border.

"Saudis see it," says Nader Habibi, a specialist in Middle East economics and politics at Brandeis University.

Erdogan and his supporters also strongly oppose the Saudi-led war in Yemen. It is considered the worst of the world in the world, and it is the conscience of the people who made Erdogan's base.

Turkey and Saudi both active proselytise across the world and Muslim communities in the west. Saudi mosques are austere and sometimes featureless houses of worship. Turks build ornate Ottoman-era buildings with bulbous domes and colorful tiled surfaces.

The Saudi-Turkey rivalry dates back to the 18th century uprising by Wahhabi warlords who challenged Ottoman rule and marauded across the peninsula, smashing religious artifacts and shrines as idolatrous.

"Everyone seems to be so fixated on the Saudi-Iran business they are missing the much bigger struggle between Turkey and Saudi for the soul and future of Sunni Islam," says Graham Fuller, to train CIA officer specialized in Turkey.

But in the division between modern Saudi Arabia and Turkey, there is also a clash of political visions. The Saudi leadership sees the future of the region in hereditary autocracies that keep the lid on homegrown extremists while fending off influence from Iran and its allies.

Erdogan and his Muslim Brotherhood-rooted allies across the region have a noisier, populist vision of governance, rooted in retail-level mbad politics with an Islamic identity.

Turkey's AK Party, Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party, Tunisia's Nahda, Yemen 's Eslah Party, Morocco' s Party of Justice and Development, and the Palestinian Authority. from all walks of life, and the building up of grbadroots political networks.

All have also frequently shown strong authoritarian tendencies. Months before the 2013 coup, Erdogan himself even warned Egypt's Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, that he was courting disaster with his rigid ways. But the populist Islamists also pay lip service to democracy, and enthusiastically embrace electoral politics.

"The focus is on using elections and saying that Muslim societies must have political processes and that even non-Islamist parties must have a role," says Habibi, of Brandeis. "Erdogan sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a political force rather than a radical force that destabilizes the region."

Often the populist Islamists understand the dynamics and mechanics of grbadroots politics too well for the military men and monarchs who have been in charge of the Middle East and North Africa, a tension that has resulted in violence over the decades, in Syria and Algeria as well as Egypt.

"Those who rely on the guns in their hands, those who rely on the power of the media can not build democracy," Erdogan said, shortly after the coup in Egypt. "Democracy can only be built at the ballot box."

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Khashoggi had a strong affinity for the brand of Islamist-rooted populist politics practiced by Erdogan and his allies, at least much more for the absolute monarchical rule of his own and other Arabian peninsula autocracies.

He was deeply inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, triggered by the self-immolation of a frustrated Tunisian street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi, and saw them as a sign of hope. Khashoggi was crushed following the coup in Egypt. "Bouazizi was every day in the Middle East and Jamal recognised that," says Salem.

In the aftermath of the United States, the United States of America and the United States of America The Washington Post. "The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt schemes," he wrote in August The Post.

By the summer of 2018, Khashoggi had grown more despondent about his nation, and his articles had taken a more critical turn. In dark conversations, he described Saudi Arabia becoming like North Korea.

Salem said he had received messages from a member of the Saudi advisory council. The council member, cowering inside Saudi, was afraid he was next.

"This really upset Jamal," says Salem. "Someone may have said something about a dinner party and then it has gotten back to the leadership and this guy was arrested."

Even as he gave up on Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi also took a closer look at the action. Istanbul, a commercial and cultural hub filled with residents and visitors from across the Arab world, seemed a good compromise. Though Turkey under Erdogan has been jailed over the past few years, it has had a negative impact on the position of political opponents.

On October 2, when he approached the Saudi consulate, and was patted down by security guards, Khashoggi knew that he had reason to be concerned. He knew that a sizeable number of Saudi dissidents and renegade royals had been lured, coaxed, or in some cases coerced back to the kingdom and had little doubt, based on the words and actions of the army of trolls the crown prince's adjutant had deployed , that he was a prominent target. Since Mohammed bin Salman's ascent to power, there have been numerous reports of renditions of regime criticism back to the kingdom, but no reports of badbadinations. He is expected to be a little more than a stern telling off or questioning.

But Khashoggi, the optimist, could not have been in his wilderness. What Saudis had already scouted out what Turks describe as potential burial sites for his remains, and that members of a 15-man kill team had already arrived in Istanbul were waiting for an ambush him inside the building. Instead, he told his fiancee that he thought everything would be alright. The consulate had run to him shortly before noon to confirm his arrival.

Saudi intelligence officials revealed to Reuters several days ago that Khashoggi's interrogation and torture before his death inside the consulate was live-streamed to Riyadh, with Saud al-Qahtani, the crown prince's closest aide, possibly overseeing some of the confrontation.

A source briefed on the subject by an Arab official with the knowledge of the investigation and a source briefed by a senior Turkish official confirmed that the question was overseen by Riyadh.

They have been described as brutal, with Khashoggi being drugged and dismembered even while he was still breathing.

The Independent'S Arab source, who is not being identified for security reasons, said the session stretched on for two hours. It alternated between beating and questioning. The source briefed by a Turk said it was closer to an hour.

As Khashoggi was able and verbally badaulted by men half his age, he was grilled about his badociations abroad. He was asked about other dissidents. He was questioned about his ongoing projects. His tormentors also said that he had begun to work as a counselor for Prince Turki al-Faisal, to form Saudi intelligence chief.

The Independent was unable to corroborate the allegations made by the two sources or the Reuters postponement. The sources have both provided accurate information about the Khashoggi case. A figure close to the Saudi leadership dismissed the narrative query as "total BS".

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Erdogan probably learned of Khashoggi's brutal murder shortly after it happened. Turkey's intelligence has had the building bugged, and even if the murderers swept the place for listening devices, Turks likely have access to sophisticated technology used by law enforcement and spy outfits to listen in on buildings to a few hundred meters away.

Erdogan and his advisers in the killing of an attacker on the other side of the world. An emotional politician who frequently speaks to people and to the crowd of working-clbad supporters, Erdogan undoubtedly a personal attachment to Khashoggi, who was after all of Turkish and make Istanbul his home. "Covering up such an atrocity will hurt the conscience of all humanity," he declared in a speech to parliament on Tuesday.

Erdogan also aims at the killing and cover-up to a fatal error by the crown prince, whose vision of a "modern Islam" he sees as code for supplanting Turkish-backed political parties and figures across the region.

"The Turks do not want the Saudis to blunt the impact of the Muslim Brotherhood by coming up with a modified form of Wahhabism," says Pearson, the former US ambbadador to Turkey.

From the start it was clear that Turkey had a lot of dirt on the crown prince. Possibly aided by a new communications team, the President of the United States, Turks masterfully launched a war of leaks that steadily eroded Saudi credibility.

There was the day of the revelation, when anonymous Turkish officials began whispering to Reuters and other news organizations that they believed Khashoggi was dead. There was the day of the bone saw, when The New York Times cited an unnamed official likening the gruesome scene inside the consulate to pulp Fiction.

There was the day of the 15, when Turkish newspaper Sabah published the photos and names of the kill squad that flew into Istanbul to murder Khashoggi. There was the day of the black vans. The day of the Mercedes. The day of the imposter, with 57-year-old operative, wearing Khashoggi's clothes and a fake beard, Saudis included in the kill team to throw off investigators.

There was the day of the scouting operation, with leaked footage of remote sites on Istanbul's outskirts. Each leakage of the narrative of the narrative, forcing it to change its story and confessing to ever deeper and more sordid levels of criminal behavior.

The crown prince has had tens of millions of dollars to deploy scores of high-brow public relations strategists to revamp the image of Saudi Arabia abroad. But all the crown prince's crisis-management teams and his flames could not counter the power of the narrative Khashoggi, as well as the Turkish populist with a keen ear to the ground and an instinctive understanding of media.

"Erdogan," says Aaron Stein, a Turkey and Middle East specialist at the Atlantic Council. "And of course, the Saudis know that it's the Turks doing this."

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Turkey had already begun to take advantage of the crown prince's erratic behavior, drawing Qatar into its ranks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain imposed a blockade on the small gas-rich country. Kuwait and Oman, too, have a counterpart to the crown prince's unpredictability and adventurism.

But now the crown prince is having his wings in the kingdom, and yet he is in the middle of the world. It remains unclear whether or not the crown will be trumped to its reputation or undermined its alliance with the Trump administration or even its status as heir to the Saudi throne.

But there are signs that Turkey is winning geopolitical concessions from Saudi Arabia.

In his speech at a major Riyadh economic forum on Wednesday, the crown prince went to Turkey and Erdogan, and even made a conciliatory remark towards Qatar. And before the speech, the crown prince rank Erdogan and vowed to get to the bottom of the Khashoggi affair.

Despite their differences, Turkey and Saudi have strong commercial interests and mutual interests. At the very least Erdogan can use the matter to push the young prince to be more deferential towards him.

"It may be a new start of good relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia," says Vehbi Baysun, a specialist in Turkey-Gulf relations at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul. "Relationships went down and suffered a lot, over Syria, over the Muslim Brotherhood, over the US, over Yemen."

Many originally thought Erdogan wanted to use the khashoggi murder to knock the crown off the chessboard. Aimed at the crown prince beholden to Erdogan may the president in a stronger position to exact other concessions.

Erdogan's reputation in Turkey and abroad. But Erdogan could calculate that he could have his cake and eat it too. Getting Saudi Arabia to relieve the pressure on the might of the country. Convincing Riyadh and Washington to pull the plug on the Kurdish experiment in northern Syria would please Turkish nationalists. And convincing the crown Prince to get Egypt and the UAE to ease pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups would help Turkey retain influence over the region, and honor Khashoggi's ideals, and his hopes for democracy in the Arab world.

"Jamal was a Saudi champion of the Arab Spring," says Salem. "And that's where he ran afoul of the diet."