Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly approved a secret operation to quell dissent more than a year before the controversial death of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
American officials said the group that killed Khashoggi is called the “Saudi Rapid Intervention Group” and was used a number of times before the writer was killed as part of a wider campaign to crush dissent, the New York Times reported Sunday.
Throughout the campaign, the group that allegedly murdered Khashoggi was used for surveillance missions. Their campaign also involved kidnapping, detaining, and torturing activists, clerics, and others. Members of the group that killed Khashoggi were reportedly involved in at least a dozen missions since 2017, when Mohammed bin Salman was elevated to crown prince.
Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now with the Brookings Institution said the scale of crackdowns against dissidents has surged under Crown Prince Mohammed. “We’ve never seen it on a scale like this,” Riedel said. “A dissident like Jamal Khashoggi in the past wouldn’t have been considered worth the effort.”
The CIA has accused the crown prince of being directly involved in the death of Khashoggi, a 59-year-old Washington Post columnist who is believed to have been killed at the Saudi embassy in Turkey. The Saudi government claims that the death was an interrogation gone wrong, and that the crown prince did not order the assassination.
The issue has strained ties between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, despite the Saudis having a mutual foe in Iran and being a strategically important partner in the Middle East. President Trump’s response to the killing, which indicated he stood by the Saudi crown prince, led to condemnation from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle
