What Is Really Going On Inside Saudi Arabia?
It will be hard to convince the world a coup was really in the offing. MBS controls the country’s security apparatus and has long since purged challengers.
An absence of clarity.
Photographer: Abaca Press/APIt has been two days since the highest profile arrests in Saudi Arabia’s history, but there has been no official explanation yet. Bloomberg News has learned that members of the Allegiance Council, a group that votes on matters of succession, have been told that Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz (the last surviving full brother of King Salman bin Abdulaziz) and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (a former heir apparent to the Saudi throne with strong ties to the U.S. security establishment) had been plotting a coup.
That would be the most powerful direct challenge ever to a Saudi ruler — of a magnitude greater than the last, in 1969, when a plan by some air force officers to overthrow the monarchy never got off the ground. So you’d expect either King Salman or Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to address their countrymen, and the international community, with some words of reassurance. This hasn’t happened.