This is at odds with some of the stories that have been floated here recently.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who is thought to have died in violent circumstances in Istanbul aged 59, had been for decades among the leading reporters and commentators on the affairs of the kingdom.
He made his name locally in the late 1980s and early 1990s when, travelling as a foreign correspondent, he wrote for Saudi newspapers about the 1st Gulf War and in particular about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
During his time there, he came to know Osama bin Laden, interviewing him at his hideout in the Tora Bora mountains and when he was living in Sudan. At the time, bin Laden, who was Saudi by birth, was a prominent member of the mujahideen resistance against the Soviets, much of it funded by the Saudis, then perturbed by the spread of Communism.
Khashoggi accordingly developed close ties with the Saudi government, which used him as a link to bin Laden, and was believed by some to work for its intelligence services, probably as a source. Although he is said to have tried and failed to persuade bin Laden to renounce violence, Khashoggi still retained the ear of powerful members of the ruling house.
In 1991, he became editor of Al Madina, one of Jeddah’s oldest newspapers, and in 1999 deputy editor-in-chief of the English language broadsheet, Arab News. Four years later, he was appointed editor of the newspaper Al Watan, only to be fired after a few months on the orders of the Ministry of Information. He had allowed a columnist to criticise the founder of Wahhabism, the conservative form of Sunni Islam which is the state religion of Saudi Arabia.
Such rebuffs were to mark the remainder of his career. Khashoggi admitted that as a young man, at university in the US, he had joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the reformist movement begun in Egypt in the 1920s which was long supported by Saudi Arabia. He claimed to have since renounced it, but many of his writings revealed sympathy for a more secular and religiously pluralist kingdom.
In 2003, he went into a form of exile by becoming media adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal, then ambassador in London but formerly the head of the Saudi intelligence apparatus. Khashoggi was permitted in 2007 to return to Al Watan as editor but was dismissed a second time three years later in similar circumstances.
In June 2017 Khashoggi fled Saudi Arabia for the US, supposedly with only two suitcases, after finding himself at odds with some of the policies of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who now wields power. Although he never positioned himself openly as opposing the prince, Khashoggi took the line in his writing that a crackdown on dissent, and participation in the war in Yemen, were not in the kingdom’s best interests.
He was, he told the BBC in November, “worried for my country, my children and grandchildren – one-man rule is always bad, in any country”.
Latterly, he had contributed a monthly column to the Washington Post (itself often at odds with President Trump). His last article (posthumously) called for greater free expression across the Arab world.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituari...ator-obituary/
Obituary of Jamal Khashoggi - Daily Telegraph
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by Tranquillus in Exile
This is at odds with some of the stories that have been floated here recently.
Bookmarks