King Salman's Appointments Finally Give a Clue as to When the Next Generation Will Take the Throne

I don't usually post on Saturdays, but this seems to merit it. In the wake of the death of King ‘Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Salman has moved to replace positions vacated by the succession, and in so doing he has also given us the first official indication of when the next generation of princes will see the throne. Admittedly, it was pretty much inevitably going to be after Crown Prince Muqrin, but now we know who it will likely be.

Upon his accession, Salman confirmed the former Deputy Crown Prince (a position created by ‘Abdullah) Prince Muqrin, as Crown Prince. Then he appointed to Muqrin's previous post of Deputy Crown Prince the Interior Minister, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef. Now second in line for the throne after Muqrin, Muhammad bin Nayef is the first member of the next generation to be officially in line for the throne.

For more than 60 years, since the death of the Kingdom's founder, King ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Al Sa‘ud in 1953, every king of Saudi Arabia (Sa‘ud, Feisal, Khalid, Fahd, ‘Abdullah, and now Salman), as well as Crown Prince Muqrin, has been a son of the Kingdom's founder, who had more than 40 sons. But Muqrin is the youngest son of King ‘Abd al-‘Azīz. (Not the last surviving son as some were passed over for various reasons.) Now, barring unforeseen changes, it is likely Muhammad bin Nayef, the man behind the Kingdom's counterterrorism efforts, will be the first grandson to succeed.

King Salman, who had been serving as Defense Minister as well as Crown Prince,  has named his own son, Prince Muhammad bin Salman, to succeed him at the Defense Ministry. Muhammad bin Salman, who had been Chief of the Crown Prince's Court before the succession, will also be Chief of the Royal Court.

Inevitably, when a succession occurs, the Senior Princes have to reach an accommodation  on which branches of the family take what posts. How exactly this is done is only roughly known; I've already noted that those who speak don't know and those who know don't speak. I would be very wary of interpretations like this one by David Hearst of "A Saudi Palace Coup" in which he sees the so-called Sudeiri branch of the family as reversing the will of King ‘Abdullah. The Sudeiris were never exactly out of power; Salman is doing what any new King does, making his own appointments, but no Saudi King acts completely independently of the other Senior Princes.

More on the Bomb in Jidda

As more comes out on the bombing attempt on Prince Muhammad bin Nayef in Jidda, the story seems to get more bizarre. Here's an account from the Saudi Gazette: somehow the bomber had half a kilo of explosives concealed in his rectum. Suicide bombing is going in strange new directions, I guess.

The King and the Prince; More on the Bombing

An Al-Arabiyya clip of the meeting of King ‘Abdullah and Prince Muhammad bin Nayef after the latter survived the assassination attempt is now up at YouTube. For those who know Arabic it's mostly expressions of gratitude to God for his survival (about half of each man's conversation seems to consist of al-hamdu li-llah), but perhaps of some interest:



Otherwise, more details continue to come out. Today's Daily Star reports that the Prince was on the phone to another terrorist in Yemen, reassuring him it was safe to enter the Kingdom, when the bomb went off. The Saudi Gazette prints a transcript of excerpts from a telephone call between the Prince and the attacker Asiri, prior to the meeting I gather.

Meanwhile, Yemen has rounded up the usual suspects.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat has some gory pictures of the aftermath of the bomb (not for the squeamish or, well, even the non-squeamish. You've been warned. Remember he's supposed to have concealed the bomb in a body cavity.) Meanwhile their English website has a lengthy profile of Prince Muhammad bin Nayef and his role.

Attacker Identified; My Post Gets Some Attention

The assailant of Prince Muhammad bin Nayef has been officially identified by the Saudis, after he had been named by an Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula posting.

While there are still some unclear aspects to the whole story, let me emphasize that my posting of yesterday was not intended to be some kind of accusation or revelation, merely an attempt to clarify some of the ambiguities still remaining. Perhaps because nobody else is crazy enough to post to a blog on the last Sunday in August, yesterday's post has gotten more attention than I anticipated (or it deserved): Marc Lynch, fresh from vacation, bookmarked it, and Gary Sick posted the whole thing to the Gulf 2000 list, which has a lot of readers all over the Gulf region. Thanks, guys, for the attention; I really didn't think the post was all that substantive, and I'm not on some kind of campaign to question the official account. I was trying to summarize some of the comments to my earlier posts.

Anyway, one response on the Gulf 2000 list (which I'm not allowed to quote directly because it's an invitation-only listserv) pointed out that explosives can behave strangely, reminding me of the time the US almost bombed Hamid Karzai into oblivion just as he was coming to power. I'm no ballistics expert and indeed, explosives can behave strangely.

Anyway, the story is gradually emerging.

More on Muhammad bin Nayef: Questions about the Details

I don't normally post Sundays but the Muhammad bin Nayef story continues to be the center of Saudi attention, and as I've already discussed with a commenter on a previous post, there are some curious aspects to the story as told so far.

Official reports don't seem completely consistent so far; perhaps this is just the natural confusion of reporting on an unanticipated event (remember the wild reports on 9/11). As a commenter who knows the Gulf well noted in a previous post, reports have said that the suicide bomber detonated himself only a meter from the Prince, yet the Prince suffered only minor injuries to his left hand, and there were no other casualties except the bomber, supposedly blown to bits. The photo of the Prince meeting with the King in the hospital afterwards (above left) has only one visible sign of injury: the middle finger of his left hand is bandaged and there's a splint or something similar showing. A picture today, greeting Pakistan's Interior Minister, shows the same: just a big bandage on the middle finger of the left hand. (Second photo.)

Several reports in Arabic have said the bomb went off during taftish, "inspection," presumably a security checkpoint. Is security only a meter away from the Prince, or is the one-meter story attempting to make the attempt sound like it got closer than it did? What kind of explosion can tear the bomber's body apart (according to some reports) but only injure the middle finger of a man a meter away? Some reports have said that the bomb was triggered by a cell phone call; one suggested it might have even been hidden inside the bomber's body. Still, it's hard to picture the geography of all this. If it was a security checkpoint, why were no security men injured, or were they and this has been suppressed? (As far as I've seen, the only casualties are supposed to be the bomber and the Prince's middle finger.) Now, if the man was not armed with a suicide vest or triggered by a cell phone call but was, say, carrying a simple hand grenade, this might be more credible, if his clothing somehow provided containment for the blast (though in Jidda in August I doubt he was wearing a leather coat or anything similar that might impede the shrapnel). Another report says he was "seated to the left" of the Prince, which doesn't seem fully consistent with the other accounts.

The narrative is gradually filling out. Since many readers don't read Arabic this Saudi Gazette article today is a good summary. Note that Yemen is implicated; the bomber (still unnamed) and his brother are among the most wanted men in the Kingdom; he entered from Yemen (from Ma'rib in southern Yemen, an area until recently claimed by Saudi Arabia), and despite his coming in from southern Yemen the article manages to bring in the Houthi campaign in northern Yemen as well. I found this odd:

[The] attack raises concerns that Yemen’s instability could allow Al-Qaeda to carry out cross-border attacks. The Yemeni army is on a near three-week-long offensive on strongholds of Zaidi rebels, also known as Huthis, in lawless swathes around Saada city in the Mareb region.

Sa‘da and Ma'rib, assuming that's what "Mareb" refers to, aren't anywhere near each other.

So the story is still emerging. I'm not sure when we'll have a clear narrative (if we ever do), but it's quite clear that the Saudis are going to use this to further their campaign against terrorism and to evoke popular sympathy and outrage.

The Muhammad Bin Nayef Story: Tomorrow's Saudi Media

Unless something major comes out I'm going to let the Saudi media deal with the Muhammad bin Nayef attack this weekend, but tomorrow's headlines just went up at the Al-Sharq al-Awsat website, and besides the main story, the front page has some related links as well, and the local press is also playing it fairly heavily (Al-Riyadh here; Al-Watan; the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat; for those without Arabic, Arab News' front page has several stories; Saudi Gazette here; Al-Sharq al-Awsat's English pages don't have Saturday's headlines up yet as I write this Friday night.) And that's just the first look at tomorrow morning's papers.

A quick early read would be that the Saudi domestic media and Saudi-owned international media have decided to play this up in order to generate outrage, rather than sweep it under the rug or dismiss it.

I've added a "Muhammad bin Nayef" category to the "categories" labels in the right column, by the way, which will bring up all my posts on the subject on one page.

Tom Lippman on Muhammad bin Nayef

I asked my colleague Tom Lippman, longtime Washington Post reporter and more recently author of several books on Saudi Arabia (and currently both an MEI Adjunct and Adjunct Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations), if he had any observations on the Muhammad bin Nayef attack that I could put on the record. Here's his e-mailed response:

There are two things to note:

This attack came while the Saudis were congratulating themselves over the announced arrests of 44 al-Qaeda suspects earlier in August, and should serve as a reminder that the struggle aginst extremism is not over.

Up to now there have been few if any direct attacks against members of the royal family that we know about. I would surmise the Mohammed was targeted not because he is a prince but because he has led a largely successful campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

More if we learn more.

More on Muhammad bin Nayef Attack

The attack on Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (immediately previous posting) is drawing more attention, since it was the first attack on a Saudi royal in a long time, and also came so close to the man running the counterterror operation. Here's a recent Al-Jazeera English update. More to the point, Thomas Hegghammer at Jihadica offers some important background:

Having said all this, I don’t think the incident itself tells us very much at all about QAP’s [Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula's] operational capability or Saudi regime stability. This was essentially a stupid security slip-up, whereby the bomber was allowed to get deep into the building without any security inspection. I would be very surprised if this happened again.

To understand how this could occur, one needs to understand Muhammad Bin Nayif’s role in the Saudi counterterrorism apparatus. In addition to being the top CT official, he is also the main contact point between the state and the radical Islamist community. He is the one that militants go to see when they want to surrender. He has been doing personal behind-the-scenes liaison work with the jihadi community since at least the late 1990s. He has made a point of always being personally accessible to militants wanting to talk. And he has a reputation in the Islamist community (outside of al-Qaida) for discretion, kindness and financial generosity.

Bin Nayif has received hundreds of jihadis in his office in this way, and by all accounts there have never been any security problems. I suspect that over time, this made the Prince and his staff overconfident about their security. In this particular case, the fact that it was 11.30 at night during a popular Ramadan reception probably made security even more lax. The bottom line is that it didn’t take operational genius or a high-ranking mole get close to the Prince.

As many reports have emphasized, the attacker was wanted and had reportedly told authorities he was there to turn himself in to the Prince.

It's also worth noting that Hegghammer says that though the SITE Intelligence group earlier reported that Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula had claimed responsibility, he (Hegghammer) and others have not yet found the claim on jihadi websites. The Waq al-Waq website has the same problem: they doubt that the claim is real.

Claim or no claim, it was still a pretty daring operation to get so close to a senior royal, and the counterterrorism chief at that. As a commenter on my earlier post noted, there have even been suggestions that Muhammad might be better suited than his father Prince Nayef for the throne some day; he's not a minor prince.

Weekend or not, if there are developments in this story I'll try to post on them.

Attack on Saudi Counterterror Chief Muhammad bin Nayef

Saudi Arabia's key counterterrorism boss, Assistant Interior Minister for Security Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, was reportedly "slightly injured" when a man blew himself up in his Jidda offices as he was receiving Ramadan greetings. The early reports don't make clear how far away from the Prince the explosion occurred, but the Prince was later shown meeting with King ‘Abdullah. The picture, and the story in Arabic, from Al-Sharq al-Awsat.

The Saudi Interior Ministry is a family affair; the Minister, Prince Nayef, has also now been made Second Deputy Prime Minister, is Prince Muhammad's father; the Deputy Interior Minister, Prince Ahmad, is Muhammad's uncle and Nayef's full brother. Muhammad's role as counterterrorism chief is often played up in the Saudi media.

500th Post: I doubt if anyone else is keeping score, but this marks the blog's 500th post. I guess I talk too much.