What Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder Tells Us About the Saudi-Iran Rivalry
When Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul a year ago today, he had been away from his home country of Saudi Arabia for just over a year. And it was a year in which the kingdom had changed enormously—from bright changes such as the introduction of movie theaters and the lifting of a ban on women driving to much darker ones.
Though Khashoggi had written about how unbearably oppressive his country had become since the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which was the reason he had gone into exile, the veteran Saudi journalist and incisive observer had not appreciated the extent and depth of those darker shifts—and so he walked into the death trap laid for him inside the Saudi diplomatic mission.
His murder inside that consulate—carried out in the most brutal of ways, with a saw to dismember him—has mostly been
