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Monday, July 29, 2019

AYMAN M. MOHYELDIN - NO ONE IS SAFE: HOW SAUDI ARABIA MAKES DISSIDENTS DISAPPEAR

Critics of the Saudi regime seem to be dissappearing, but MBS is still getting the red carpet in the West.

This article gives a climpse of how dangerous the world really is.


The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi was no aberration. A Vanity Fair investigation reveals how Saudi Arabia attempts to abduct, repatriate—and sometimes murder—citizens it regards as enemies of the state.


In April, Iyad el-Baghdadi, an exiled Arab activist living in Oslo, was surprised when Norwegian security officials came to his apartment. According to el-Baghdadi, they told him they had received intelligence, passed along from a Western country, that suggested he was in danger. El-Baghdadi, who is Palestinian, had been a close associate of Khashoggi’s. In the months before Khashoggi’s murder, the two men, along with an American colleague, were developing a watchdog group to track false or manipulated messages being pushed out across social media and press outlets by Saudi authorities and their proxies. El-Baghdadi had been warned that M.B.S.’s leadership considered him an enemy of the state. In fact, according to el-Baghdadi, just weeks before the Norwegian officials paid him a visit, he had been helping Amazon determine that its CEO, Jeff Bezos, had been the subject of a Saudi hack-and-extortion plot. The Norwegians were not taking any chances, as el-Baghdadi recalled; they whisked him and his family to a safe house.

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