Erdogan vows he’ll reveal all
Turkish officials have been leaking lurid details for weeks about the assassination and reported dismemberment of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul. But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, keen to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia, has until now mostly held his tongue.
On Sunday, Erdogan broke his silence, promising that within 48 hours he would remove the lid completely from what his spokesmen are now calling a Saudi cover-up.
“We will reveal it,” he said in a televised speech. “It will be revealed in full nakedness.”
With international outrage at Khashoggi’s killing increasingly focused on the potential culpability of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Erdogan appears to sense an opportunity.
Khashoggi’s status as a U.S. resident and a Washington Post columnist, along with the Saudis’ clumsy handling of the scandal, have presented Erdogan with an unexpected chance to inflict damage on the crown prince — a cordial ally in public but a fierce rival in private.
The Turkish president may now risk antagonizing a country that is among the richest and most influential in the region. But he may have concluded that risk is worth the chance to strike a blow in a broader regional conflict.
Crown Prince Mohammed is the linchpin of a coalition of Middle Eastern states hostile to Erdogan and his Islamist allies.
Erdogan has cast himself as a champion of the Arab Spring revolts and the election-minded Islamists who hoped to ride them to power.
By hinting that he might reveal details of Khashoggi’s killing that could implicate the crown prince, Erdogan is sending tremors of anxiety through much of the farflung coalition that has lined up with Saudi Arabia to crush the Islamists. The coalition ranges from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf to the strongmen in Egypt and eastern Libya.
The backlash over the Khashoggi killing “is the biggest event in the region since the Arab Spring,” said Michael Stephens, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank.
For weeks after Khashoggi disappeared, Crown Prince Mohammed and other Saudi officials insisted that he had left the consulate freely and that they knew nothing of his whereabouts.
Then, in a new version of events, the royal court said that in fact Khashoggi, 59, had been accidentally strangled in a brawl with Saudi intelligence agents. The agents’ mission, the Saudis say, was to persuade him to return voluntarily to the kingdom.
The crown prince, they insisted had no knowledge of what happened and did not get answers about it for more than two weeks.
“There obviously was a tremendous mistake made,” Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Sunday in an interview on Fox News, adding, in a message, to Khashoggi’s relatives: “Our condolences go out to them. We feel their pain.”
If the Saudis hoped their new explanation would limit the furor, they were surely disappointed. President Donald Trump, who initially called the Saudi claims credible, sounded increasingly dubious.
“Obviously, there’s been deception and there’s been lies,” the president said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Their stories are all over the place.”