Saudi Arabia uses Germans to hit Turkey

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Turkey keeps on pressing the Saudis about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, said Rainer Hermann, and the Saudis are fighting back through social media. A Saudi-born Washington Post columnist and outspoken critic of Riyadh, Khashoggi was visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October to get a document for his marriage to a Turkish woman when a 15-member Saudi hit squad killed and dismembered him. His body has yet to be found. Because Turkey won’t let the case go, the Saudis are trying to hurt Turkey’s tourism industry. Saudi trolls edited footage of a statement by Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu last week to make it appear as though he had threatened to ar-

rest any tourist in the country who had ever been critical of Turkey. In fact, Soylu was talking only about Kurdish terrorists, saying that if they had been agitating abroad, they would be prosecuted for it upon their return home. But the apparent threat to arrest tourists played big in Germany, because some 4 million Germans vacation in Turkey every year. German foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Adebahr even warned Germans to be wary of travel if they have participated in pro-Kurdish demonstrations. Still, it’s Turkey’s own fault that the hoax was so plausible: Five Germans of Turkish descent are currently imprisoned in Turkey “for political reasons.”