2017–2019 Saudi Arabian purge

Based on Wikipedia: 2017–2019 Saudi Arabian purge

On the night of November 4th, 2017, something unprecedented happened at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh. The luxury resort—which had hosted a glittering announcement for a futuristic planned city called Neom just eleven days earlier—suddenly stopped accepting new reservations. Guests were told to leave. Private jets across the kingdom were grounded. And within hours, some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Saudi Arabia found themselves detained in the very suites where celebrities and heads of state typically slept.

This was the opening night of what would become known as the Saudi Arabian purge.

The Ritz-Carlton Prison

The scale was staggering. As many as five hundred people were rounded up in the initial sweep—princes, government ministers, billionaire businessmen. Saudi banks froze more than two thousand domestic accounts. According to the Wall Street Journal, the government was targeting assets worth up to eight hundred billion dollars. To put that number in perspective, it exceeds the entire gross domestic product of Switzerland.

The official justification was corruption. The arrests came just weeks after King Salman had created a new anti-corruption committee, headed by his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—often known by his initials, MBS. The king announced that the committee would "identify offences, crimes and persons and entities involved in cases of public corruption," condemning "the exploitation by some of the weak souls who have put their own interests above the public interest."

But anti-corruption campaigns rarely happen in a vacuum. And this one had a very specific beneficiary.

The Rise of Mohammed bin Salman

To understand the purge, you need to understand how Saudi Arabia had traditionally been governed. Unlike most monarchies where succession passes cleanly from parent to child, the Saudi system operated on something closer to consensus among the royal family's many branches. Power was distributed. Different princes controlled different security services, different ministries, different economic fiefdoms. It was inefficient, often corrupt, but it maintained a delicate balance among the descendants of the kingdom's founder, Abdulaziz ibn Saud.

Mohammed bin Salman wanted to end that system. And by November 2017, he was in a position to do it.

Just months earlier, King Salman had removed Mohammed bin Nayef as crown prince—a man who had been the kingdom's counterterrorism chief and was considered next in line to the throne—and installed his own son instead. The purge was the second act. By arresting his rivals, Mohammed bin Salman accomplished several things at once: he sidelined the faction loyal to the previous King Abdullah, he consolidated control over all three branches of the security forces, and he established supremacy over the business elite who might have challenged him.

The detained included Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the world's richest men and an investor in companies from Twitter to Citigroup. Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, son of the late King Abdullah and former head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard—considered the most powerful of those arrested. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the former crown prince himself, was placed under house arrest. Even Queen Fahda, King Salman's own wife and Mohammed bin Salman's mother, reportedly faced restrictions.

One analyst compared it to Russia under Vladimir Putin, where the president had selectively prosecuted oligarchs who challenged his authority while leaving compliant ones alone. The Economist drew parallels to Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign in China, which similarly served to eliminate political rivals. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times called it Saudi Arabia's "Arab Spring"—though whether that comparison was meant as praise remained ambiguous.

The Tiger Squad

The public arrests, dramatic as they were, may have been only part of the story.

According to Middle East Eye, an investigative news outlet, a parallel campaign was underway—one conducted in shadows rather than luxury hotels. A unit called the Tiger Squad, reportedly formed in 2017 and composed of about fifty secret service and military personnel drawn from various branches of the Saudi forces, allegedly carried out assassinations of critics deemed too dangerous to simply arrest.

The logic, according to sources who spoke to the publication, was grimly practical. Arresting prominent dissidents created international pressure for their release. Human rights organizations would campaign for them. Governments would inquire about their welfare. But a death that appeared accidental? That attracted far less attention.

The alleged methods were varied and difficult to trace: car accidents, aircraft crashes, house fires, poisoning during routine hospital visits. Prince Mansour bin Muqrin, the deputy governor of Asir province and son of a former crown prince, died when his helicopter went down on the same night as the purge. The official explanation was an accident. Unverified allegations suggested the aircraft was shot down as he attempted to flee the country.

Suliman Abdul Rahman al-Thuniyan, a Saudi court judge who had opposed Mohammed bin Salman's economic reform plan known as Vision 2030, allegedly died after being injected with a deadly virus during a routine health checkup.

Five members of the Tiger Squad would later become internationally notorious as part of the fifteen-person team that murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. That killing, which Saudi officials initially denied before eventually acknowledging, thrust the shadowy unit into public view.

Inside the Ritz-Carlton

For those detained at the hotel rather than disappeared, the experience was surreal—and often brutal.

In November 2020, three years after the purge began, some detainees anonymously disclosed what had happened behind the Ritz-Carlton's elegant doors. They described beatings and intimidation, overseen by two ministers who were close confidantes of the crown prince. Major General Ali Al Qahtani, a Saudi Army officer, died in custody. Ahmed al-Amari, dean of the Quran College at the Islamic University of Madinah, also died while detained, though the circumstances remained murky.

Prince Abdulaziz bin Fahd, the youngest son of the late King Fahd, sparked rumors that he had been killed while resisting arrest. The Saudi information ministry released a statement insisting the prince was "alive and well," but the need to issue such a denial spoke to the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.

The detainees faced a choice: settle or face prosecution. A settlement meant surrendering assets—cash, real estate, companies—in exchange for release. Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the billionaire investor, was released in late January 2018 after reportedly reaching an undisclosed agreement. Others remained far longer.

The Final Accounting

The anti-corruption committee officially concluded its work on January 30, 2019. King Salman reviewed the final report, which stated that 381 individuals had been investigated. Settlements were reached with 87 of them, resulting in the recovery of approximately 107 billion dollars in real estate, companies, cash, and other assets.

Fifty-six individuals had their settlement offers rejected because they already faced criminal charges. Eight refused to settle and were referred to the public prosecutor.

The Saudi authorities had claimed they could prove corruption involving assets worth between three hundred and four hundred billion dollars. The actual recovery, while substantial, was less than a third of that figure. Whether this represented a success in anti-corruption efforts or simply the extraction of wealth from one faction of the elite to benefit another remained a matter of perspective.

The Crackdowns Continue

The purge established a pattern that would repeat. In 2018, seventeen women's rights activists were arrested, including Loujain al-Hathloul, who had campaigned for women's right to drive—a reform Mohammed bin Salman himself had announced just months before her detention. The irony was lost on no one: women gained the right to drive while the women who had fought for that right sat in prison.

Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan, Hatoon al-Fassi—names that should have been celebrated as reformers instead became symbols of the crown prince's intolerance for any activism outside his control. In the Eastern Province, human rights activist Israa al-Ghomgham, who had already been imprisoned since December 2015, faced the possibility of beheading along with her husband and four colleagues.

Nasser Al Qarni, whose father—the prominent cleric Awad Al-Qarni—had been arrested during the purge for a critical tweet, received a chilling warning from state security officials: discussing his father's treatment would result in imprisonment or execution. Nasser applied for asylum and fled to the United Kingdom.

The New Saudi Arabia

Ten days before the arrests, speaking to investors in Riyadh, Mohammed bin Salman had outlined his vision. "We are returning to what we were before," he declared, "a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world." He pledged to counter extremism.

This was the paradox of the purge and everything that followed. Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman has indeed changed. Women can drive. Cinemas have opened. The religious police who once terrorized shopping malls have been defanged. Foreign tourists can visit. Entertainment previously banned as un-Islamic is now promoted as part of the kingdom's economic diversification.

But these liberalizations have come alongside a concentration of power unprecedented in Saudi history, and a willingness to silence critics—through imprisonment, exile, or death—that has shocked even longtime observers of the kingdom. The anti-corruption committee that imprisoned princes at the Ritz-Carlton was headed by the same crown prince whose luxury spending has drawn its own questions. The modernizer who opened cinemas also approved, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, the murder and dismemberment of a journalist.

In the Council of Senior Scholars, the kingdom's highest religious authority, the purge received support. The business community, those members still free and in possession of their assets, fell into line. The consensus-based governance that had characterized Saudi Arabia for decades was replaced by the will of one man.

The Ritz-Carlton, after several months, eventually reopened to regular guests. The suites where billionaires had been detained returned to hosting the merely wealthy. But the message of those November nights lingered: in the new Saudi Arabia, no one's position was secure, no wealth was truly private, and the difference between a palace and a prison could be decided in a single evening.