The EU’s 9th sanctions package marks the first time Brussels has targeted Russia’s metals sector.

With the war in Ukraine approaching its first anniversary, the European Union has just enacted its ninth package of sanctions against Russia, progressively widening the scope measures aimed at hobbling the country’s economy. In a very significant development, this latest package includes a ban on new investments in Russia’s mining sector – the first time Brussels has directly targeted Russia’s metals sector.

True, the ban only applies to investment and not trade in Russian minerals, and there are – for now – explicit derogations for certain minerals deemed to be of strategic importance: titanium, aluminium, copper, nickel, palladium and iron ore. It nonetheless marks a major threshold in the ongoing ‘sanctions creep’ – to which, like the war itself, there is no end in sight.

Trade in Russia’s critical minerals is already fraught with complications. Measures hindering Russia’s access to international banking and insurance markets have had an effect, as have sanctions affecting logistics: Finnish railway company VR for example has ceased transporting nickel from Russia to Europe as of January 1st as it implements a blanket ban on Russian cargo.

For a time last year, the London Metals Exchange mulled a ban on new deliveries of Russian metals, only to back away from the idea in November after concluding that “for the most part a material portion of the market is still planning to accept Russian metal in 2023”. But ‘self-sanctioning’ behaviour by some western consumers who have been refusing to buy Russian minerals has already caused a pile up of stocks of unsold Russian copper in LME warehouses, and as the war drags on renewed pressure to implement a formal ban on trade in Russian metals can certainly not be ruled out.

This is not a blip, it is a trend: Russian minerals may be toxic for a generation.

This is not a blip, it is a trend. Sanctions are not only creeping, but they are here to stay: whatever the outcome of the war, it is almost impossible to imagine a situation in which the West will be able to wheel them back, at least as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power (and conceivably beyond that). Russia’s minerals may be toxic for a generation.

All of which is, to say the least, problematic. Russia is a major supplier of minerals that are key inputs for clean energy technologies : nickel, used in batteries and production of green hydrogen; cobalt and selenium, also used in batteries; molybdenum, for wind turbine blades; palladium, for catalytic converters and hydrogen purification, storage and fuel cells; and of course copper. Demand for all is set to soar as the energy transition proceeds, and in most cases global supply was tight even before the Ukraine conflict.

There is rich untapped potential for critical minerals across the MENA region.

As the European Union strives to “fast forward the green transition” (in the words of the European Commission’s REPowerEU strategy document), it needs to look amongst others to the Middle East and North Africa – a region with which Europe already has many very good geopolitical reasons for building closer and more collaborative relations.

There is rich untapped potential for critical minerals across the MENA region. Last May, France’s Renault struck a deal with Moroccan mining group Managem to secure supplies of cobalt sulphide for its EV batteries. Cobalt has been mined in Morocco since the 1930s and the country is currently powering ahead to boost reserves and production. Rabat has also announced the discovery of deposits of lithium in the contested Western Sahara.

In neighbouring Algeria, developing the country’s long neglected mining sector is a pet policy of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune. Keen to attract FDI to the sector, the authorities have a shopping list of “around 30 undeveloped minerals” they seek to bring on stream, including cobalt, manganese, cerium and neodymium, according to Ministry of Energy and Mining officials. To date, almost all cooperation in mining has been with Chinese state corporations, but the idea of bilateral collaboration in critical minerals is understood to have been floated by France’s President Macron when he visited Algiers last August.

Looking east, Jordan late last year signed an MoU for the production of lithium in the south of the country and has begun prospecting for various rare earth metals.  For their part Egypt, Oman and Saudi Arabia have all dusted off their mining codes in recent years, with the Saudis in particular announcing ambitious plans to attract $32bn in investments in the mining and minerals sector; among the 48 exploitable minerals identified by the Saudi Geological Survey, the Kingdom’s subsoil holds reserves of copper, cobalt, lithium and titanium. Five new exploration sites are up for licensing and the Kingdom will release details of an additional 10 opportunities this year.

European businesses and policymakers must forswear anything that smacks of ‘green colonialism’.

The countries of the region have no intention of being limited to the role of suppliers of cheap raw materials to power the ‘third industrial revolution’ in the developed economies, however. If their potential is to be turned into real solutions, European businesses and policymakers must foreswear anything that smacks of ‘green colonialism’. When it comes to new mining products, this will mean signing up to local governments’ plans to develop full value chains in-country – as Morocco is doing with its cobalt, with plans to establish major new battery manufacturing facilities in Casablanca’s industrial hub.

With its Joint Communication on Strategic Partnership with the Gulf, released in May of last year, the EU has shown that it understands it has to engage positively with Gulf oil and gas producers on climate action and decarbonisation – notably by foregrounding green hydrogen. This effort now needs to be broadened to take in the entire MENA region, and deepened to encompass mutually beneficial strategies for bringing new supplies of critical minerals on stream. Without them, the clean energy transition is at risk of stalling just when it needs to accelerate.

ONE: RUSSIA’S INVASION OF UKRAINE IS A 9/11 MOMENT

Three months into the war in Ukraine, it is becoming clear that the launch of Vladimir Putin’s ‘special military operation’ is a new 9/11 moment. Not because it is uniquely spectacular – few people will remember where they were and what they were doing when the first Russian tanks crossed the border in the way that the first images of planes hitting the Twin Towers are forever burned into our memories – but because of the world-shaping reaction it has elicited from the United States and its European allies.

The 9/11 attacks sparked a military-security response – the invasion and occupation first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq, and the launch of the so-called ‘global war on terror’ – the consequences of which shaped international relations, global security and the lives of millions in the Middle East and beyond for a generation. The invasion of Ukraine has elicited a political-economic response that is likely to have consequences that are as momentous, and long-lasting.

Whatever the outcome of the war – total collapse of the Russian offensive, partial Russian victory, or, more likely, a festering stalemate – it is now almost impossible to imagine a situation in which the very wide-ranging sanctions imposed on Russia can be wheeled back, at least as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power and quite probably beyond that. The Russian President’s personal commitment to his adventure in Ukraine appears too deep for him to be able ever to sue for peace or admit defeat – and even if he were to, the emerging evidence of extensive Russian warcrimes will be as impossible for the Europeans to ignore as it will be for Moscow to accept.

The forced ‘de-globalisation’ of Russia’s economy brought about by wave after wave of Western sanctions on Russian state institutions, banks, companies, oligarchs and other individuals looks set to last.

The forced ‘de-globalisation’ of Russia’s economy brought about by wave after wave of Western sanctions on Russian state institutions, banks, companies, oligarchs and other individuals therefore looks set to last. With Russian banks now excluded from the SWIFT system, the world’s dominant financial messaging apparatus, Russia has been discussing linking up its alternative Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS) with the SEPAM system built up by Iran after it was blocked from SWIFT in 2012, and there is a real possibility that the two might integrate with China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System. Such developments point the way to the consolidation over time of an ‘Eastern’ economic bloc in opposition to the West, to which significant parts of the global South may be attracted.

At the same time, following the exit of the Western oil and gas supermajors from Russia, the European Commission has been working on plans aimed at “rapidly reducing our dependence on Russian fossil fuels”. Russian oil imports are to be phased out, possibly within as little as six months, while the Commission hopes to be able to drive down European imports of Russian natural gas by as much as two thirds by the end of this year. These aims are addressed in the Commission’s wide-ranging “REPowerEU” plans, unveiled this week. REPowerEU leaves no doubt about the fact that such changes are intended to be permanent. The implications for Russia’s economy, for Europe’s energy architecture, and for energy producers outside Europe, are immense.

TWO: THE UKRAINE WAR IS ALREADY AFFECTING THE ENERGY TRANSITION

In April, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink hailed “a significant long-term opportunity for investors in infrastructure, renewables and clean technology”, arguing that the Ukraine war “will accelerate the shift towards greener sources of energy in many parts of the world over the long term”. With the EU hunting for long-term replacements for Russian oil and gas, while at the same time soaring oil prices are enhancing the competitiveness of renewables, this could be a breakthrough moment for the energy transition, it is argued.

These factors are real enough – but Europe’s immediate response has out of necessity been to turn to LNG imports as a substitute for Russian gas (according to Global Energy Monitor, plans for 22 LNG transport projects worth €6bn have been announced, proposed or revived since February). This in fact is the delicate balancing act faced by REPowerEU: how to reconcile the overarching goal of decarbonising the European economy with the immediate need to secure “adequate alternative gas supplies to cover Europe’s gas demand by diversifying external supplies”, which will require considerable investment in new LNG import terminals, new pipelines and retrofitting existing pipelines – at the risk of baking dependence on LNG imports into Europe’s energy infrastructure for the long term.

As the Western supermajors pull out of Russia, the temptation will be strong to redirect capital and technical resources to upstream operations in other parts of the world, and notably in the Middle East and North Africa

What is more, economic factors cut both ways. Resurgent prices encourage increased production of oil and gas, and make investment in that sector attractive again. As the Western supermajors pull out of Russia, the temptation will be strong to redirect capital and technical resources to upstream operations in other parts of the world, and notably in the Middle East and North Africa (only BP has been clear that it does not intend to compensate for the loss of its Russian assets by increasing capital spending on oil and gas elsewhere).

THREE: NOT ALL MENA OIL & GAS PRODUCERS HAVE EQUALLY STRONG HANDS TO PLAY

MENA oil and gas producers have been deploying differing strategies for adapting to the energy transition.

Saudi Arabia, with the stated aim of becoming the world’s leading producer of green hydrogen, has issued a series of increasingly bold targets for hydrogen and renewables: Neom, a planned new city of over 25,000 km2, is to be entirely carbon-neutral and comprise a factory for the manufacture of hydrogen-powered vehicles and a green hydrogen plant with a daily capacity of 650 tonnes; overall hydrogen production — green at Neom on the Red Sea, and blue (i.e. produced using natural gas with CCUS) on the Gulf – is to reach 2.9m tonnes per year by 2030 and 4m tonnes per year by 2035; solar PV capacity is to be doubled over the next two years; etc.

Such brash pronouncements are typical of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Ben Salman’s leadership style – as are their subsequent quiet dilution or abandonment, and there is room for doubt as to whether MBS’ goals will really be met. Indeed, viewing them in the context of Riyadh’s now notorious behind-the-scenes lobbying to have the IPCC’s decarbonisation recommendations gutted in the run-up to last year’s COP26, an uncharitable mind might even suspect at least an element of ‘greenwashing’.

The UAE, realising that its interest lies in getting its considerable associated gas reserves out of the ground while they are still saleable, is going full steam ahead with a number of programmes to boost its production capacity. Abu Dhabi is tabling on a mix of LNG exports (in response to the boost the LNG market has received from the Ukraine war, plans for a new LNG export facility in Fujairah have been upgraded, taking capacity to new 9.6mn tonnes per year) and blue hydrogen, supposedly as a stepping stone to green hydrogen production as the market matures.

Neither the Saudis nor the Emiratis have shown any enthusiasm for jumping on the West’s anti-Russian bandwagon generally speaking. But as aspiring hydrogen exporters, both will be quietly pleased to see Russia progressively blackballed as an energy supplier by the Europeans, insofar as Moscow had been aiming for 20% of the hydrogen market by 2030 (relying notably on nuclear power to produce so-called ‘pink’ hydrogen for export). According to REPowerEU’s targets, the EU should be importing at least 10m tonnes of hydrogen per year by the end of this decade. The UAE and Saudi Arabia will also welcome REPowerEU’s suggestion that the EU should encourage the uptake of hydrogen by subsidise the gap between production cost and sales prices for H2 generated outside the bloc as well as at home.

Qatar, meanwhile, like the UAE, is ramping up its natural gas production capacity. With partners for the North Field East extension due to be announced next week, and the North Field South tender to follow soon, LNG production is set to rise a massive 64% over the next 5 years. Having so far shown less interest in hydrogen than its neighbours, Qatar is betting on LNG serving as the leading transition fuel on the path to decarbonisation for decades to come, and on its own particularly low carbon-intensity production having a competitive advantage in that market (fresh investments are planned in cutting methane leakages, powering facilities with solar energy, and sequestration of carbon dioxide in order to maintain that edge).

As this expansion proceeds, one important question will be how much of Qatar’s new gas production may be made available for gas-hungry Europe. From early on in the Ukraine crisis, Qatar was solicited by Germany’s Green Party Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck and others seeking alternatives to Russian gas, but had only limited volumes available, the bulk of its LNG production being sold on the basis of long-term contracts to its traditional customers in the Far East. QatarEnergy boss Saad Al-Kaabi has scarcely bothered to hide his Schadenfreude over pleas for help from those who had so recently made a speciality of “demonising” oil and gas companies.

Beyond the Gulf region, Algeria was also sounded out by the Europeans in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine as a potential substitute gas supplier – but like Qatar had relatively little spare capacity immediately available; after a series of exchanges with Rome, its chief European partner, Algiers is now promising to pump an additional 9bn cubic metres of gas via the Transmed pipeline “by 2023-24”.

Algeria is only now beginning to wake up to both the challenges of the energy transition for oil and gas producers and to its renewable energies potential.

Although unsuccessfully courted by the promoters of the Desertec project over ten years ago, Algeria is only now beginning to wake up to both the challenges of the energy transition for oil and gas producers and to its renewable energies potential. Earlier this month, Energy and Mining Minister Mohamed Arkab was tasked by President Tebboune with drawing up a ‘national strategy for the development of hydrogen’. If past experience is anything to go by, however, this may only be the beginning of a rather long and uncertain road – especially given that what Arkab has actually been put in charge of is yet another cumbersome inter-ministerial committee.

FOUR: THE ENERGY TRANSITION IS ALSO A COMMODITIES TRANSITION

In many respects, the energy transition is also a commodities transition. To meet the growing demand for clean energy technologies (solar PV panels, wind turbines, electric motors, rechargeable batteries, etc.), the production of certain minerals, such as graphite, lithium, cobalt and rare earth metals such as molybdenum, could increase by nearly 500% by 2050 according to a World Bank study. The World Bank estimates that over 3bn tonnes of minerals and metals will be needed to deploy wind, solar and geothermal power, as well as energy storage, required for achieving a below 2°C future. According to the International Energy Agency, demand for nickel will grow 19 times over by 2040 if the world makes the effort necessary to meet that goal. And as the IMF has pointed out, under a net zero scenario current copper and platinum supplies are inadequate to satisfy future needs, with a 30-40% gap versus demand.

Here, market forces and geopolitics are aligning to make diversification into mining of vitally important minerals a very attractive proposition for MENA hydrocarbons producers: with metals prices already skyrocketing, in the post-Ukraine world order a question mark hangs over Russia’s exports of cobalt (of which it is the world’s second largest producer), nickel (3rd largest), copper and molybdenum (9th largest for both), and so on.

Not all MENA oil and gas producers have been quick to latch on, however. Saudi Arabia, having had its mining code radically overhauled by a team from Herbert Smith Freehills, showed some flair by hosting an international Future Minerals Forum in January of this year.

Algeria has emerged as an unlikely trailblazer – on paper at least – and it will be interesting to see how that country’s strategy evolves.

Algeria has also emerged as an unlikely trailblazer – on paper at least. The wide-ranging “strategic agreement” signed by Sonatrach and ENI at the end of last year included a pledge to work together on prospecting for lithium. And in a striking new departure, the recently established Higher Energy Council’s attributions include “determining strategy on … the introduction and development of new and renewable energies, while guaranteeing the mineral resources necessary for their development”. It will be interesting to see how that strategy evolves.

It was only a video, of course, signed (in the interests of plausible deniability) by a shadowy group calling itself ‘Saudi Strike Force’. But its clunky CGI did give graphic shape to MBS’ publicly stated pledge to “bring the fight to Iran”, and its release in December 2017 marked the high-water mark of the inter-bloc rivalry that characterised most of the decade following the Arab Spring.

As the revolutionary wave that began in Tunisia in 2011 peaked and then crashed, three regional blocs – one comprising Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, another Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt (the so-called Arab Quartet), and a third Iran, Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthi rebels – coalesced, locked in an increasingly bitter cold war. Blockaded by its Arab Gulf neighbours, Qatar faced an ultimatum that stopped just short of full-on regime change. Proxy wars raged in Yemen and Libya. The leading antagonists scrambled to establish extraterritorial military bases: Turkey in Doha, Mogadishu and Suakin (Sudan); Saudi Arabia in Djibouti; the UAE in Berbera (Somaliland), Assab (Eritrea) and on the Yemeni island of Socotra.

Those trends are rapidly disappearing into the past. One key turning point seems to have come when it became clear to the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE that it was not after all going be possible to leverage their influence over Donald Trump to deliver knock-out blows to Doha and Tehran, after which the ties that bound the Arab Quartet together began to fall away. By January of this year, Qatar was welcomed back in from the cold by MBS at the GCC’s Al-‘Ula summit, and since then things have been moving fast on all fronts.

Today’s dominant trend, clearly, is towards reconciliation and rapprochement between former antagonists – with immediate consequences for the regional business environment.

The rehabilitation of Qatar has put an end to an unseemly battle over beIN’s sports broadcasting rights and removed the sword of Damocles that for a time hung over the head of the Dolphin gas project with the UAE. Prodded by Turkey’s business class, hard-hit by his eccentric monetary policies, President Erdogan has begun mending fences with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE; Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Zayed was welcomed to Ankara in November amid talk of plans for new ‘strategic’ bilateral investments that could, for example, see Abu Dhabi acquiring a stake in Turkish military drone manufacturer Baykar. A fragile peace has been brokered in Libya, while the UAE has started the ball rolling towards Arab Gulf normalisation with Assad’s Syria, potentially opening up the (not unproblematic) perspective of vast reconstruction programmes in those countries. Even Saudi Arabia and Iran have begun talking about restoring diplomatic relations.

There are limits to all this, of course. While the other two blocs may be fading into the past, the axis centred on Tehran – arguably the only one that was of truly existential importance for most of its members – is largely holding together (only Baghdad appears wobbly, for a range of reasons). And rather than some Pauline conversion to peaceful coexistence, the limited attempts by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to engage with Tehran signal, as Diwan’s ever-perceptive Michael Young has observed, an entirely pragmatic “effort by Arab states to use openings toward Syria and Lebanon to challenge Iran’s sway in both countries and turn them into places where the Arabs can bargain with Tehran”.

The overall trend, nonetheless, is still towards detente between former rivals. Perhaps more interesting than this, however, is a parallel trend towards new rivalries between erstwhile allies.

Let us look in particular at Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who been locking horns increasingly openly as they race to shore up their soft power and to future-proof their heavily hydrocarbons-focussed economies against the energy transition. Much of the competition between them has been on the legal and regulatory plane.

MBS has been especially brazen, issuing a shock ultimatum in February of this year to foreign companies to move their regional headquarters to Saudi Arabia by 2024 or face being excluded from Saudi government contracts – a move clearly aimed at undermining Dubai’s dominant position as a regional base for multinational firms. More insidiously, Riyadh has reportedly also exploited the opportunity presented by the Covid-19 pandemic to strike a blow against Dubai’s position, invoking health restrictions to clamp down on the common practice of foreign firms’ expatriate staff conducting their business in Saudi Arabia Sundays to Thursdays only while maintaining their home base in the far more congenial Dubai.

Saudi Arabia has also announced a ten-year tax holiday and a raft of other incentives  for foreign firms that set up shop in Riyadh’s mammoth, but so far empty, King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) – a direct rival to the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). Even more ambitiously, at the beginning of the summer the Saudi government unveiled a very wide-ranging National Strategy for Transport and Logistics Services, with the explicit aim of turning the Kingdom into a major regional air transport and logistics hub – another direct challenge to Dubai’s traditional dominance.

In these and other fields, Dubai and Abu Dhabi do of course enjoy a real first-mover advantage – and are actively defending it by making modifications to the legal, regulatory and social framework so as to enhance the UAE’s attractiveness for foreign companies and their expatriate employees.

The Emirati authorities scored an early goal with a series of reforms announced in November 2020 aimed chiefly at making life easier for expatriates: decriminalising the consumption of alcohol, allowing unmarried couples to cohabit, recognising the legislation of expatriates’ countries of origin in matters of inheritance, divorce, etc. This was followed in September of this year with a new reform of the rules governing visas and residence permits, specifically designed to attract and retain creatives and other highly qualified foreign workers.

This year the UAE has also made important changes to the Commercial Companies Law, allowing foreign nationals to own 100% of shares in onshore Emirati companies for the first time, abolishing the requirement for local branches of foreign firms to work with a local service agent, and making it easier to launch IPOs in-country. In another significant development, in mid-September Dubai announced an ambitious overhaul of its ADR institutions, folding the offshore DIFC Arbitration Institute and the Emirates Maritime Arbitration Centre into the Dubai International Arbitration Centre (DIAC), fully restructured and relaunched for the occasion. The explicit intention is to make Dubai the undisputed regional centre for commercial arbitration.

The UAE’s legal system has been aptly described as an “archipelago”: an ocean of sharia-influenced civil law (as enshrined in the UAE’s Civil Code) dotted with islets of business-friendly English common law (the DIFC and Abu Dhabi Global Market Courts). The latest reforms if anything reinforce the place of English common law, insofar as they make the DIFC Courts the default jurisdiction overseeing the newly consolidated DIAC.

Saudi Arabia now seems poised to adopt a somewhat similar “archipelago” model: MBS has pledged that NEOM, his flagship mega-development in the north-west of the country, is to have its own autonomous legal system; the logical next step will be to grant special status to the KAFD itself, at least in terms of commercial law; and in furtherance of the Crown Prince’s aim of developing international tourism it has been suggested that special legislation authorising alcohol and gambling may soon be applied in specific areas.

But the UAE’s rulers are always keen to keep one step ahead. And indeed there are indications – not yet concrete plans, but it would seem more than mere rumours – that the UAE might be contemplating root-and-branch reform of its legal system, sweeping away the archipelago in favour of a more easily navigable, unified model (some say based on common law, others civil law).

Could Saudi Arabia possibly match that? There has been much talk – dating back to the reign of the late King Abdullah – of the need to codify Saudi Arabia’s entirely sharia-based law, in the interests of clarity and predictability, especially for business. But introducing even limited change in this direction has so far proved difficult, and painfully slow. In early February of this year, MBS announced the imminent adoption of four new laws – a Personal Status Law, a Civil Transactions Law, a Penal Code for Discretionary Sanctions and a Law of Evidence – that were touted as a major step towards the codification of law in Saudi Arabia. As the year draws to a close, none have seen the light of day…

Will 2022 see unprecedented transformations in Saudi Arabia’s legal environment? Will the UAE maintain its competitive edge by introducing even bolder business-friendly reforms?

One thing is certain: the legal and regulatory cold war is far from over.

Take Saudi Arabia.  On April 6^th a Saudi airlines pilot tweeted that his plane was about to take off from Nairobi, Kenya, “loaded with fruits, vegetables and meat for our beloved country”^[1] — immediately raising speculation that Saudi Arabia was running out of food supplies and had been compelled to import fruit and vegetables from Kenya by air freight. The pilot’s Twitter account has since been deleted, which has naturally only compounded the speculation that he had revealed something he should not have.  On April 12^th the Saudi Trade Ministry ordered supermarkets to end all promotional offers on nine basic foodstuffs “in order to preserve existing stocks and prevent shortages”.^[2]

In the UAE, Dubai’s Emirates airline has been busy airlifting food supplies in from Pakistan^[3], while the federal government in Abu Dhabi issued a law on March 31^st to “secure food supplies”, giving the Ministry of Economy extended powers to monitor the inventories of retailers and distributors.^[4]  

Meanwhile private sources in one Gulf capital quote senior officials as saying they fully expect food shortages to hit both Kuwait and Qatar “soon”.

In Egypt, a country of 100 million that imports 60% of its wheat and 95% of its cooking oil, there have been reports of shortages and soaring prices of meat, eggs and other foodstuffs.  The Egyptian government recently banned exports of certain types of legumes (the local fava beans, known as fool, a staple for millions of Egyptians) to secure supplies for the domestic market.^[5]

And in Algeria, President Tebboune has been struggling to reassure the public amid reports that durum wheat semolina, the stuff of couscous, the local staple, has gone missing from the shelves.^[5]

Of course, in times of crisis, real or perceived, no country is immune to self-fulfilling prophecies of food shortages that send anxious consumers en masse to the stores, thereby causing the very shortages they so fear — as anyone who wanted to buy toilet paper or pasta in the United Kingdom as of mid-March, for example, can testify. But in many countries of the MENA region, the problems run far deeper.

The stark reality is this: most countries of the Middle East and Africa have a structural problem of food security, with the region as a whole importing about 57% of the calories consumed domestically (in particular wheat and other grains, dairy products and other sources of protein). The figures vary from country to country and are of course particular severe in the GCC countries who, with little arable land and extremely limited water resources, have to import as much as 85% of their food. But the problem also affects some of the larger countries in the region that have serious agricultural potential, such as Iraq or Algeria, blighted each in their own particular ways by the so-called ‘resource curse’, compounded by disastrous government policy choices and rapidly growing populations.

The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown this underlying problem into stark relief. Not only global logistics but agricultural production itself have been slowed and disrupted, pushing many major producers of agricultural goods to limit exports in order to protect their own supplies.  India and Vietnam have restricted exports of rice, Kazakhstan is holding on to its wheat, and there is speculation that Russia and Ukraine, massive exporters of grain, might follow suit.^[6]  There is consequently a real danger that countries that rely on imports may find their food situation strained.  Smaller, richer countries like Gulf principalities might be able to weather the crisis, even if that means buying foodstuffs at unusually high prices on the international market, flying it in and selling it at subsidised prices to local consumers. MENA countries with larger populations, such as Iraq and Algeria — or even Egypt, an exporter of certain agricultural goods but, crucially the world’s largest importer of grain to make the subsidised bread on which the country’s poor rely — are likely find it a struggle to keep shelves and bellies full. Especially if, as seems likely, the catastrophic slump in the price of oil persists.

^[1]      https://twitter.com/MohammedAWADDA/status/1247224912407904260

^[2]      https://www.okaz.com.sa/economy/na/2019243.  The Ministry has banned promotional offers on “flour and its derivatives, rice, sugar, cooking oils, meats, poultry, powder milk, tea, coffee”.

^[3]      https://www.24newshd.tv/09-Apr-2020/emirates-plane-airlifts-62-ton-food-supplies-from-karachi-to-dubai

^[4]      https://www.thenational.ae/uae/government/uae-president-approves-law-to-secure-food-supplies-in-emergencies-1.999369

^[5]      https://www.aljazeera.net/news/ebusiness/2020/4/9/تحقيق-للجزيرة-نت-كيف-تعاملت-الدول-العربية-مع-أمنها-الغذائي-مع-كورونا

^[6]      https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as-borders-harden-during-pandemic-some-countries-look-to-hold-onto-their-own-food/2020/04/08/385600e4-7459-11ea-ad9b-254ec99993bc_story.html

Without hazarding any guesses as to how the epidemic can be expected to evolve, below are a few preliminary observations on the current circumstances and possible future implications of Covid-19 in the region.

Under-reporting:

As of March 2, Egypt officially had just two confirmed cases of Covid-19 (both of whom, conveniently, were foreigners). By then, however, there had been reports from the UK, Canada and France of returning travellers who appeared to have contracted the virus during package holidays in Egypt – suggesting strongly that Covid-19 was very much at large in the country by late February. This in turn suggests severe shortcomings in local reporting.

This ought not perhaps to come as much of a surprise in the current social/political climate of Sisi’s Egypt, which disincentivises (to put it mildly) the reporting of unwelcome or unflattering information by low-ranking officials. A set-up that in many ways resembles the stifling atmosphere that badly hampered China’s initial response to the Covid-19 outbreak. Sadly, Egypt is by no means the region’s only highly centralised and authoritarian regime with a strong penchant for denial, and similar dynamics are likely be in play in a number of other countries. The number of Covid-19 cases reported in Saudi Arabia, for example, has been suspiciously low – the Kingdom reported its first confirmed case only on March 2 – even if there are arguably signs that the Saudi authorities have learned at least some of the lessons of the homegrown (and proportionately far deadlier) MERS coronavirus outbreak of 2012.

Economic damage:

Even without hitting true pandemic levels, the Covid-19 outbreak has already wiped $50 billion off global exports in February alone and is expected to slash growth globally in 2020. The MENA region, and notably the GCC countries, are likely to be particularly hard hit.

On March 1, Gulf stock exchanges slumped dramatically, with the Kuwaiti bourse suspending trading, after it emerged that the last week of February had been the worst week for oil prices since 2008. With global oil consumption now expected to fall this year for the first time since the financial crisis, the pressure on prices can only get worse – and Gulf oil exporters will be likely to feel the pain even worse than others: countries such as the UAE and, in particular, Saudi Arabia have reoriented their crude exports over the past decade or so massively towards the China and the Far East, precisely the economies that have been the hardest hit by the Covid-19 outbreak (China’s demand for oil slumped by a massive 20% in the first two months of 2020). This in turn may undermine attempts by OPEC and other oil producers to bolster oil prices by means of production restraint: with their market share suffering badly from the effects of the Asian downturn, the Saudis, who together with the Russians have effectively led this long-running effort, seem likely to be less inclined to shoulder so much of the burden. If ‘OPEC+’ production restraint gives way to a beggar-my-neighbour free-for-all, the consequences for oil prices, and for the budgets of oil-producing countries, may prove catastrophic.

The coronavirus crisis is also very bad news for debt-ridden Dubai, where the already struggling tourism and real estate sectors are likely to take an additional hit. With so much riding on Expo 2020, which is due to open in Dubai in October, in terms of stimulating renewed growth in those key branches of the economy, Dubai’s rulers will be praying that the outbreak will have run its course before then. Dubai’s Emirates airline – and similarly regional rival Qatar Airways – also stand to be hurt by the Covid-19 epidemic, having based their highly ambitious growth strategy largely on positioning themselves as “super connectors”, linking the Far East with the Middle East, Europe and beyond.

Political effects:

So far, the reaction of the protestors driving the civil revolts in Algeria and Iraq to the Covid-19 outbreak has been one of defiance. There was no appreciable dip in number as Algeria’s pro-democracy ‘Hirak’ entered its second year on February 28, and slogans raised in Oran and Algiers riffed on the theme of coronavirus being the lesser threat to the wellbeing of the people: “Goulou lel issaba yrouhou yakhtouna, el mardh dialhoum ketar men el Corona” (Tell the clique in power to leave us alone, because their disease is worse than coronavirus), “Makanch Corona, kayen li sarqouna” (There is no coronavirus, there’s only the people who robbed us), and so on.

Likewise in Baghdad, despite an official ban by health authorities on public gatherings in an effort to contain the virus, protesters have refused to leave Tahrir Square, chanting in defiance: “Your snipers didn’t deter us, what can coronavirus do?”. Makeshift clinics erected in Tahrir Square months ago to treat demonstrators hit by bullets and teargas canisters are now dispensing gloves, hand sanitizer and leaflets on prevention.

Depending on how the epidemic develops, however, it cannot be ruled out that it could have a dampening effect on the protest movements (this may already be the case to some extent in Lebanon) – although whether this will be sufficient for the regimes in place to stabilise and lastingly take back the initiative remains to be seen.

What seems inevitable, on the other hand, is that certain governments’ mishandling of the Covid-19 epidemic will come back to haunt them. In Iran in particular, reports that the authorities deliberately suppressed news of the outbreak in its crucial early days lest it affect participation in parliamentary elections on February 21 will further undermine the public’s trust in the regime – already dealt severe body blows by its repression of protests last year and its inept coverup of the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in January.

Weaponisation:

Predictably, in a region whose media is addicted to outlandish conspiracy theories, there have already been efforts to ‘weaponise’ the Covid-19 outbreak for foreign policy ends. “Coronavirus is not a germ but rather a plot by Iran and Qatar to crush this world … Both of them must be eradicated,” tweeted Nora Shanar, who writes for Saudi-owned online newspaper Elaph, on February 27.

كورونا ليس جرثومة بل هي مؤامرة إيران وقطر لسحق هذا العالم .. كلاهما ينبغي استصاله.
#كورنا_الكويت#الكويت_كورونا pic.twitter.com/z7OOMCg5IT

— نورة شنار (@Norashanar) February 27, 2020

Not to be outdone, on March 1 Noura Almoteari, who writes for Saudi daily Okaz and the UAE’s Al-Bayan, tweeted: “I think the fabrication and spread of the #Corona virus is [a] Qatari [misdeed] par excellence … and that Doha paid billions to grow this frightening virus in China, with the aim of hitting the year 2020, which was supposed to see the beginning of the implementation of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, Dubai Expo 2020, the end of the Ottoman caliphate, the implementation of the Riyadh agreement and the return of peace to the Middle East.”

أعتقد أن تركيبة ونشر فيروس #كورونا قطرية بامتياز.. وأن الدوحة دفعت مليارات لزراعة هذا الفيروس المخيف في الصين، بهدف ضرب العام 2020 الذي كان معدا له بدء تحقيق رؤية السعودية 2030 ودبي اكسبو 2020 ونهاية الخلافة العثمانية وتحقيق اتفاق الرياض وعودة السلام للشرق الأوسط.#قطر_هي_كورونا

— نورا المطيري (@Noura_Almoteari) March 1, 2020

Sadly, we can be confident that they will not be the last. The extent to which they are taken seriously by their reading public is another matter, however…

The hashtag “birthday of the leader of renewal”^[1] has been trending on Saudi twitter since August 31, celebrating the 34th birthday of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman. This is highly unusual and also telling of how MBS sees his future role.

Based on a tradition of the Prophet that goes something like “A nation of many feasts shall not be blessed by God”, Saudi Wahabism long ago decreed that all public celebrations or holidays apart from the two religious festivals (Eid al-Fitr, after Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, at the end of the pilgrimage) are un-Islamic and therefore unacceptable. Which is why Saudi Arabia does not observe religious occasions — like the birthday of the Prophet (Mawled), or the Islamic New Year — that are widely celebrated as public holidays across the Muslim World. You will never hear a Wahabi scholar wishing believers a “happy Mawlid”. Much the same goes, of course, for national occasions: celebration of Saudi Arabia’s national day (September 23) was long a topic of contention between the royal family and the religious establishment. It was only in the reign of King Abdullah (2005-15) that the national day became a public holiday.

So it goes without saying that the birthdays of Saudi rulers and senior figures were never celebrated or even publicly acknowledged. To see MBS’ birthday widely celebrated and commented on Twitter in this way is a break with both tradition and religious orthodoxy.

But before delving into what it means, it is worth pointing out that, while a hashtag on twitter is not an official celebration, that does not mean it is spontaneous — and this one almost certainly isn’t. No one on Saudi twitter bothered to mention the birthdays of previous Saudi rulers, including MBS’ own father, who is still king, or even of the crown prince himself in the four years since he became the de facto ruler of the country. This hashtag is clearly an organised campaign, launched by the Diwan (which answers to MBS) and amplified by the crown prince’s army of twitter sycophants.

If this very public fawning over the crown prince’s birthday is a slap in the face of the Wahhabi ulema, they must have grown used to it by now. For MBS made it clear from day one he intends to free himself from the shackles of the religious establishment, and that entails changing the very nature of the Saudi regime. The relation between Wahhabi scholars and the House of Saud has formed the bedrock of the Saudi state since it first emerged in the 18th century. The Al Saud have always based their legitimacy as rulers on their religious role, and by extension on the alliance with the religious establishment. To the question of ‘Why should this one family rule this vast land that never came under centralised rule before?’ the stock answer was always: ‘Because they uphold the law of God’. This of course gave the religious establishment a special place, for they are the keepers of God’s seal of approval.

This arrangement was not going to work for MBS, for two reasons. First he needed to free himself from the straight jacket of the religious establishment to modernise the economy, opening it up to foreign investors, new activities (e.g. entertainment) and fully opening the labour market to women. Second, the legitimising role of the ulema worked when the royal family was united behind the ruler. The religious establishment imparted legitimacy on the regime as a whole, i.e. on the royal family, and the family extended this legitimacy to the person it unanimously chose as king. Family unity was long guaranteed by the system of succession decreed by the founder of the modern (third) Saudi state, King Abdulaziz, by which his sons succeeded one another on the throne by order of seniority. This created a stable, predictable and incontestable line of succession that was mapped out for decades in the future. King Abdullah was designated second in line to the throne 30 years before he actually became king in 2005. Today, however, the youngest remaining sons of Abdulaziz are all octogenarians, and it is obvious that Salman is the last one of them to reign. But the Saudi regime had no roadmap for what comes next. Who of the hundreds of cousins who make up the ‘third generation’ is to rule? And on what basis would he be chosen? MBS was not a strong candidate — ten years ago no one would have bet on him becoming king. He just had the luck of being at the right place at the right time, and his rise was fiercely contested within the royal family. He operated what was essentially a palace coup to get rid of the previous crown prince, Mohamed bin Nayef, and his uncle Ahmad still ostentatiously refuses to swear allegiance to him. If MBS is to rule, he cannot rely on the traditional legitimacy of the royal family, he needs personal legitimacy for himself, independent of the family and the religious establishment. He needs to make the people love him.

The search for a new legitimacy

In August 2017, about a month after MBS ditched Mohamed bin Nayef, Saud al-Qahtani, then an adviser at the Royal Court who was understood to be close to MBS,^[2] penned an article in the official Riyadh newspaper, under the headline “The Nation State and Ideological Legitimacy”. In it he argued that while “ideology,” (i.e. the official Wahhabi doctrine) certainly played a key role in the unification of the country, it is not what has kept it united since. What really kept the country united is the royal family, he wrote, and its success in leading Saudi Arabia on the path of development. “The royal family is the real legitimacy that has kept this country united and strong,” he went on, “and it is now time for this legitimacy to replace ideological legitimacy in theory and in media discourse; so as to make things clear to everybody”. In effect, Qahtani is arguing for the demotion of religion from its central role in the Saudi regime, to turn Saudi Arabia into an ‘ordinary’ nation state governed by a ruling family that needs no other legitimacy than the fact of its rule. Shortly after it appeared, our own sources confirmed to us that the article did indeed reflect the crown prince’s own thinking.

MBS has been busy turning those words into deeds since. The religious establishment is now effectively marginalised and muzzled. The religious police has been all but dismantled. Religious scholars who dared not so much to oppose but merely to diverge from the official line were imprisoned. Reforms that have long pitted the royal family against the religious establishment (allowing women to drive), or that were simply unthinkable (abolishing male guardianship over women) have been enacted in the past couple of years. Young Saudi men and women dancing together at music concerts is no longer taboo.

Parallel to the demotion of the religious establishment, MBS has been promoting his own brand and personality cult. His propaganda machine has been playing on the resemblance between him and his grandfather King Abdulaziz to brand the young prince as the “second founder” whose reforms herald a new golden age.

#ميلاد_ولي_العهد#ذكرى_ميلاد_الزعيم_المجدد pic.twitter.com/N7nLKYpfas

— عبدالله الشهري (@a_shehri87) August 31, 2019

Earlier this year, MBS was filmed being asked by a journalist from a pro-Saudi TV station about whether “we are seeing the birth of the fourth Saudi state”, only to answer with ostensible modesty that “we are the prolongation of the third Saudi state”. But this was clearly a case of ‘to ask the question is to answer it’, as the French saying goes. The Twitter celebration of his 34th birthday on August 31 is one more brick in the edifice the crown prince is building to his personality cult. It would not be entirely surprising if, in years to come, the birthday of King Mohamed bin Salman were to be made a public holiday.

مراسلة احد القنوات تسال #ولي_العهد

هل نحن بحضرة الدولة السعودية الرابعة ؟

فجائها الرد سريعاً pic.twitter.com/tsHKZk4oHI

— بندر العويمري (@bandar__W) February 10, 2019

It is interesting to note here that, in the first couple of years of his rule, MBS’ birthday and exact age were a (poorly kept) secret and a topic of speculation, probably because the young prince felt his age undermined his credibility in a country long ruled by a gerontocracy and a culture that emphasises respect for elders. Having his birthday and exact age touted publicly on Twitter is sort of a ‘coming out’ for him: he feels confident enough, and old enough, not to have to hide his age.

For all his confidence, this strategy represents a huge gamble for MBS. Muzzling the religious establishment may, overall, go down well with the younger generation and the urban populations — but certainly less so with the conservative tribal population of the hinterland that has traditionally formed the backbone of the regime. Further, eliminating religion as a legitimating factor, in the absence of any real democratic institutions, will leave the regime dependent for its legitimacy to a large degree on the economic situation. If, in a few years’ time, MBS’ economic reforms turn out to be a failure, will there be ulema to tell the people to stick with the regime because, after all, ‘it upholds the law of God’?

For people on the Salafi-jihadi spectrum the answer is far from obvious, and the debate around it is revealing of some broader trends within the movement.

By Hazem Eseifan and Peter Cross

On June 18, the sixth instalment of an occasional series entitled “the Student Asks and the Sheikh Answers” was released in PDF form via Telegram. As always since the series began in January of this year, the “sheikh” in question is Abu Ubayda Youssef al-Annabi, head of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s “Council of Notables” and the group’s leading theoretician, and the “student” asking the questions is a Palestinian named Nail bin Ghazi Mosran, a Salafist sheikh in Gaza.¹  The document itself is not dated and does not carry any official logos of AQMI or of its media organ, Al-Andalus.

The question asked here is “Can we pray God to have mercy on Dr Mohamed Morsi?”, Egypt’s first democratically elected president in the wake of the Arab spring and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. After being toppled by a military coup in July 2013, Morsi died in a courtroom in Cairo on June 17 this year. To understand the question, one should remember that “seeking God’s mercy” for a deceased person (by using the invocation rahimahu Allah, literally “May God have mercy on him”, the Muslim equivalent of RIP) is reserved for Muslims according to mainstream Salafi doctrine. It is a serious sin, in the eyes of Salafists, to say “May God have mercy on him” if the deceased person was not Muslim. In effect the Palestinian sheikh is asking whether Morsi can be considered a Muslim by Salafi doctrine?

But why would anybody doubt Morsi’s faith? Because he is a Muslim Brother, a group that Salafis regard with suspicion, and because he compromised himself by being elected to rule Egypt. For hard-line Salafism democracy is nothing short of heresy, since accepting elections and popular legitimacy is tantamount to accepting “the law of people” over the law of God.

Annabi answers (emphasis in the original):

The man [Morsi] died a victim of great injustice in the hands of his tyrannical jailers, so how can we not implore God’s mercy for him? Whatever he did during his presidency, he was trying to do his best as he understood it. This, God willing, will shield him from accusations of kufr [unbelief] and sin.
Believe me, the least we can do for this leader is to seek God’s mercy for him. And if we could avenge him, we certainly would.

This position by Annabi is to a certain extent pragmatic. After his fall, imprisonment (since 2013) and now death, Morsi has become a hero and a martyr to the broader Islamist movement, and it would have been impolitic for one of AQMI’s leading lights to condemn him as a heretic.

But there is also a broader point here, insofar as Al-Qaeda — and AQMI especially — has been trying these past few years to “soften” its image. Several AQMI and Al-Qaeda leaders have released introspective documents analysing the reasons for the “failures” of the jihadist movement, and one of the main reasons given is that jihadists cut themselves from society and the broader Islamist movement by anathematising anybody who was not exactly on the same line as them. The Algerian Salafist-jihadist movement has a particularly long history of controversy over this issue of takfir (designating a person who professes Islam a kafir, or unbeliever — a judgement that amounts to declaring that person an apostate, for which the sharia punishment, at least by Salafi-jihadi lights, is in principle death), as illustrated by AQMI’s own history. The organisation’s precursor, the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC), was initially formed out of the 2nd and 5th regions of the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), with which they had split in the mid-1990s largely because of the GIA’s extremely extensive interpretation and murderous application of takfir; ironically, the GSPC subsequently drew closer to Al-Qaeda and in 2007 rebranded itself as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb under the direct influence of Abu Musaab Al-Zarqawi, the notoriously takfiri head of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.²

The debate became more pressing in the years following the rise of Islamic State (IS) in 2014. The “caliphate” has adopted hardcore takfirism as a foundational doctrine: for them, anyone who has not sworn allegiance to Baghdadi is an apostate and deserves death. True to form, the latest issue of Al-Nabaa, IS’ official news bulletin (issue no. 187 dated June 20), not only declared Morsi an apostate and an infidel — “he ruled according to the same infidel constitution as his predecessors” — but also added to the rolls of anathema all those “who call themselves ‘the Islamist movement’” but do not disown democratically-compromised rules like Morsi, Erdogan and Ghannouchi.  Al-Qaeda’s quest for a “kinder, gentler” jihad thus became a means to differentiate their brand from the bloodthirsty lunatics at IS.

Al-Qaeda mother ship in Afghanistan and its affiliates have been trying to change their image by “reaching out” to society at large and emphasising that “we stand with the people” against the “tyrants who oppress you”. We see this “softened” attitude in AQMI’s position towards the demonstrations in Algeria, which they have strongly supported even though the demonstrators are clearly not calling for Sharia rule.

Another interesting point is to see Annabi emerging as a religious authority for the broader Salafi current. Salafism in North Africa was traditionally subservient to figures from the Middle East — it is intriguing to see this trend reversed.

1- An article in a Gaza news site from 2013 names him as “managing director of the Bin Baz Association,” a Salafist group in Gaza named after Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti in the 1990s, sheikh Abdulaziz Bin Baz.  In the article Mosran is critical of Hamas over its treatment of Salafists in the territory.

2- Zarqawi was indeed sharply criticised by his mentor Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi and Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri for his excessive takfirism, beginning with his execution in 2005 of a kidnapped Egyptian diplomat he and his group had condemned as an “enemy of God”.

A friend asked me last week if I thought war between Iran and the US was likely. “Look,” I replied, “Saudi Arabia and Israel want America to fight Iran on their behalf, and America is looking for someone to fight Iran on its behalf”. Saudi Arabia, already bogged down in Yemen, certainly cannot take on Iran on its own. And in Washington DC there is relatively little appetite, National Security Advisor John Bolton excepted, for direct confrontation with Iran. Trump himself was elected essentially on an isolationist slate, and it was just a few months ago that he was promising to get the US out of Syria. Full-blown war with Iran would be neither easy nor short — and Trump has an election to win next year. That of course does not mean Washington will not try to destabilise the Iranian regime by means of indirect operations and proxies, but direct military operations against Tehran appear to be off the table — as shown by the last-second backdown by the White House following the shooting of the American drone over the Gulf on June 20.
But what is Iran playing at? The Islamic Republic clearly has no interest in provoking a suicidal war with the US, so why the repeated provocations? These could be seen as a warning of the havoc Iran can wreak in the region if attacked — and at the same time as a means of testing the adversary’s limits. Those tests have just given Teheran a very satisfactory answer. There is also probably a domestic policy element, insofar as the Iranian leadership is able to project strength and confidence and portray Iran’s enemies as weak and indecisive.
This analysis is only partly reassuring, though. While it looks unlikely that either side is trying to provoke a deliberate war, there is no ruling out an accidental one. An Iranian provocation that goes too far might leave the White House politically with no option but to attack. In the game of brinksmanship Tehran and Washington are playing, one clumsy misstep — and Trump is nothing if not clumsy — might yet push things over the edge.

On March 27, Algeria’s Ministry of Defence issued a communiqué announcing that an Army detachment, acting in coordination with the police, had broken up a three-man “terrorist cell” in the western city of Oran the previous day, seizing a submachine gun, two hunting rifles, knives, a pair of binoculars and a GPS device in the process. The three men who were arrested had, according to the communiqué, been “preparing terrorist attacks during the election rallies.” A week later the MoD followed up with the announcement that seven members of a related “support group” had been apprehended.

AQMI fired back with an indignant rejoinder. In a short written statement dated March 30, the organisation

“categorically den[ies] that our soldiers target the peaceful uprising of the nation. We have no connection with any criminal act that targets our Muslim brothers, whether in those locations they mentioned or other places where Muslims gather. […]

“Our honourable people, it is not a secret to you that the gang of evil and criminality continuously seeks to interfere with your popular uprising, may it be blessed, Allah willing, with every trick and every means.

“Simultaneous with the ongoing popular uprising and its escalation, senior criminals in the army promote such lies. It is not ruled out at all that they will resort to conducting criminal operations and then pin them on the Mujahideen, the sons of this proud people, who are pleased to free their nation and their people from the shackles of oppression and enslavement imposed by those traitor agents with the force of iron and fire.”

Beyond the bombast, it is worth noting AQMI’s very emphatic effort to ingratiate itself with a peaceful, mass movement which has to a quite remarkable degree eschewed all religious references, never mind islamist sloganeering.

In this, the March 30 statement is of a piece with the 20-minute video message by the head of AQMI’s ‘Council of Notables’, Abou Oubeïda Youssef Al-Annabi, issued on March 10 (which, as it happens, raises the possibility of the pouvoir mounting false-flag operations to incriminate AQMI). Let’s take a closer look at this first attempt by AQMI’s chief ideologue to get to grips with the burgeoning revolution.

Entitled “Algeria and the way out of the dark tunnel”, the video begins with a short clip of Ahmed Ouyahia seemingly promising to quell any protests, before segueing into several minutes of smartphone footage from the demonstrations overdubbed with jihadist anashid. Al-Annabi’s speech itself (an audio recording delivered over a static photomontage) begins with a lengthy disquisition on the conditions a leader (imam) must meet under Islamic law and why they disqualify Bouteflika. “We list this religious argument,” Al-Annabi goes on, “because we want the basis of the fundamental change you seek to be the basis of religion”.  “We salute your courage” in coming out to seek change, but “if you are to achieve your goals, we urge you to observe the following”:

1. “Your first goal” should be the downfall of “the whole criminal gang that rules you”, and “your ultimate goal is that Algeria should be ruled by Islamic law alone.”

2. “Stay united and cast aside all factors of division, such as the regional, sectarian or tribal tensions that the ruling gang has often used to divide you”.

3. “Stick to Islamic morals and good behaviour in your protests: no rioting, pillaging, or foul language.”

4. “Organise yourselves into associations and coordinating bodies, appoint good men to organise and lead the movement. And beware the provocateurs and mercenaries the ruling gang will try to plant in your midst to spread rioting and unrest and thus find a pretext to suppress the movement.”

5. “The ruling gang have a long history in crime”. It is not to be ruled out that they “might commit criminal acts against innocent people and their property and blame it on the jihadis in order to hamper the movement. […] We in the jihadi movement, part of this dear nation that we are, declare hereby that we disown any criminal acts against the lives or the property of our people.”  For “our fight was never against our people” and “our guns targeted no one but the criminal ruling gang”.

“Our brothers in Algeria,” Al-Annabi intones, “your fight against the ruling gang right now is the same fight your brothers in the jihadi movement have been leading for the past 25 years. […] Let us continue the fight together: intensify your demonstrations, broaden their scope and spread them all over the country”.  However, “be patient, and do not seek to reap the fruit before it is ripe”, for ultimate victory is certain.

AQMI has since followed up with a second recording, also by Abou Oubeïda Youssef Al-Annabi, dated April 4, in which islamist references find even less place, programmatically or analytically, than in his initial not-very-hot take. In this 11-minute audio message, entitled “By God we beseech you not to retreat”, Al-Annabi salutes the Algerian people’s “blessed intifada” that is now “a stone throw away from achieving its noble goal”, and proffers his advice:

“We beseech you by God, do not retreat” for “the ruling gang is collapsing” and soon “its main pillar will fall. […] Be patient [and] do not be fooled by those thieves who were part of the gang just yesterday, and today, when the gang is about to fall, want to join the intifada. […] Beware of those who want to distort the aims of your movement, so accept nothing short of fundamental change and nothing but Islam as a governing constitution”.  Al-Annabi goes on to call on “all members of military and security forces: the Army, the Republican Guard, the Gendarmerie, the Border Guard, the police, and prison guards” to “join your people in their blessed uprising; it is your people and your country, the country you swore by God to protect.  The day has come for you to fulfil your oath and protect your people from the plotters who, supported by countries and organisations known to be enemies of Islam, work to punish the people by emergency rule and curfews. Officers and soldiers, do not let your people down; defend your country. Do not shoot at your sons and daughters for the sake of [leaders] who will soon be gone”.

It is impossible to know how big an audience there is for AQMI’s propaganda output in Algeria, but there has certainly been no sign so far that Al-Annabi’s exhortations to focus on demanding the rule of sharia have registered at all with the bulk of protesters. During the massive demonstration in central Algiers on Friday, April 5, a small group of youth did try to lead the crowds in chants of “dawla islamiya” (‘Islamic state’ – the chief slogan of the Front Islamique du Salut in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s), but got nowhere. The same slogan, along with chants of “freedom for Ali Belhadj!”, was heard, sporadically, during a small parallel protest in the Algiers suburb and one-time FIS stronghold of Kouba on March 22 – but even there the organisers clearly had trouble controlling the local youth who turned out and keeping them on message. One might suppose Al-Annabi may have a thus far invisible audience among the many thousands of repentis – former members of armed islamist groups pardoned and released into society after giving up the armed struggle under Bouteflika’s Civil Concord (1999) and National Reconciliation (2005) programmes – some of whom may conceivably hanker back to the jihadist ideals of their younger days, although this is a hypothesis that is yet to be tested.

It is striking, meanwhile, that the slogan of “freedom for Ali Belhadj” was touted relatively early on by Jordanian-Palestinian jihadi ideologue Abu Qatada Al-Falastini, in a video Q&A posted on his YouTube channel on March 6. Now based in Jordan, Abu Qatada has a long history of involvement with the Algerian jihadi movement (in the 1990s he founded and edited Al-Ansar, the London-based organ of the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé – the organisation from which the GSPC, the forerunner of today’s AQMI, emerged) and it is worth dwelling on his analysis of the situation in Algeria.

Asked by one of his followers via social media How to deal with the demonstrations in Algeria “given that the demonstrators refuse to raise Islamic banners and slogans and are not calling for sharia rule”, Abu Qatada answers that:

“the level of religious awareness in the Algerian nation is not sufficient for them to achieve Islam’s objectives”.  Therefore, “what we need to do is to raise the level of this awareness” and these moments of collective action are a good opportunity in this respect. The way to raise Islamic awareness among the people is by being on their side.  The Algerian people are demonstrating against injustice, so the natural place for Islamists is to stand beside the people: “stand up, show them you reject oppression too, and people will follow you”.  “In terms of demands, demonstrations never end where they start.  The demonstrators are not calling for the caliphate right now?  So what?  It is your role to get them there”.  But to “take leadership you need leaders, and the only person in Algeria who can lead the movement is Ali Belhadj”.  Hence Islamists at this stage should put forward the release Ali Belhadj as one of the demands of the movement and leave it there for the time being. In a follow-up question, a viewer asks whether “peaceful demonstrations are the way to achieve change, meaning that jihad is no longer needed”.  Abu Qatada answers: “That is what the secularist enemy wanted us to believe during the Arab Spring, but history has shown it does not work like that.  Peaceful demonstrations work in certain conditions, but there comes a point where armed conflict is inevitable.”

This rationale would seem to be coherent with, if not explain Al-Annabi’s approach. Indeed, both Abu Qatada and Al-Annabi have for some time contributed to a broader effort by certain jihadi ideologues associated to one degree or another with Al-Qaeda to rethink the movement’s relationship with the broader Muslim masses.

As has been pointed out elsewhere (see for example Cole Bunzel, Abu Qatada al-Filastini: “I am not a Jihadi, or a Salafi”), over the past two years Abu Qatada has issued a series of videos and written fatwas in which he has expressed his regret that “the jihadi current” has “succeeded brilliantly in isolating itself” from the broader Islamic community (umma) and developed the idea of a more broad-based “jihad of the umma” in contrast to the “jihad of the vanguard” (jihad nukhba) that, he suggests, has largely failed to achieve its goals. In his recent output, Abu Qatada has argued that since the Arab Spring the jihadi movement has tended to alienate the umma with its incessant organisational and ideological infighting and urgently needs to learn to engage with “the real world” rather than withdrawing into a self-sustaining Salafi-jihadi fantasy world.

Similarly, shortly before the outbreak of the current popular uprising, Al-Annabi expounded at some length, in response to a question from a follower as to whether the jihadi movement had “lost the initiative”, on the need for jihadis to “develop and change” and reexamine the ideological, strategic and organisational foundations of their movement, the better to be able to appeal to “the people”.

Al-Annabi’s suggestion that a rethink of organisational forms might be possible is particularly noteworthy. Although AQMI’s propaganda does not seem to be have had any noticeable impact in the earliest, headiest days of the Algerian revolution, in the more difficult days that likely lie ahead it may conceivably find a more receptive audience among parts of the youth and, perhaps, the repentis – and in this mulch, if the Tunisian experience is anything to go by, new, hybrid, city-based, semi-jihadi groups along the lines of Ansar Al-Sharia could take root. To quote an oft-mangled dictum of Gramsci’s: when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Peter Cross (President, Yaqut s.a.s.)

Hazem Eseifan (senior consultant, Yaqut s.a.s.)

Hat-tip to Aaron Zelin’s excellent Jihadology for making so many of the primary sources available.

The answer to the first question is that we don’t know who he or she is.  The twitter account @Mujtahidd (meaning “diligent”) first appeared around 2012-13, in the reign of King Abdullah and started tweeting insider information from within the royal palace.  The tone of it was clearly hostile to the Al Saud regime and sympathetic to Islamist movements.  London-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih has long been suspected of being behind it, but that has never been proven.  We quickly established that @Mujtahidd’s information was reliable but not deep.  He would announce government reshuffles or the king’s movements for the coming days before they were officially announced, and the leaks were often borne out by the events.  People noticed, and Mujtahidd gained a broad following in Saudi Arabia, where twitter usage was booming.  But when it came to more closely-guarded information, concerning, say, the king’s health or relations within his immediate entourage, Mujtahidd was far less reliable.

Whatever access he had, he lost it with the arrival of King Salman on the throne early 2015.  Nowadays most of what he says is a mixture of conspiracy theories, his own opinions and reports from Western media.  The loss of reliability, however, did not translate into a loss of influence; in fact the number of his followers grew from around 1.6 million in 2015 to more than 2 million today — which is why what he says matters.  In spring 2017 the account tried to drum up street demonstrations in Saudi Arabia against the policies of MBS.  This was enough to draw massive police presence on the streets, but no demonstrations happened.

The general thrust of this series of tweets of February 1 is that the king is in poor health, senile, unaware of his surroundings and totally controlled by MBS.  This does not fit with reliable reports we have received from private sources to the effect that King Salman on a number of occasions intervened directly to overrule some of MBS’ policies or make him change course.

تمكن مبس من إشغال والده بالبلوت وحفلات النساء والرقص حتى لا يسأل عن والدته السجينة، وقد اختار مبس البلوت والنساء لأنها أكثر ما يسعد والده خاصة بعد الألزهايمر الذي شخصه الأطباء منذ ٢٠١٢، ومن غباء بقية آل سعود أنهم لا يدركون تمكن الألزهايمر منه ويعاملونه كما لو كانت ذاكرته سليمة

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

ومن ضمن أعراض الحالة النفسية لفهدة غضبها المستمر على مبس إلى درجة أنها تشتمه و تردد رغبتها في قتله، ولذلك فهي محاطة بالأطباء ويصرف لها أدوية مضادة للقلق Xanax و Ativan ومسكنات قوية مثل codeine وفي المقابل يصرف لها منشط Amphetamine خوفا من آثار أدوية القلق الجانبية

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

The series of tweets opens by claiming that MBS is keeping his father busy with “parties, women and card games” so that the king will not ask about MBS’ mother, Fahda bint Falah al-Hathleen “who was thrown in jail by her son”.  This has been particularly the case “since Salman was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2012”.

“Fahda has been mentally ill since her husband became king.  MBS kept her and her brothers in jail since.  The mental disease she has is hereditary and there are signs that MBS and his full brothers have it.  Part of the symptoms of her malady is that she keeps insulting MBS and threatens to kill him, which is why her son has put under strong drugs”.

None of this is credible.  King Salman suffering from Alzheimer’s has been one of Mujtahidd’s long-standing and totally unsubstantiated claims.  Likewise the allegation that MBS threw his mother Fahda in jail.  The crown prince is very close to his mother; her influence on him and on his father was a key factor in his stellar rise.  We received reports in summer 2017 that MBS had fallen out with her because she criticised some of his actions, and stopped visiting her as often — but that is as far as it went.  There is no indication whatsoever that he did, or even could, throw her in jail.

هؤلاء الأربعة يلعبون البلوت لساعات متواصلة مع الملك في ليالي وسط الأسبوع وربما معهم أحفاد الملك سعود، أما ليلتي الجمعة والسبت فيلعب مع الأخوياء من البادية، ولا أدري لماذا يغير مبس الطاقم في نهاية الأسبوع! وبالمناسبة الملك لا يؤدي أي دور آخر غير هذا ولا يعرف شيئا عن أحوال البلد

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

“The four people closest to King Salman are Nayef al-Zahrani, the clown who entertains his grandchildren, a person from Najran named Shdayyid who makes the king laugh by imitating voices, Abdulrahman al-Assaf, Fadha’s maternal uncle, whose role is just to be the fourth player for card games, and Fahd al-Hathleen, Fahda’s brother, who is in charge of the king’s camels.

“These four people play cards with the king during weeknights, sometimes accompanied by some of the grandsons of King Saud.  On weekends, the king plays with some of his Bedouin servants.  It is not clear why MBS changes the crew on the weekends.”

Note that Mujtahidd seems to contradict himself here, claiming that MBS threw Fahda’s brothers in jail while one of them plays cards with the king every night of the week.

ويمنع مبس دخول غير هؤلاء على الملك حتى لو كان من كبار آل سعود، وهذا يشمل أعمامه وأخوانه غير الأشقاء مثل سلطان وفيصل وعبد العزيز وجميع هؤلاء يتحايلون في المناسبات العامة أو يستغلون بعض الثغرات لمقابلة الملك، وقد شوهد إخوانه في خصام معه بصوت مرتفع عدة مرات

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

“Other people allowed to see the king regularly are his personal doctor and nurse, MBS’ wife and children and the wife and children of his full bother Khaled, the personal guard of the king, some officials of the royal medical clinic, and private servants.

“MBS does not allow anyone else to see the king, including the king’s brothers and nephews and other senior Al Sauds”.

و يعاني الملك من أرق شديد ولا ينام إلا باستخدام zolpidem ، كما تنتابه حالات غضب وتوتر إذا بدأ يستعيد بعض الذاكرة مما يضطرهم لإسكاته باستخدام Xanax ، إضافة لمجموعة من المسكنات من آلام الظهر والركبة في مقدمتها Codeine ، ثم مسيل الدم Warfarin الذي يحتاجه لمنع للمزيد من الجلطات

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

إضافة للطبيب الشخصي يشرف على علاج الملك فريق العيادة الملكية الذي يقوده د. صالح القحطاني، ثم فريق كليفلاند الذين يدفع لهم الديوان مليار ريال سنويا ويقوده كيرتس ريمرمان. ومن مهمات العيادة الملكية وفريق كليفلاند علاج المقربين من الملك ومبس، ومن مهماته كذلك علاج الأمراء المعتقلين

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

ويتردد بين المقربين من علاج الملك أن سعود القحطاني ينسق مع د. صالح القحطاني للتلاعب بعلاجات الملك حتى يعجل بموته فيصبح مبس ملكا. ومن بين هذه التوجيهات تحديدا تشجيعه على صرف أدوية النوم والقلق بلا خوف من ضخامة الجرعة عسى ولعل أن تتسبب الجرعة الزائدة بنومة لا صحوة بعدها.

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

According to Mujtahidd, “in addition to Alzheimer’s”, King Salman is suffering from back pains for which he was operated in 2009, arterial fibrillation and arrhythmia, which necessitated surgery and a pacemaker. He suffers bouts of anxiety and anger when his memory comes back for which he is given Xanax, insomnia for which he is given zolpidem, and other drugs to treat his heart condition and prevent strokes.  He also suffers “terrible pains” in the knees and was supposed to have knee replacement surgery but doctors recommended against it “because his heart and brain cannot take it.”  “The medical team in charge of the king’s health is led by Dr Saleh al-Qahtani, and a team from Cleveland led by Dr Curtis Rimmerman who are paid a billion riyals a year [$232m!].  They take care of the king, MBS and some of the detained princes”. “Dr Saleh al-Qahtani was brought in by his relative Saud al-Qahtani, and it is said that Saud is working with Dr Saleh to hasten Salman’s end and make MBS king”.

We have no information to confirm to contradict the list of diseases above — though, as we said earlier, the Alzheimer’s claim is not credible.  The Saud al-Qahtani (@saudq1978) mentioned above is a close adviser to MBS, his social media guru and his unofficial spokesman.  He was implicated in the Khashoggi case and officially sacked with other officials in November 2018, though it is very likely he still advises MBS behind the scenes. Mujtahidd’s claims about his role are usually fantastically conspiratorial.  It should be noted that the author of these tweets has a tendency to attribute dark machinations to the people around senior Al Sauds.  Back in the days of King Abdullah his bête noir was Khaled al-Tuwayjiri, then head of the Royal Diwan, whom he blamed for all that was wrong in the country.  There is no reason to take Mujtahidd’s claims about Saud al-Qahtani any more seriously.

ويعاني مبس من أرق شديد وقد يبقى واعيا لمدة ٤-٥ أيام ثم يأخذ جرعة ضخمة من المنومات والمهدئات وينام ٤٨ ساعة كاملة، ثم بعد صحوته يتناول منشطا حتى يستطيع التركيز. ويتوقع الأطباء أن يتعاظم المرض عنده حتى يصل لمرحلة لا يمكنه إخفائه بعد أن تدمر المخدرات دماغه كما حصل لعبد العزيز بن فهد

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

“MBS himself has been using drugs since he was 20. He started with light stuff, but his usage got heavier over time.  This activated his inherited mental troubles and is beginning to show as paranoia, inability to concentrate and anxiety.  He takes a cocktail of medication similar to what his father consumes. 

“He also suffers severe insomnia that keeps him sleepless for 4-5 days on end after which, helped by a heavy dose of drugs, he sleeps for 48 hours non-stop.  When he wakes up he takes drugs that help him concentrate.  Doctors expect he will soon reach a state where the destruction of his brain by drugs can no longer be concealed”.

This contrasts with information we have received from our sources earlier in MBS’ reign to the effect that he, unlike many Saudi princes of his generation, leads a clean, sober life centred around his family.  He is married to one woman (polygamy is common among Saudi royals) and usually shuns wild nights out and loud parties. 

ومن الأدلة على حالته النفسية المريضة جدا أنه أمر بتحويل قبو القصر إلى سجن لكبار الشخصيات حتى يحس بالإشباع أن خصومه يعذبون تحت قدميه، ونقل إلي هذا القبو كل المعتقلين من الأمراء والوزراء السابقين والتجار، ولا يزال فيه أكثر من ١٠٠ شخص، وقد وكل أمرهم بالكامل لسعود القحطاني

— مجتهد (@mujtahidd) February 1, 2019

“Evidence of his sick state of mind can be found in the fact that he ordered the cellars of the palace transformed into cells for VIP prisoners where he can enjoy knowing that they are being tortured under his feet.  All senior princes and former minsters in detention are kept there, and Saud al-Qahtani is in charge of them”.

 It seems unlikely, not least from the logistical point of view, that any detainees would be held in the royal palace.