How Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman rose to power — and why it matters

When Sultan* talks about Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, he becomes visibly nervous.

"My hands are sweating. I'm getting hot flushes. It's nerve racking … You always have to keep an eye over your shoulder," he tells ABC RN's Take Me To Your Leader.

Sultan is originally from Saudi Arabia, but is now living in exile in Australia.

He's talking about Jamal Khashoggi – the journalist who was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

It's a murder that the CIA believes was approved by Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he's widely known.

"People around the world are being targeted. But there's just no official way of tying it back to the Saudi government. So there is always a constant fear," Sultan says.

What makes this all the more real for Sultan is that he knew Jamal Khashoggi, calling him "the nicest, most gentle giant in the world".

To people like Sultan, MBS is a murderer. To others, he's a visionary.

What's undeniable is he's one of the most powerful people in the Middle East.

So, how did MBS climb to the top and what does this mean for Saudi Arabia and beyond?

Down the family food chain

Karen Elliott House is a journalist and former foreign editor at the Wall Street Journal. She's written about Saudi Arabia for more than four decades and has interviewed the Crown Prince multiple times.

She says that his rise to the top was far from assured.

MBS was born in 1985, to Salman bin Abdulaziz (who was then a prince and governor of Riyadh, and is now Saudi Arabia's king) and his third wife Fahda bint Falah Al Hithlain.

"In his family, his father has five older sons," Elliott House says, meaning MBS was way down the family food chain.

But just how low down?

Comparing it with the British royal family, Sultan says MBS' rise is not even like the "second child of Prince Edward" becoming king. "It's like that Australian fellow who claims he's King Charles' [love child] becoming king."

But Elliott House says when MBS was a teenager, two sons died within a year of each other and the other sons from his father's first marriage were "busy with their families".

"[So] the young Mohammed really stayed with his father, comforted his father, went everywhere with him." And this is when the bond between the two of them deepened.

A 'brat'?

MBS went to university in Riyadh and received a law degree in 2007 (in Saudi Arabia, this means studying Islamic law as well as secular law).

A few years later, he became an adviser to his father Salman, who was still governor of Riyadh.

But it was not all smooth sailing for MBS.

From 2005-2015, Saudi Arabia was ruled by Salman's half brother – King Abdullah.

Sultan says under the rule of King Abdullah, MBS was "isolated and kicked out of the royal court … for his misbehaviour as a young prince".

"MBS was coming in, fully charged, like, 'Hey, I'm in charge now' … [MBS] was bullying, speaking rudely to people. King Abdullah was a very fair king, he didn't like that," Sultan says.

So was MBS "a brat"?

"Basically, that's the sense that we all got," Sultan says.

A brat perhaps, but Sultan adds that MBS always longed for power, that "he's always had the hunger for it".

Then in 2015, everything changed. When King Abdullah died, Salman became king. And the new king immediately appointed his son as the country's defence minister.

War in Yemen

After a matter of months in his new role, MBS launched an intervention in Yemen.

Broadly, the conflict in Yemen is considered a proxy war between Iran, who is backing the Houthi militia and Saudi Arabia, who is backing the Sunni-led government. Both are trying to limit the other's influence in the region.

More than 300,000 people have died in this war, whether directly from airstrikes or indirectly due to hunger or disease, including at least 11,000 children.

It has been, without question, a humanitarian catastrophe.

According to Amnesty International: "All parties to the conflict in Yemen continued to commit violations of international humanitarian and human rights law with impunity."

A gilded prison

In 2017, MBS got the promotion he had longed for.

King Salman announced a major reshuffle where MBS became Saudi Arabia's crown prince, or the king's designated successor.

Graeme Wood, a writer at the Atlantic magazine who has also interviewed MBS, says one of his first moves as crown prince was to do something "extraordinary".

MBS rounded up hundreds of Saudi Arabia's most powerful people – including family members – and locked them up in a Ritz-Carlton hotel.

"He effectively imprisoned many of his own family members and other prominent citizens of the kingdom … and then went to them one by one, and said, 'You have not had clean hands, you've been corrupt. [Now] repay your debts'," he says.

Some were kept in there for weeks and there were allegations that torture took place.

Wood says MBS wanted everyone to see that he was "clearing house, as everybody knew that Saudi Arabia had suffered from great corruption". It meant the move was popular domestically.

Or as Elliott House says: "I believe that he was trying to establish there is a new sheriff in town".

And sheriff he is. While not yet king, he's widely understood and portrayed as the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia.

A brutal murder

Perhaps the biggest event that has occurred during MBS' time in power, at least from international eyes, happened on 2 October 2018, when Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and was never seen again.

Sultan vividly remembers the kind of man Khashoggi was.

As Wood sums up: "Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate … under circumstances whose details are not known, but which basically came down to a Saudi hit squad having been sent there."

"[Khashoggi] was lured there, under the pretext of having to get permission to remarry."

From grisly audio recordings taken inside the consulate, it is known that Khashoggi was dismembered with a bone saw, while a Saudi forensic doctor listened to music.

Elliott House thinks the murder is "inexplicable". She adds: "I just find it hard to believe that an intelligent person [like MBS] could order the murder of someone like that."

As Wood points out: "The United States has said openly at this point that their interpretation [of the audio] is that the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible ultimately for the death of Khashoggi."

Incredibly, MBS has claimed to be a victim in the whole affair, including in an interview with Wood.

"In my conversation with him, he was very frustrated at the fact that people would not let him forget this. And he said, 'Look, my rights have been violated here. Because the world claims that I'm a murderer'," Wood recalls.

It's a death that's never far from Sultan's mind.

"I wish I could have been there somehow or go back in time and say 'Hey don't go in there'," he says, holding back tears.

Exile to Australia

Sultan knows firsthand what it's like to feel the wrath of the Saudi state.

One day, back in Saudi Arabia, he was told that the work he was doing was unacceptable to the authorities.

"I was called in suddenly by state security," he says, and was told, "You're done".

Sultan knew he had to leave the country. Immediately.

He was able to "get on a flight and leave, overnight, literally within 24 hours", without even saying goodbye to his family.

Since arriving in Australia, Sultan is always fearful of the long reach of the Saudis.

He's constantly keeping his "eyes and ears open", which he says is now a normal part of his life.

'They love him'

Despite stories like that of Jamal Khashoggi and Sultan, MBS remains popular at home, especially among young Saudis.

This is because of a string of major reforms he made to the arch-conservative kingdom.

Even Sultan admits he was wowed by MBS' early actions.

"[Changes like] bringing in cinemas, letting women drive, getting rid of the hijab, getting rid of the religious police – that was just amazing. When he did that, I felt happy. I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, the future in Saudi Arabia is going to be amazing'."

Sultan says many of Saudi Arabia's massive youth population "love MBS".

"They love him, because they're not involved ... These are kids that want to have concerts, these are kids that used to go to Dubai or to Bahrain just to catch a movie in the cinema."

"You can't believe the difference" his reforms have made, Elliott House says.

"[For example], the religious police used to forbid physical education for women because it would destroy their reproductive capability. Now you have women running races, people dancing in the streets."

What's behind his effort to fundamentally remake Saudi society?

"He has to do this, I believe, because he wants to attract foreigners into the country – both their money and their minds – to help modernise Saudi Arabia," Elliott House says.

But these reforms have been occurring hand-in-hand with a harsh crackdown on dissent.

"He wants complete control of the society because he fears any kind of domestic upheaval," the American journalist says.

Saudi Vision 2030

MBS has also been pushing "Saudi Vision 2030", his grand plan for the kingdom.

"It's mostly an economic reform plan that seeks to make Saudi Arabia cutting edge," Elliot House says.

One part of it is the US$500 billion ($722 billion) NEOM, an urban development project that includes the Line, a 170 kilometre long, 500 metre tall linear city.

"What I think is maybe a bit out of reach are some of the futuristic ideas that you see in the illustrations of what that city will be, which is like a Jetsons-style, science-fiction-like place," Wood says.

But realistic or ridiculous, it speaks to MBS' mindset.

"I think what it says is that this is a man with immense ambition, a man to whom people rarely say no. And so if he has this extraordinary idea of what to do, then he's going to get pretty far with it without having to confront some [certain] realities," Wood says.

"But I don't think he has a lot of people who are in a good position to bring him back down to Earth, when it comes time to turn that vision into a reality."

What next?

So what does MBS want to do with all this power he's accumulated?

"And just grow it to be something so that he has a legacy."

Sultan says MBS "wants to be remembered as the man who got rid of the religious police. And as the man who moved the country out of the dark ages, and in many ways he's achieving that".

But he adds that in Saudi Arabia, nothing is certain. And MBS knows this.

"To protect his own life, he surrounded himself by contractors, mercenaries, people that he pays very, very, very well," he says.

"It's hard to tell exactly what's going on in there. But it's a modern day Game of Thrones."

*Name and details have been changed to protect privacy