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A year after the brutal murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, attempts by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to exploit the controversy to boost his own political standing have back-fired.
Ever since Mr Khashoggi was murdered moments after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in October last year to obtain documentation for his forthcoming marriage, Mr Erdogan has skilfully exploited the incident to cause maximum embarrassment to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he regards as one of his major regional rivals.
Ankara has been at loggerheads with Riyadh ever since the Muslim Brotherhood, a key ally of Mr Erdogan, came to power in Egypt in 2012, a move bitterly resisted by the Saudis, who regard the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation.
Indeed, one of the reasons the Saudis targeted Mr Khashoggi in the first place was because of his close links with the Brotherhood, as well as his close relationship with Qatar, the Gulf state that is bitterly opposed to the Saudi royal family and is one of the Brotherhood’s most important backers.
Khashoggi’s gruesome fate was very much the consequence of this complex web of bitter regional rivalries between prominent Muslim leaders, so that when a team of Saudi assassins carried out their plot to silence Khashoggi’s high profile criticism of the Saudi regime — his columns regularly appeared in the Washington Post, among other prominent publications — Mr Erdogan responded by doing everything in his power to orchestrate an international campaign denouncing the Saudi crown prince.
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