The Saudi State: An Instrument of Cruelty
In the nearly ten years since Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) became the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the state's machinery of violence has undergone a profound transformation: it has evolved from a repressive tool of an authoritarian regime into a precision killing system whose core objective is the elimination of political threats—and, beyond killing, into an architecture of cruelty designed to make dissent unbearable for those who survive. Data compiled by human rights organizations shows that since King Salman's accession in 2015, Saudi Arabia has executed more than 2,000 people, with the second thousand completed nearly 50 percent faster than the first. Meanwhile, the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and the thwarted assassination that same year of exiled former intelligence official Saad al-Jabri, reveal that this system has extended beyond the kingdom's borders. Drawing on public records from Human Rights Watch, the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR), Amnesty International, and multiple national intelligence agencies, this essay argues that state violence under MBS exhibits four core features: the scaling and politicization of capital punishment, the transnationalization of extrajudicial killing, the systematic expansion of targets—from Islamists to liberal activists, from the Shia minority to rivals within the royal family—and the calibrated infliction of cruelty through disappearance, torture, solitary confinement, family retaliation, and medical neglect. The gulf between the public relations narrative of a "reformer" and the execution figures, victim lists, and testimonies of survivors constitutes the key entry point for understanding contemporary Saudi politics. The cruelty, this essay contends, is not incidental to the reform project. It is the project's foundation.
I. The Political Arithmetic Behind the Execution Numbers
To understand the nature of state violence under MBS, one must first confront the execution data. A joint statement issued by Human Rights Watch in early April 2026 noted that as of that month, Saudi Arabia had executed more than 2,000 people since January 2015. ESOHR's tracking shows that the first thousand executions took six years (2015 to 2021), while the second thousand took less than four—an acceleration of nearly 50 percent. The annual execution figures for 2024 and 2025 reached 345 and 356 respectively, setting modern Saudi records.
These numbers are harrowing enough on their own, but what matters more is the composition of those executions. In a 2022 interview with The Atlantic, MBS claimed that capital punishment had been restricted to intentional homicide cases, with victims' families given the choice between retribution and forgiveness. Yet ESOHR's analysis of the data reveals that murder cases account for only about 43.9 percent of all executions, meaning more than half are carried out for offenses that do not meet international law's threshold of "most serious crimes." Non-lethal drug offenses account for roughly 35 percent, while politically framed executions—hearings conducted primarily through the Specialized Criminal Court that handles "terrorism" cases—make up about 14 percent. In those cases, the defendants' conduct often amounts to nothing more than exercising free expression.
This composition exposes a critical fact: the death penalty in Saudi Arabia is not merely a criminal justice measure but a tool of political governance. The mass executions for drug offenses target primarily foreign laborers and marginalized groups who lack the political resources to challenge judicial proceedings; the elastic application of "terrorism" charges means that virtually any form of political dissent can be brought within the death penalty's reach. The 14 percent figure for political executions may appear modest, but given the closed nature of the Saudi judicial system—defendants often lack effective counsel, trials are not public, and convictions rely heavily on confessions extracted under torture—the actual number of political executions is almost certainly understated.
The issue of juvenile executions is especially acute. MBS's government promulgated the Juvenile Law in 2018, explicitly abolishing discretionary death sentences for juvenile offenders, and issued a royal decree in 2020 reiterating the prohibition on executing minors. Yet ESOHR's records show that since 2015, Saudi Arabia has executed at least 17 individuals who were under 18 at the time of their alleged offenses, 13 of them after the Juvenile Law took effect. At least six more juvenile defendants remain at risk of execution. This systematic violation of the state's own legal commitments points not to an enforcement lapse but to a clear political will: when the regime defines a category of conduct as a core threat to national security, the defendant's age ceases to be a protection. The execution of minors is not an anomaly within the system; it is a logical extension of a logic in which the elimination of perceived threats trumps every other consideration—including the regime's own stated legal commitments. This is the first layer of the cruelty architecture: the bureaucratic production of death, in which the forms of law are preserved while its substance is systematically emptied.
II. Khashoggi and the Transnationalization of Killing
On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents needed for his marriage. He never walked out. A fifteen-member Saudi operations team strangled and dismembered him inside the consulate. The CIA assessed that MBS "approved the operation to capture or kill Khashoggi in Istanbul." That judgment rested on several pillars: MBS's absolute control over Saudi security and intelligence agencies; the direct ties between members of the operations team and his inner circle, including seven members of the Royal Guard's "rapid intervention force," a unit answerable solely to MBS himself; and MBS's prior support for using violent means to suppress dissidents abroad.
Intercepted communications disclosed by The New York Times further strengthened the chain of attribution: during the same window in which the operations team entered the consulate, there were eleven communications between MBS and his senior adviser Saud al-Qahtani. Former CIA official Bruce Riedel commented: "This is the smoking gun, or at least the smoking phone call. There is no other way to interpret it."
The significance of the Khashoggi case extends far beyond the death of one journalist. It established an operational template: using diplomatic facilities as killing sites, using state aviation assets to transport operatives, and using elite units within the intelligence and security apparatus that answer directly to the leadership to carry out the mission. That template was subsequently applied to other targets.
According to UK court filings and multiple media reports, less than two weeks after Khashoggi's murder, MBS dispatched a "Tiger Squad" (Firqat al-Nemr) of the same type to Canada to assassinate Saad al-Jabri, the exiled former deputy head of Saudi intelligence. Al-Jabri had served as the kingdom's core liaison to the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance under Muhammad bin Nayef and possessed extensive sensitive information about MBS's rise to power. The operations team carried two bags of forensic tools, including a person reportedly skilled in "cleaning up crime scenes," and attempted to enter Toronto's Pearson Airport on tourist visas. They were refused entry after border officers discovered that several of them actually knew one another—a photograph exposed their cover story. Canadian Public Safety Minister Bill Blair did not comment directly on the case but acknowledged that the government was "aware of incidents where foreign actors have attempted to monitor, intimidate or threaten people in Canada."
In its legal response, Saudi Arabia did not deny the existence of the Tiger Squad. Instead, it invoked head-of-state immunity as a defense and countersued al-Jabri for allegedly embezzling some $11 billion in government funds. That response is itself revealing: it implies the squad's character as MBS's personal instrument—neither part of the regular military chain of command nor subject to any external accountability mechanism. The Tiger Squad represents a second layer of the cruelty architecture: the privatization of killing, in which the state's coercive capacity is concentrated in a unit loyal not to institutions but to a single man, and in which the target's fate—whether death, disappearance, or the terror of knowing they are hunted—is determined by their proximity to power rather than any legal process.
III. Mass Executions and the Systematic Targeting of Minority Communities
If the Khashoggi case was the "boutique display" of political violence under MBS, mass executions are its everyday operating mode. On April 23, 2019, Saudi Arabia executed 37 people in a single day, 32 of them members of the Shia minority. Human rights organizations verified that most of those executed were peaceful political protesters from the Eastern Province, and that at least 21 of the convictions rested entirely on confessions obtained under torture. Three years later, on March 12, 2022, Saudi Arabia carried out the largest single-day execution in its modern history: 81 people put to death in one day. Officials claimed most were tied to terrorism, but human rights groups' tracking showed that dozens had been executed simply for participating in anti-government protests.
These numbers point to a fact the official narrative deliberately obscures: the expansion of capital punishment under MBS is, to a significant degree, a war on specific communities. The Shia-majority Eastern Province has been a center of protest since the 2011 Arab Spring, and the timing and target selection of mass executions follow a clear deterrence logic—by publicly eliminating young men from a particular community, the state transmits an unchallengeable signal to the entire group. The normalization of torture as a basis for conviction means that the function of judicial proceedings has shifted from "establishing truth" to "producing legitimacy"—however thin that legitimacy may appear to outside observers.
The expansion of the death penalty stands in naked contradiction to MBS's public relations narrative. In 2018, MBS promised in an interview that Saudi Arabia would "significantly reduce" its use of capital punishment. In 2022 he claimed the death penalty had been restricted to intentional homicide. But the data will not cooperate with the narrative: the pace of executions has not slowed but accelerated in the 2020s. In a joint statement, Human Rights Watch and 35 other organizations said flatly that Saudi Arabia's execution practices "contradict the government's claims of reform." This disconnect between narrative and reality is not accidental—it is itself part of the governance strategy: signaling reform to international audiences to sustain investment and diplomatic relations, while displaying visible violence to domestic audiences to demonstrate the regime's unchallengeability. Mass executions are the third layer of the cruelty architecture: spectacular punishment, in which the public, collective killing of identified community members serves as a theater of deterrence, and in which the cruelty is amplified by its visibility—the families of the executed know not only that their loved ones are dead but that their deaths were staged as a warning.
IV. Internal Royal Purges and the Tiger Squad's Shadow
MBS's consolidation of power has targeted not only dissidents outside the system but also potential competitors within the royal family. On November 4, 2017, Saudi Arabia launched what it called an anti-corruption campaign, detaining dozens of princes, current and former ministers at Riyadh's Ritz-Carlton hotel. The next day, Prince Mansour bin Muqrin, deputy governor of Asir Province, died in a helicopter crash near the Yemeni border. All aboard were killed.
The official account cited mechanical failure or weather, without releasing investigation details. But media outlets including Middle East Eye, citing intelligence sources, reported that Prince Mansour attempted to flee the country after the anti-corruption campaign began and that his helicopter was brought down by fighter jets deployed by the Tiger Squad. Mansour was the son of former Crown Prince Muqrin, who had been stripped of the succession in the months after Salman's accession in 2015. That background provides a plausible political logic for the assassination: Mansour represented a branch of the royal family that had been marginalized but retained potential appeal.
The allegation has never been tested in court, and Saudi officials deny it. But its credibility should not be assessed solely through the lens of direct evidence. During the critical window of MBS's consolidation (November 2017), any figure with royal blood and a potential claim to the succession was viewed as a structural threat. The helicopter crash occurred the day after the mass detentions at the Ritz-Carlton—a temporal coincidence that resonates uneasily with the operational pattern the Tiger Squad displayed in the Khashoggi and al-Jabri cases: using state assets, targeting specific individuals, and manufacturing the appearance of "accidents" or "mishaps."
The existence of the Tiger Squad itself was partly confirmed through court filings in al-Jabri's lawsuit. The roughly 50-member elite unit was established in 2017 and is described as tasked with "quietly eliminating" dissidents through methods including poisoning and staged accidents. Its members overlap with personnel identified in the Khashoggi dismemberment case and report directly to MBS. This organizational form—a secret killing unit unconstrained by the regular military justice system and loyal only to one individual—is the key institutional innovation for understanding the nature of state violence under MBS. It allows political killings to bypass the friction and leakage risks of the bureaucratic apparatus, designed around the principle of plausible deniability—even though the Khashoggi case demonstrated that such deniability often collapses under the scrutiny of international intelligence agencies. The targeting of royal rivals is the fourth layer of the cruelty architecture: the elimination of alternatives, in which violence is used not to punish wrongdoing but to foreclose the very possibility of a different distribution of power.
V. The Architecture of Cruelty: Disappearance, Torture, and the Destruction of the Self
The death penalty and transnational assassination are the most visible instruments of MBS's rule, but they are not the only ones. For every dissident who is killed, many more are subjected to forms of punishment designed not to end life but to make it unlivable. These practices constitute a fifth layer of the cruelty architecture: the calibrated infliction of suffering on the living, in which the regime selects the method of pain based on the victim's visibility, vulnerability, and the message it wishes to transmit.
Enforced Disappearance as Psychological Warfare
One of the regime's most effective tools is not the prison sentence itself but the period of uncertainty that precedes it. Enforced disappearance—the detention of individuals without acknowledgment of their whereabouts or legal status—is used systematically against activists and critics. Manahel al-Otaibi, a fitness influencer and women's rights activist, was arrested in November 2022 for tweets supporting women's rights and posting photos of herself without the abaya. Before her secret trial, she was subjected to months-long periods of enforced disappearance. Even after her conviction, she was forcibly disappeared again between December 2024 and March 2025, leaving her family without information about her condition or location.
The cruelty here is deliberate. Disappearance severs the detainee from the outside world, denying them access to legal counsel, family support, and medical care. It also inflicts suffering on families who are left without answers, unable to advocate effectively because they do not know where their loved one is being held or what is being done to them. For someone like al-Otaibi, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, the denial of adequate medical care during these periods constitutes a form of slow violence. In a phone call to her family in May 2025, she reported severe leg pain and said she had not received proper treatment.
Torture and the Weaponization of Confessions
Torture is not an aberration in the Saudi system; it is a procedural norm. Human Rights Watch notes that Saudi courts "routinely rely on torture-tainted confessions and deny basic legal rights, making fair trials virtually impossible." The case of Saud al-Faraj illustrates the machinery in operation. Arrested in 2019 after a violent, warrantless raid on his home, al-Faraj was deliberately misled into believing his family remained in custody—a calculated psychological tactic to extract confessions. He was transferred blindfolded and forced to sign documents whose contents were never disclosed to him. He was then subjected to enforced disappearance, denied legal representation, and tortured into confessing to charges including calling for protests, communicating with human rights organizations, and belonging to a terrorist organization. In 2022, a court used that forced confession to sentence him to death. He was executed by royal order.
The cruelty in al-Faraj's case is not only the torture itself but the instrumentalization of his family's fate as a lever. The regime understood that threatening his loved ones would break him more efficiently than physical pain alone. This is a mode of punishment that extends beyond the individual to the networks of care and affection that sustain resistance.
Solitary Confinement and the Destruction of Health
For high-profile detainees whose executions would generate too much international scrutiny, the regime employs a different method: indefinite detention under conditions designed to erode physical and mental health. Prominent religious scholar Salman al-Oudah, detained since September 2017, has reportedly suffered significant loss of vision and hearing due to ill-treatment and limited access to medical care. He has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest. The prosecution has called for his death sentence, but the trial has been repeatedly postponed—leaving him in a state of legal limbo where the threat of execution hangs over him indefinitely while his health deteriorates.
This is cruelty by duration and neglect. The regime does not need to kill al-Oudah to neutralize him; it can simply allow his body to fail while denying him the medical attention that might preserve his faculties. The message to other potential critics is clear: we can make your remaining years an experience of gradual disintegration, and we can do so without ever pronouncing a final sentence.
The Targeting of Families as Retaliation
Human Rights Watch documents that "family members of dissidents are also targeted in retaliation, making it nearly impossible for advocacy to continue from abroad without consequences." This tactic extends the punishment beyond the individual to the people they love, exploiting the bonds of family as a vulnerability rather than a protection. For Saudis living abroad who might consider speaking out, the knowledge that their relatives inside the kingdom could face harassment, travel bans, or detention creates a powerful deterrent. The regime has effectively outsourced surveillance and self-censorship to the families of dissidents, who become unwilling enforcers of silence through their own fear.
The Specialized Criminal Court as a Cruelty Machine
The institutional vehicle for much of this cruelty is the Specialized Criminal Court (SCC), established to try terrorism cases. Amnesty International has documented how the SCC "has routinely used vague provisions under the anti-cybercrime and counter-terror laws equating peaceful expression with 'terrorism,'" and how "every stage of the SCC judicial process is tainted by human rights violations." The court operates in secrecy, denies defendants access to the evidence against them, and hands down sentences that bear no relationship to the actual conduct alleged. Al-Otaibi's initial sentence of eleven years for tweets and photographs was imposed after a secret trial in which her family had no access to court documents or the evidence presented against her.
The SCC's function is not to adjudicate but to launder political repression through legal form. By processing dissent through a court that mimics the rituals of justice while systematically violating its substance, the regime can claim that activists are "terrorists" rather than prisoners of conscience. The cruelty lies in the pretense: the defendant is forced to participate in a proceeding whose outcome was determined before it began, denied the ability to mount a defense, and then punished for conduct that was never a crime.
The Cumulative Logic of Cruelty
What emerges from these accounts is a system in which cruelty is not incidental but architectural. Each practice—disappearance, torture, solitary confinement, family targeting, medical neglect, secret trials—reinforces the others. Disappearance facilitates torture by isolating the victim. Torture produces the confessions that legitimize the sentence. The sentence, whether death or decades in prison, is then publicized as justice. The family's suffering extends the punishment beyond the prison walls. And the health deterioration of long-term detainees ensures that even those who survive their sentences will emerge diminished.
This is what distinguishes MBS's approach from the arbitrary violence of a less sophisticated autocracy. It is systematized, calibrated, and bureaucratically embedded. The cruelty is not the product of individual sadism (though sadism may be present) but of institutional design. The regime has created a machinery whose purpose is to make dissent not merely illegal but unbearable, and to make the experience of that unbearability visible enough to deter others while hidden enough to deny.
VI. Conclusion: The Cruelty Is the Point
The evidence assembled here—the execution statistics, the transnational assassinations, the mass killings of minorities, the disappearance and torture of activists, the deliberate destruction of health and family—points to a conclusion that is uncomfortable for those who prefer to see Saudi Arabia through the lens of economic reform and geopolitical necessity. The cruelty under MBS is not a bug in an otherwise modernizing system. It is the operating logic of a regime that has concentrated power in a single individual and must therefore eliminate any challenge to that concentration.
The reform narrative serves a specific function in this system. By projecting an image of social liberalization—women driving, cinemas opening, sports stars signing—MBS generates goodwill among international audiences that translates into investment, arms sales, and diplomatic cover. Meanwhile, the actual mechanisms of control remain untouched. The women who campaigned for the right to drive are now in prison, tortured and disappeared. The journalist who exposed royal corruption was executed in secret. The religious scholar who advocated tolerance is blind and deaf in solitary confinement. The reform narrative and the cruelty are not contradictory; they are complementary instruments of the same governance strategy.
The international response has been a study in willful blindness. The CIA concluded that MBS personally approved Khashoggi's murder. The UN has documented the systematic nature of the abuses. Human rights organizations have published name after name, case after case. Yet Western governments continue to treat MBS as a necessary partner, and the Trump administration's 2025 White House welcome for the crown prince—his first visit since the Khashoggi murder—sent an unmistakable signal that the costs of cruelty can be managed. When the most powerful actors in the international system choose pragmatism over accountability, they become complicit in the system they claim to oppose.
The 2,000 executions are not an abstraction. They are 2,000 individuals who were, in most cases, denied fair trials, subjected to torture, and killed for conduct that should never have been criminalized. Behind those numbers are the specific cruelties documented in this essay: the blindfold and the forced signature, the months without news of a daughter's whereabouts, the leg pain that goes untreated, the solitary cell where a scholar's sight fades. MBS's Saudi Arabia is not a reform project with a human rights problem. It is a system of power that has made cruelty its method, and until that method is named and confronted, the reform narrative will remain what it has always been: a cover story for the ongoing infliction of suffering.