When Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, died, in 2015, his four daughters had been held in captivity for approaching 15 years, according to several people. Why didn’t world leaders intervene?
Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who was the king of Saudi Arabia from 2005 to 2015, was widely hailed as a progressive monarch. He enacted a series of women’s-rights initiatives: opening up employment sectors, inaugurating the country’s first mixed-gender university, appointing a female government minister. Saudi women still could not drive, and continued to live under the control of male guardians, but Abdullah’s cautious reforms won praise from Western leaders.
, the Saudi crown prince who rose to become the de-facto ruler after Abdullah’s death, has rolled out women’s-rights reforms as part of his Vision 2030 plan to modernize the Saudi economy. He has also detained members of the royal family who posed a threat to his authority—reportedly including his own mother.
The two began Skyping regularly, and Sahar confided her history to him. The King, during his long life, had fathered as many as thirty-five children with a multitude of wives; Sahar and her sisters were born to Alanoud Al-Fayez, a Jordanian-born noblewoman, whom he had married when she was fifteen and he was around fifty.
Al-Ahmed reached out to the princesses’ mother, Al-Fayez, to offer advice about publicizing her daughters’ plight, and she filed a complaint to the United Nations. “My daughters are truly persecuted by them by every possible means,” she wrote, describing how the princesses were “systematically drugged” and kept under the “relentless surveillance” of armed guards. Hala was severely anorexic, she said, and had been denied medical care.
The interview aired the same day President Barack Obama travelled to Riyadh for a private dinner with King Abdullah. “He should be ashamed to meet such a leader that has four women—grown women—locked up just because he wants to,” Jawaher said. “Especially that they speak of human rights.” The meeting went ahead, and the White House hailed the “strong relationship” between the two nations.
Al-Ahmed told me that the princesses’ situation grew increasingly dire in the months before their father’s death. He sent me a photograph of a crude contraption they had fashioned to distill fresh water from the sea, and of a copper hook that he said they used to catch fish and crabs to feed themselves and their dog. The dog eventually starved to death, he said.
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