Saudi officials are discouraging citizens from travelling to Turkey, after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi soured relations
draws 39m foreign tourists each year is on the brink of anarchy, if you believe the Saudi media. “Turkey is not safe for travel,” blared a recent headline in a Saudi newspaper. The kingdom’s embassy in Ankara has warned of rising petty crime aimed at Saudi citizens. Another story claimed that 2,187 people were killed in gun violence in Turkey in 2017.
It is true that one Saudi visitor in Turkey last year was murdered and dismembered. However, his killers were not locals but a 15-member Saudi hit squad and the murder took place inside a Saudi consulate. The victim was a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who had upset the Saudi regime. His death made tense relations between the two countries much worse. Hence the campaign by Saudi officials to discourage their citizens from travelling to Turkey.
Cheap, Arabic-speaking and comparatively clement, Egypt has always been a popular destination for Gulf tourists. But Qataris now avoid it because of politics: Egypt was one of four countries to impose an embargo on the emirate in 2017. The embargo has even turned the, the pilgrimage to Mecca, into a political spat: Saudi Arabia and Qatar accuse each other of obstructing travel for Qatari pilgrims.
In Egypt, citizens aged under 40 need state-security approval before flying to Turkey. The ban was imposed in 2014 to stop Egyptians from crossing into Syria to join Islamic State. That is no longer a worry. Yet the rule remains in place, as one woman recently discovered while trying to spend a long weekend in Istanbul with her foreign partner. Permits are also sometimes required for notorious hotbeds of Islamism like Georgia and South Korea.
By discouraging travel to Turkey, the Saudi government may hope to keep tourist rials at home. King Salman has set an example the past two summers. Instead of his usual visit to a palace in Morocco, he has taken staycations at Neom, a planned $500bn city on the kingdom’s north-western coast. The summer heat is no doubt unbearable, but on the bright side, there are no crowds at the beach: the city has no residents yet.
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