For decades, China was seen as the capital of the digital dictatorship in the world, as Beijing uses technology in every possible way to extend its control over people's lives, and there is no place for it for privacy or for keeping people's secrets, however, it seems that the title of the digital capital of evil will finally move to the Arab region, specifically the Saudi city of Neom.
The city of the future, the capital of leadership, the new global tourist destination; all these loose titles, were used by the Saudi media to describe Neom, which bin Salman began building near the Red Sea, and sought to make it ready for people by 2020.
^he former CIA analyst for Middle East affairs, Bruce Riedel, spoke to the American SpyTalk website, which specializes in intelligence matters, and said that CIA experts are currently working on evaluating the options of the new president, Joe Biden, n dealing with Saudi Arabia, they were also discussed the future of the Saudi city of Neom.
The American website, which published these statements in a report by “Jonathan Browder”, the defense and foreign affairs correspondent, considered that dealing with the Crown Prince of the Kingdom, Mohamed bin Salman, constitutes the main dilemma for Biden in formulating his administration's relationship with Riyadh, due to the many crimes he was involved in.
The website expected that the process of getting rid of bin Salman has become difficult these days, thanks to the city of Neom, which is actually a future city, but not in the popular technologies that it provides to people, but rather in its military and tracking techniques, which In practice makes it a fortified fortress, in which bin Salman spends most of his time away from people.
Speaking about NEOM, Riedel, who is now an expert in Middle East affairs at the Brookings Institution in Washington, revealed the real goal of building the city: “Bin Salman has not stopped spending most of his time in Neom recently, that futuristic city high in technology he is building near Jeddah, which is almost completely empty of people, ”adding:“ No one lives there yet, so securing it is very easy. ”
Douglas London, a non-resident researcher at the Middle East Institute in Washington, pointed out that MBS runs an intelligence-gathering apparatus from Neom, all over the country, and it constantly monitors and identifies the dangers facing him, especially through social media. “Mohamed bin Salman in Neom has a lot of people who are tasked with monitoring those with them and those around them,” he said.
The former CIA employee who worked for many years in the Middle East, said that MBS is currently controlling, through NEOM, all the security, and intelligence services in Saudi Arabia, and perhaps this explains why he spends most of the time in the city to monitor citizens, and to protect himself from them.
Three years after the project was announced in 2017, the desert still contains nothing but the blood of its displaced people, Neom was scheduled to be opened by 2025, and it was an attempt to diversify the economy instead of relying entirely on oil production.
So far, the city has an airport, a palace, and a few hotels. In fact, the propaganda for the city does not show the existence of any of these advanced projects, on the contrary, it shows only general images of sand dunes with high quality.
It is not surprising for the project not to progress s, as it suffered a number of setbacks that prevented it from implementing bin Salman's promises.
The first setback for the project was the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of the Saudi regime in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. This hideous incident made MBS an “international pariah” and created a state of reluctance for foreign investors to invest in Saudi Arabia.
A number of investors withdrew from the project and its partnership deals, after the massive public attack on the administrations of those international companies criticizing them for working with a bloody regime with a horrific record of human rights.
The drop in oil prices, due to the Corona pandemic, had a significant impact on the project as well, as public spending in Saudi Arabia was significantly reduced, and although this did not prevent bin Salman from spending on his projects, the general recession of the state's economy was supposed to affect these projects.
With all these failures and to save the regime's face, Neom which was King Salman’s destination for recovery when he was ill, turned into a center for international policies, where it began holding secret meetings there with the Prime Minister of the Israeli Occupation entity, Benjamin Netanyahu.
