Susanne Koelbl

Susanne Koelbl is a journalist and a military and foreign correspondent for the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Her dispatches have covered conflict areas and wars around the world, including the Balkans, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. She is known for her probing reports from Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea. Her book Dark Beloved Country: People and Power in Afghanistan was published in 2009. In her exceptional interviews with state leaders, intelligence-chiefs and Islamic extremists, Koelbl repeatedly challenges the powerful, including the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir (wanted for genocide with an international arrest warrant), or the underground Hamas leader Khaled Mashal. Koelbl has excellent contacts in all political camps in the Middle East. She has been travelling to Saudi Arabia since 2011. Most recently she lived in Riyadh during 2018-2019. Saudi Arabia plays a key role in the world, yet few have first-hand knowledge of who lives, suffers, and wields power there. Behind the Kingdom’s Veil: Inside the New Saudi Arabia Under Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (Mango) is a deep dive behind the walls of one of the world’s most secretive countries. It’s a place where religious conservatism and strict laws governing women’s freedoms support a single goal-preserving the power of the House of Saud. Chapter-by-chapter the black box that is Saudi Arabia opens. We are eyewitnesses to the inner workings of the new as well as the traditional Saudi Arabia; have breakfast with Royal Highnesses, meet Osama bin Laden’s bomb-making trainer, enter the palaces of secret service chiefs and listen to intimate conversations with women ambivalent about their newly offered freedoms. We also get to know journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered and brutally dismembered in 2018, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), contrasting liberalization of Saudi society with punitive treatment of dissenters. Ahmed Rashid, bestselling author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, praise dit as ” a marvelous book on the recent developments in Saudi Arabia, a book full of analysis, anecdotes and the tensions generated by the change of geo-politics in the Arabian Gulf. Her access to Saudi officials, princes, shop-keepers and to ordinary women and men struggling with jobs, school and bringing up children is unique because Koelbl lived in Saudi Arabia for some time […] A piercingly powerful book.”