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Saudi chief of general staff Fayyad Bin Hamid Al-Ruwaili visited Oman from 2-4 January for talks with senior officials including deputy prime minister for defence affairs Sayyid Shihab Bin Tariq Al-Said and the Sultan’s Armed Forces chief of staff Abdullah Bin Khamis Bin Abdullah Al-Raisi.

During his visit to Oman in early January, Saudi chief of general staff Fayyad Bin Hamid Al-Ruwaili met a number of key officials. Who were they?

Walid Abukhaled – appointed Saudi Arabian Military Industries (Sami) chief executive in August 2020 after serving as acting chief executive for several months (following Andreas Schwer’s departure), he joined the group in September 2019 as chief strategy and business development officer. This followed a career at BAE Systems, AEC, General Electric and Northrup Grumman.

Sheikh Khalid Bin Khalifa Al-Thani (prime minister and interior minister): appointed premier in January 2020, replacing Sheikh Abdullah Bin Nasser Al-Thani who had held the position since Sheikh Tamim became emir in 2013.

Having built up a list of local construction firms working on the giga-projects, GSN has analysed the shareholding records for several contractors, using data provided by Diligencia in a partnership to help sharpen understanding of those involved. It shows that the companies most heavily involved are often decades old, with the exception of Saudi Real Estate Infrastructure Company (Binyah). They are mainly in private hands (Red Sea International is an exception) and often held by generations of the same family.

Tribes play an important role in Kuwaiti political life – not least because the largest of them are generally pro-opposition. However their influence is not always readily apparent to outside observers. The tribes are spread around the country with no real geographic focus and most are a mix of Sunni and Shia. The largest is the Al-Awazem, whose prominent members include the recently ousted National Assembly (parliament) member Bader Dahome.

Minister of state Prince Turki, son of former Eastern Province governor Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd, has raised his public profile in recent years, either by accompanying senior royals on trips or by conducting on missions of his own. This is in marked contrast to the pre-2015 years when he was a low-profile businessman.

National Assembly speaker Marzouq Ali Mohammad Al-Ghanem reminded the region of his reputation for anti-Israeli rhetoric in early February, when he dramatically threw a copy of President Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ in a bin during a meeting of the Arab Parliamentary Union in Jordan, declaring as he did so that the deal “was born dead” and “should be thrown in the dustbin of history”. It is not the first time Al-Ghanem has made controversial comments involving israel that have made international headlines.

Princess Reema (sometimes Rima) Bint Bandar has become a prominent figure in a branch of the Al-Saud now closely associated with diplomacy. Her brother Prince Khalid Bin Bandar Bin Sultan was, until recently, ambassador to Germany. Their father, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, was ambassador to Washington between 1983 and 2005 before becoming secretary general of the National Security Council and then head of the General Intelligence Directorate; he made a surprise return to the public arena last month in an extensive interview.

Resident in Doha since 2007, ex-Knesset (Israeli parliament) member Dr Azmi Bishara has played a key role in developing the thinking of both Father Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani and his son Emir Sheikh Tamim during and since the Arab Spring. Bishara has provided an link with Arab nationalist elements who, sources say, appeal to Tamim. Sources canvassed by GSN described Bishara as “very influential” or “Tamim’s prophet”. One compared him to Italian Renaissance diplomat and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli and his realpolitik manual The Prince.

A Saudi businesswoman married to a prince has been profiled at length in the 6 February edition of New York Magazine, which labelled her “The Anna Wintour of the Middle East”, in a reference to the influential editor of Vogue magazine. Princess Deena Aljuhani Abdelaziz, appointed editor-in-chief of Vogue Arabia last year, was born in California and moved between the US and Saudi Arabia due to her father’s work as an economist. Vogue Arabia, the newest addition to the Condé Nast International stable, is already online, with a print edition due soon which will be distributed across the Gulf.