📬 MENA Unleashed is on Substack, providing regular analysis on the constant stream of geopolitical events in the region. We dissect the economics and trade route dynamics behind overwhelming news, breaking them down into concise, digestible insights on a region caught in the crossfire of Great Power competition. menaunleashed.com/

Syria shut the Nasib crossing to Jordan on Tuesday, after Jordanian airstrikes killed seven people in the south, and hundreds of lorries sat at Jaber until it reopened this morning. From April 2015 to October 2018 the same gate stayed shut for three and a half years. In June, Turkey and Saudi Arabia signed to rebuild the Hejaz railway through Aleppo, Damascus and Amman, construction from 2027, no branch to Haifa, so Israel is left off the map. But the line crosses the one border that closes whenever Amman and Damascus fall out. Who lends for that? menaunleashed.com/p/the-heja…

Don't cry for Saudi banks. Al Rajhi made SAR 7.1bn in three months, up 12%. Who stopped borrowing? Saudis. Its mortgage book shrank by SAR 5bn this year.

Ten Saudi banks made 269 million riyals a day last quarter, and Saudis have stopped borrowing from them. That is SAR 24.75 billion in the third quarter, the best quarter the sector has ever had. Al Rajhi, the biggest of them, made SAR 7.1 billion in three months, 12% more than a year ago. And on the same call where it reported that, its management said the home loan book had shrunk by almost SAR 5 billion this year, to SAR 271 billion, that it had sold SAR 10 billion of mortgages on to investors to make room, that depositors pulled money out during the quarter, and that its own cost of money will keep rising into the next one. So the record profit is interest on loans Saudis signed in better years, and fewer of them are signing new ones. In January the household electricity tariff goes up 17%, with a SAR 500 allowance that only reaches the state payroll, and the courts have already issued 272,448 enforcement orders on unpaid cheques and promissory notes in 2026. The banks are being paid by people who have stopped borrowing. That lasts exactly as long as the old loans do.

Every barrel Saudi Arabia sells leaves through one of two doors, and the Houthis have now reached both of them. The doors are Ras Tanura on the Gulf and Yanbu on the Red Sea. In the early hours of Tuesday a fire broke out at Ras Tanura, the biggest refinery in the country and its biggest export terminal, handling 550,000 barrels a day. Riyadh says it shot down three ballistic missiles aimed at the east and four drones aimed at the south. The Houthis say one missile got through and started the fire. Aramco has not commented. Yanbu was the door Aramco leaned on when Hormuz became too dangerous, and in September drone strikes on the pumping stations shut the pipeline to it for two weeks and stopped the tankers loading, and on Monday the Houthis said they had hit those stations again. Brent is above $115 a barrel this morning. Riyadh keeps saying the war is not touching business. Its oil now leaves through whichever door is not burning.

Aramco, the most profitable oil company on earth, is asking six foreign banks for a $10 billion overdraft, and it wants the papers signed within weeks. A revolving credit line is money you keep in the drawer for the day the cash stops arriving. Bank of China, ICBC, JPMorgan, Citi, HSBC and MUFG are lining up to provide it, at about 0.6% over the American benchmark rate, which is the price a lender charges a borrower it is not worried about. The borrower has had its headquarters in Dhahran, one of its oil fields, a refinery and the port at Yanbu hit by the Houthis in the space of a month, and Saudi oil export earnings had already slipped to $16.3 billion in August. When Aramco last arranged a line like this, in 2024, $3 billion of it came from banks in the region. This time every name on the list sits in Beijing, New York, London or Tokyo, and Chinese and American banks are lending to the same oil company in the same war, because both of them need those barrels to keep moving. Riyadh keeps saying the war is not touching business. Its oil company is building a cushion before the next strike, and it is borrowing the cushion from abroad.

The Houthis have hit the place Saudi oil leaves the country from, and Riyadh is telling you it shot everything down. Ras Tanura is Saudi Arabia's biggest oil export terminal and its biggest refinery, on the Gulf coast. In the early hours of Tuesday a fire broke out there after an attack. Saudi forces say they intercepted three ballistic missiles and four drones. NASA's fire satellites saw the terminal burning. Aramco has not commented. Why does a terminal in the eastern desert matter to someone filling up in London or New York? Because since February Aramco has been shipping most of its crude from the Red Sea side, to get around Iran's mines in Hormuz, and in the last few weeks it moved exports back to the Gulf, because the Houthis made the Red Sea ports too dangerous. Now the Gulf side is burning too. Brent is at $116, up 13% this month. This month alone the Houthis have hit Aramco's headquarters in Dhahran, the pumping stations on the pipeline that links the two coasts, and Riyadh's main airport, and Washington, which has used up most of its interceptors in Hormuz, has turned down Riyadh's requests for help. Two coasts, one pipeline between them, and someone else's rockets deciding where it goes out today.

Secretly? Houthis entire financial system runs through dubai since more than 5 years. Western Journalism is dead. It is mostly recycling old news as findings. I have noticed this pattern. The Analytical abilities of westerners is sinking because all white people cannot imagine a world in which they are weak or non hegemon. They will commit global genocide before conceeding power loss of defeat. Racial supremacy illusions are re-surfing harder because at core the West is a darcaonian long term genocide project.

The Saudi state has decided who deserves help with the January electricity bill, and the answer is everyone it already pays. Civil servants, soldiers, pensioners and social security families get 500 riyals a month from January. The same month, the household tariff goes up 17% on the band most families sit in, and industry pays 15% more. Work for a private company? You get a promise that your employer must pay you at least 5,000 riyals in six months' time and 6,000 a year after that, and nothing towards the bill. The companies have started telling the stock exchange what the bill does to them. A glass maker filed on Tuesday that it adds 0.8% to its cost of sales. A building materials firm filed that it may raise production and sales costs, which is corporate language for the customer will pay it. And the brokers assure us the effect on inflation is limited. Limited for whom? Ten listed banks made 73.6 billion riyals in nine months, up 6.8% on last year, in the middle of a war, while the courts issued 272,448 enforcement orders on unpaid cheques and promissory notes in 2026, a third of them in Riyadh, and that number says more about who is short of cash than any tariff table does. The payroll gets cash. Everyone else gets the invoice. By the end of March 2027, the tariff will be in the price of every bag of cement and every pane of glass sold in the kingdom, and the 500 riyals will have bought the state exactly one quiet winter.

The Houthis have told travellers to avoid every Saudi airport except Mecca and Medina. Even the people bombing the kingdom know which two it cannot afford to lose.

Who bails out Bahrain when the rest of the Gulf is tightening too? The UAE, apparently. Bloomberg reports a UAE-led rescue after Bahrain's reserves fell, in the same year Qatar's revenues dropped 42% in six months and Kuwait has borrowed $25 billion abroad. Manama gets the cash. What it hands over in return is the part nobody announces.

Two years ago Riyadh was selling itself as the place the world comes to meet. This October it has been cancelling the world. The Future Investment Initiative, the conference they call Davos in the Desert, has gone virtual and moved to 2027 after Wall Street bosses told the sovereign fund they didn't feel safe flying in. The GCC-EU summit was postponed. The Misk Global Forum was cancelled. The UN World Data Forum was pushed to 2027. Five of the stadiums planned for the 2034 World Cup are being dropped, the $2.5 billion one at NEOM among them, and Etihad has no Saudi flights until 5 November. None of it is Riyadh changing its mind. King Khalid airport was hit, 12 people were killed in a single strike, and about 45% of departing flights were cancelled after 8 October. The model was simple. Capital follows confidence, and confidence follows a calendar of big events. When the events go, the capital leaves first, and the market is already at a five-year low. I don't think anyone who planned Vision 2030 wrote a page for this.

Europe now charges a flat duty on the cheap parcels Temu and Shein send its shoppers, and tariffs of up to 45% on Chinese electric cars, yet a lithium battery assembled in Morocco enters the EU at 0%. That gap is why Beijing has committed close to $10 billion to Moroccan industry and wants a free trade deal with a country of 38 million, when Moroccan goods already enter China almost duty free. If Brussels shuts the Moroccan door as well, who in Tangier and Kenitra is left with the bill? menaunleashed.com/p/beijing-…

"the Only Democracy in the Middle East".

Aramco is lining up a $10 billion credit line with Bank of China, ICBC, Citi, JPMorgan, HSBC and MUFG, Bloomberg reports, at a margin of barely 0.6% over the US benchmark rate. A revolving line is money you keep in the drawer for the day the cash stops arriving, and this month the Houthis have hit Aramco's headquarters, one of its oil fields, a refinery and the port at Yanbu. Chinese banks and American banks, side by side, lending to the same oil company in the middle of a war, because both need those barrels to keep moving.

Tehran keeps telling us the economy beat the American pressure campaign, and the banks would agree, as long as nobody checks their capital. Only 13 of Iran's 27 banks hold the 8% minimum cushion that Iranian law itself demands, according to the judiciary's spokesman, so 14 banks are running with too little between their bad loans and their customers' savings. Turkey has just spent a month learning what happens when savers discover a fund was hollow. The official cure is to order capital increases from shareholders who don't have the money. By March, expect at least one of those 14 to be merged, taken over or frozen.

X picks the posts you get to see. Telegram doesn't. Today alone we posted Egypt lending Saudi Arabia its air force, Saudi oil being parked in caves under Singapore, and Riyadh's main airport shut to normal flights since 10 October. Most people following here saw one of those, maybe two. The Telegram channel gets every post and every video, in order, nothing filtered, and it's quiet. No replies to wade through, no ads. Telegram t.me/menaunleashed2024 Join if you want all of it rather than whatever the feed picks.

Riyadh has worked out where its oil is safest, and it isn't Saudi Arabia. From 2027 Saudi crude will be stored in Singapore, under a deal the two governments announced this week. Aramco has been shopping abroad for storage and partner countries since the Houthis started hitting its sites, and it is pushing the East-West pipeline towards 10 million barrels a day so that less of its oil has to pass Hormuz at all. Clever, I'll give them that. A barrel sitting in a tank next to Asia's buyers can't be mined or droned, and it keeps the customers loyal when the strait shuts. But think about what it says. The world's biggest exporter now treats its own coast as the risk.

Washington tells Americans to avoid all but essential travel to Saudi Arabia. The same week, it hands Saudis an express lane into America. From today Saudi citizens can apply for Global Entry and TSA PreCheck, the US trusted-traveller programmes, which mean five years of skipping the queues at American airports once you pass the checks. Getting out of the kingdom is the hard part. About 45% of departing flights from Saudi airports were cancelled after 8 October, and the Houthis now tell travellers to avoid every Saudi airport except Mecca and Medina. So the fast lane is for the people who were going to fly to New York anyway (and the US is still pulling its own staff out of the kingdom).

Turkey has 2.74 million people out of work, and only 484,949 of them got an unemployment payment in September. Where did the fund's money go? To employers, 122 billion lira since January against 82.6 billion for the jobless. Workers pay into it, and their bosses collect.

Saudi Arabia is sending its oil to wait in caves under Singapore, because the sea around its own coast is no longer safe. On Monday, Riyadh and Singapore agreed that Saudi crude will be stored in rock caverns on an island off Singapore, from the second half of 2027. The kingdom stored oil in Japan in 2017 and in South Korea in 2023. The idea is old. What is new is the timing, with tankers hit near Hormuz every week and the Houthis claiming strikes on the capital's own airport. Singapore gets a reserve it can draw on in its own emergency, filled with oil it did not have to buy first. A city with no oil of its own now looks safer than the Saudi coast, and that is a hard thing for Riyadh to admit. Every barrel parked in Asia is a barrel that cannot be trapped inside the Gulf. I expect India or China to ask for the same arrangement before the end of 2027.