US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has told Saudi Arabia’s king and crown prince that “every single person responsible” for the murder of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi needs to be held accountable.

King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, “both acknowledge that this accountability needs to take place,” Pompeo said in Riyadh following talks with the two men on Monday.

“They reiterated their commitment to achieve the objective, the expectations we set for them,” Pompeo added.

The secratary of state told reporters he had also raised a number of human rights issues with the king and crown prince, including women’s rights activists who have been detained for months and some allegedly tortured.

Khashoggi, a longtime royal insider who had become a critic of the crown prince, was killed in October in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate, prompting a global outcry including Treasury sanctions on 17 individuals and a US Senate resolution blaming Prince Mohammed.

US President Donald Trump and Pompeo, however, have so far been reluctant to directly implicate the royal or issue any punitive measures.

A CIA assessment has blamed Prince Mohammed for ordering the killing, which Saudi officials deny.

At least 21 Saudis have been detained in the case, with five facing the death penalty. Five officials were also fired, including a senior royal advisor.

The outcry over Khashoggi’s murder has strained ties with Western allies and focused attention on Saudi Arabia’s domestic crackdown on dissent and the nearly four-year-old war in Yemen.

During meetings that lasted about 80 minutes total, Pompeo said he had spoken with Saudi leaders about women’s rights activists detained last summer and accused of treason.

“Their commitment was that the lawful judicial process would take place and they would do so quickly, and that they would continue down that path,” he told reporters.

‘Need for de-escalation’

On Yemen, Pompeo and Prince Mohammed agreed on the need for continued de-escalation and adherence to agreements made last month at talks in Sweden to end the civil war between the Saudi-backed government and the Iranian-aligned Houthis.

“We talked about the fact that work done in Sweden on Yemen was good but we need both sides to honour those commitments. To date, the Iranian-backed Houthis have chosen not to do that,” he said.

Pompeo, whose earlier stops included Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Doha, will cut short the rest of his Middle East trip to attend a family funeral, a State Department spokesman said. He will return home after meetings in Oman instead of travelling on to Kuwait.

Pompeo is due to visit Oman next but will cut short his tour and miss a scheduled visit to Kuwait due to a death in his family, the US State Department said, adding he would visit the country “at an agreeable time”.

His tour comes amid conflicts raging in Syria and Yemen, while the US is trying to ensure a unified front against Iran, which it accuses of expanding its political and military footprint in the Middle East.

The United States has been “a highly unreliable partner” to Ankara as a result of inconsistencies in Washington’s Syria policy as well as its approach to Turkey and “terrorist” groups, a senior Turkish official told Al Jazeera.

“The problems and misunderstandings between the US and Turkey are results of the confusion and cacophony between the actors at different levels of the US administration and institutions,” Yasin Aktay, who advises President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his AK Party, said on Monday in an interview.

Turkish and US officials have been trading barbs over Washington’s support for Kurdish fighters in Syria and what will happen to the areas held by them in the north of the country after the planned US troop withdrawal.  

Starting the long overdue pullout from Syria while hitting the little remaining ISIS territorial caliphate hard, and from many directions. Will attack again from existing nearby base if it reforms. Will devastate Turkey economically if they hit Kurds. Create 20 mile safe zone….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2019

Erdogan said last week the US administration is “seriously mistaken” in cooperating with Syrian Kurdish fighters, while President Donald Trump threatened on Sunday to “economically devastate” Turkey if it carries out a military offensive against the militia.

Trump announced the withdrawal of some 2,000 US troops from Syria last month, shocking many politicians in Washington as well as Western allies and Syrian Kurdish fighters who fought against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, ISIS) alongside American troops.

Washington in ‘confusion’

According to Aktay, the US administration has been incoherent about the withdrawal process since Trump’s announcement as well as in its approach to different “terrorist groups”.

“Trump is stuck between US public opinion that widely questions the US presence in Syria and the wider Middle East, and politicians from his party and allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia who are against the withdrawal,” he said, adding Trump has shifted positions over the drawdown various times over the last few weeks.

Trump’s decision to withdraw troops was initially expected to be carried out swiftly, but the timetable has become vague and some conditions were set in the weeks following his announcement, including the safety of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an anti-ISIL force led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

“Washington fights one terrorist group, Daesh, while backing another one, the YPG. Such inconsistencies in US policies decrease the country’s reputation as a global power,” Aktay said, using an alternative name for ISIL.

US-backed SDF’s assaults were part of multiple operations that have removed ISIL fighters from most of the swaths of Syria and Iraq they captured in 2014.

Ankara considers the YPG and its political wing, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), to be “terrorist groups” with ties to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged war in Turkey since the 1980s.

Turkey has long condemned Washington for its military relationship with the YPG, and it seeks to take over militia-controlled areas east of the Euphrates River in Syria.

Ankara has launched two military operations in northern Syria over the last three years that targeted YPG and ISIL.

Warning from allies

After Trump’s withdrawal announcement, France, Britain and local armed groups warned ISIL had not totally been defeated yet in Syria. The decision also prompted the resignation of US defence chief James Mattis.

Subsequently, US officials made clear the withdrawal would not happen quickly and would take place in an orderly manner, as the White House faced a backlash from members of Congress.

Aktay said the US ignores the threat the YPG poses to Turkey and keeps making the mistake of identifying the group with Syrian Kurds.

“The US officials keep talking the PYD and YPG as if these groups represent the Syrian Kurds. This is scandalous. There are other ethnicities in these groups and they are engaged in terrorist activity regardless of their ethnicities,” he told Al Jazeera.

“As a NATO ally, the US supports and prefers to cooperate with a threat to another NATO ally, emerging as a highly unreliable partner,” he added.

Follow Umut Uras on Twitter: @Um_Uras

Tunisia is often touted as the Arab Spring‘s only success story – and for good reason.

Since 2011, the North African country has held free and fair elections, seen incumbents peacefully step down, and – in a first for the region – pushed forward legislation to grant women equal inheritance rights.

But eight years after street protests forced Tunisia’s long-time authoritarian ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down, the economic malaise that prompted the popular uprising has anything but subsided, particularly in the historically marginalised southern and central regions.

“What can be described as a dramatic transformation at the political level has not translated into economic and social gains for the majority,” said Larbi Sadiki, a professor of political science at Qatar University.

“The shift from popular uprising to institutional politics has not been smooth and has benefited the few, various cliques, often at the expense of the immediate interests of citizens throughout Tunisia’s various regions.”

The scale of the regional imbalance in economic resources was evident in Ben Ali’s final budget prior to his January 2011 overthrow, which allocated a mere 18 percent of state funds to the country’s inner regions. The rest, 82 percent, went to the coastal towns.

In fact, such has been the traditional disparity between the industrialised coast and the north, and the rural southern and central areas that its easing was enshrined in Tunisia’s post-revolution constitution, which envisioned devolving some powers and economic resources to the neglected regions.

But the persisting inequality, coupled with rampant unemployment (estimated at more than 15 percent), and anger at the failure of successive governments, has repeatedly led many Tunisians in recent years to take their grievances to the streets.

Most recently, the apparent self-immolation of an underemployed photojournalist in the central city of Kasserine brought once again the country’s wide economic imbalance and the authorities’ response to it into sharp focus.

“I am going to set myself on fire,” 32-year-old Abderrazak Zorgui can be heard saying in a video shared on Facebook prior to his death last month.

“The government needs to take an interest in what’s happening in Kasserine… Are we not human in Kasserine?”

Like Mohamed Bouazizi, the young fruit vendor from the impoverished city of Sidi Bouzid who set himself on fire and triggered what later came to be known as the Jasmine Revolution, Zorgui hailed from a town that seemed to be neglected by the central authorities.

And while Zorgui’s brother has maintained the journalist was only trying to rally support for his cause, and that a gang of youth actually set him on fire against his will, acts of self-immolation have nevertheless witnessed a threefold increase in the period between 2011 and 2016.

No easy fixes

Sarah Yerkes, a fellow at Carnegie’s Middle East programme, said the government has sought to implement policies aimed at reversing the imbalance.

“One of the pillars of the 2014 constitution is the concept of positive discrimination, which prioritises the traditionally disadvantaged regions,” Yerkes said.

“The problem is that the decentralisation process that will actually implement the policy of positive discrimination has been delayed multiple times.”

In May last year, after several postponements caused by a number of logistical and political hurdles, Tunisians finally headed to the polls to vote in the first free municipal elections since Ben Ali’s January 2011 overthrow. 

Yerkes said local officials still lack the funds and adequate human resources to “carry out the projects and policies that will help bring the marginalised areas on par with the coast”. 

Many question the feasibility of decentralisation, at least in the current challenging economic context, with international lenders pressuring Prime Minister Youssef Chahed to push ahead with unpopular reforms that include letting go of lossmaking state companies and cutting the public sector wage bill, which accounts for roughly half the national budget. 

In an effort to boost the comepetitiveness of its exports and in line with recommendations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) authorities have allowed the Tunisian dinar to depreciate. 

But that policy hasn’t been without consequence. 

As a result, those most vulnerable have been forced to accept exorbitant hikes in the price of basic commodities as the country turns to foreign markets to meet food shortages. 

Tunisia’s import bill for the first eight months hit a record $13.9bn – a 20 percent increase compared with the previous year.

Meanwhile, the powerful UGTT labour union threatened to stage a nationwide strike on Thursday if its demands for higher wages for public sector workers are not met, putting Chahed in a difficult position.

The prime minister’s problems, however, don’t stop there.

Rooting out corruption

An agricultural engineer by training, Chahed is at the heart of an ongoing dispute between President Beji Caid Essebsi’s Nidaa Tounes and the Muslim democratic Ennahdha Party. The melee has already led to the end of the two parties’ partnership, which formed the nucleus of the national unity government. 

The 43-year-old prime minister drew the ire of Essebsi, 92, after launching a crackdown on corruption that implicated prominent business people and officials from the Ben Ali era, an important component of the nonagenarian’s support base.

The implications of the “divorce” are not quite clear. Some analysts suggest it will lead to further fragmentation and polarisation of Tunisia’s political scene. 

Others, more optimistic about the democratisation process, say the split is long overdue and allows parties to focus less on the politics of consensus and more on coming up with ideas and initiatives of their own. 

Still, observers say tackling corruption remains a top priority. 

On January 4, Transparency International denounced a request by the Tunisian foreign ministry to unfreeze the assets of Mohammed Marouen Mabrouk, a businessman and son-in-law of Ben Ali.

Youssef Belgacem, senior project manager at I Watch, Transparency International’s chapter in Tunisia, said the request was made “under instruction from Prime Minister Chahed”. 

“With Mr Chahed seeking to launch a new political party one year before the elections in Tunisia, this request to unfreeze Mabrouk’s assets – out of nearly 50 sanctioned individuals – strongly suggests some kind of deal has been struck,” said Belgacem.

The government has already passed legislation aimed at rehabilitating members of the pre-revolution establishment. 

One of President Essebsi’s first and few projects in 2015 was an administrative reconciliation law that grants amnesty to former Ben Ali officials.

Although watered down from its initial version, the legislation ignited controversy.

“This law is in essence part of the counter-revolutionary assault that Tunisians, as well as those in several other Arab countries, are struggling against,” said Noha Aboueldahab, a visiting fellow at Brookings Doha Center.

Sihem Ben Sedrine, the president of the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD by its French acronym), a body set up in 2014 and charged with investigating crimes committed under president Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987) and Ben Ali (1987-1989) deplored a lack of cooperation on the part of Tunisia’s new kingmakers.

In March, the IVD, whose work includes recommending policies to strengthen state institutions and prevent corruption, saw its request to extend its mandate by another six months rejected by parliament. 

Ben Sedrine contended that seeking approval from Tunisia’s popular assembly was not mandatory but merely a ceremonial procedure, prompting a debate over whether the legislature had any authority over the commission. 

The issue could’ve been resolved swiftly with the intervention of the constitutional court, the establishment of which was supposed to take place no later than a year after the October 2014 parliamentary elections.  

But more than four years since the date of its creation, none of the 12 judges has been appointed. 

“Most were quick to label Tunisia’s transition as ‘smooth’, ‘a beacon of hope’, or even a ‘model’ for others in the region to follow,” Aboueldahab said. 

“Such overly optimistic accounts have overlooked the gravity of continued socioeconomic injustice in Tunisia.”