Alwaght- A simmering power struggle between Saudi Arabia's two most powerful princes amid a brutal military aggression in Yemen, terrorism and the devastating hajj tragedy last month have put the dictatorial monarchy’s future in peril.

Experts say many of Riyadh’s mounting troubles can be blamed on its aging king, and a power struggle brewing within the House of Saud.

Just nine months after King Salman assumed the throne following the death of king Abdullah, the secretive kingdom confronts some of its biggest challenges in years.

At the centre are the two designated heirs to the House of Saud, which has ruled Saudi Arabia since its emergence as a modern state.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the king's 56-year-old nephew, is first in line to the throne but Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, believed to be about 30, is Salman's son and a rising power.

Mohammed bin Nayef is interior minister while Mohammed bin Salman runs the defence ministry.

Experts say the rivalry might appear insignificant but the fact that the two hold important positions, their growing rivalry is making itself felt.

"It’s resulting in some disturbing policies abroad and internally," said Frederic Wehrey of the Middle East Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told AFP.

He points to the "irresponsible" Saudi-led intervention in Yemen and says the key Western ally has taken a more "hardline tilt" away from reforms.

Tensions between the two princes emerged after the king's shock removal six months ago of Crown Prince Moqren, who had been appointed as the country's first deputy crown prince by Abdullah.

In the months since, the younger Mohammed bin Salman has moved to shore up his power, analysts say.

"A lot of people see this as a kind of a coup... that it's one faction taking power for itself," Stephane Lacroix, a specialist in Saudi Arabia at Sciences Po university in Paris told AFP.

There are suggestions that there would be one way to tarnish Nayef’s reputation. Given that the interior ministry’s police were in charge of security at the hajj last month, the stampede which left over 7,000 people dead might be used against him.

On the other side of the rivalry, diplomats say some in the royal family are quietly uneasy about Mohammed bin Salman's handling of the aggressive and brutal war on Yemen.

Late September, a senior Saudi prince has launched an unprecedented call for change in the country’s leadership, as it faces its biggest challenge in years in the form of war, plummeting oil prices and criticism of its management of Mecca, scene of last week’s hajj tragedy.

The prince, who is not named for security reasons, wrote two letters earlier this month calling for the king to be removed. “The king is not in a stable condition and in reality the son of the king [Mohammed bin Salman] is ruling the kingdom,” the prince said. “So four or possibly five of my uncles will meet soon to discuss the letters. They are making a plan with a lot of nephews and that will open the door. A lot of the second generation is very anxious.”

In the last week of October, eight of the 12 surviving sons of Saudi Arabia's founding monarch were reported to be supporting a move to oust King Salman, 79, the country's ailing ruler, and replace him with his 73-year-old brother. According to a dissident prince,

clear majority of the country's powerful Islamic clerics, known as the Ulama, would back a palace coup to oust the current King and install Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, a former Interior Minister, in his place. "The Ulama and religious people prefer Prince Ahmed - not all of them, but 75 per cent," said the prince, himself a grandson of King Ibn Saud, who founded the ruling dynasty in 1932.



Support from the clerics would be vital for any change of monarch, since in the Saudi system only they have the power to confer religious and therefore political legitimacy on the leadership.

Born in the desert of Najd, Saudi Arabia — a kingdom built under the umbrella of imperial Britain, on the back of an alliance forged over two centuries ago between the House of Saud and Mohammed Abdel Wahhab, the founding father of Wahhabism, is eroding.

In the “Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy to the Middle East,” Hempher, a self-proclaimed British spy, explained how at the turn of 18th century imperial Britain sought to exploit Wahhabism as a means to weaken the Ottoman Empire through an agent-country network, like the nascent kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The House of Saud kingdom that took form in 1932 has long been instrumental in remapping the Arabian Peninsula in line with the British-American agenda.