Saudi Arabia announced late on Sunday that it was cutting diplomatic relations with Iran after the storming of the embassy in Tehran.
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Saudi Arabia has been rallying Sunni allies to its side in a growing diplomatic row with Iran, deepening a sectarian split across the Middle East following its execution of a prominent Shi’ite cleric.
Kuwait recalls its ambassador to Tehran, the fifth Arab country to cut or downgrade relations with Iran.
Its ruler, Sultan Qaboos, orchestrated secret US-Iran contacts that began in Muscat in 2012, leading to the first formal talks between the US and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, paving the way for July’s nuclear deal.
– Hundreds of demonstrators in Teheran set fire to the Saudi Embassy before the police make 40 arrests.
Saudi Arabia’s severing of diplomatic ties with Iran will not affect its efforts to secure peace in Syria and Yemen, and ties with Iran would be restored when it stops interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, said the kingdom’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Saudi Arabia is not one of the countries or regions identified in the five-year strategy. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has said Saudi would face “divine vengeance” for the “unjustly spilled blood” of Nimr.
“We don’t want to see any progress that has been made or may be made on those issues affected by this, which is why (we) have been in communication with leaders there, to try to get tensions calmed down, to try to get dialogue started or restarted so that we can focus on these other very pressing issues in the region”, State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters. Mohammed al-Nimr, the sheikh’s brother, said people planned to hold a funeral Thursday for the cleric, though Saudi authorities already buried his corpses in an undisclosed cemetery.
The Interior Ministry said on Saturday that numerous men were responsible for terrorist attacks more than a decade ago, including the bombings of residential compounds and an attack on the USA consulate in Jeddah.
While Shiite communities across the region protested al-Nimr’s death, Saudi state television broadcast round-the-clock coverage of the executions and their aftermath on Sunday and Monday.
The civil war saw the reign of death squads and horrific communal violence that killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than four million, reshaping the confessional map of a country in which up to 65 percent of the Muslim population is Shiite.
PRE-REVOLUTION: Iran had rocky relations with Saudi Arabia under the shah, but they improved toward the end of his reign in 1979.
The U.N. chief urged Saudi Arabia to renew a ceasefire it ended this weekend with the Iran-allied Shi’ite Houthi group in Yemen that it has been bombing for nine months.
Al-Nimr and 46 others were executed in Saudi Arabia on Saturday – the largest mass execution carried out by the kingdom in 35 years. And those sectarian tensions will play out in Iraq, too, as Iran consolidates its influence over the Baghdad-based Shia government and expands its reach through pro-Iranian Iraqi Shia militias.
Iran’s president says Saudi Arabia “cannot cover its crime” in executing a Shiite cleric by severing ties with the Islamic Republic.
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Not only Saudi Arabia but Oman, Qatar, Dubai, Bahrain and Kuwait are all touted as issuers for 2016 by bankers.
