Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif will embark on a peace mission to Saudi Arabia and Iran tomorrow (Monday) morning with an aim to ease tensions between the two countries.
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Official sources confirmed that the top civilian and military leadership will pay a day-long visit to Saudi Arabia, where they will hold meetings with King Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other senior royals.
Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran have always been uneasy.
“Pakistan enjoyed good brotherly relations with both the countries (Saudi Arabia and Iran) and hoped both sides would peacefully resolve their issues”, the Foreign Office Spokesman Qazi Khalilullah said in his media briefing in Islamabad on Thursday.
He said the prime minister has called for the peaceful settlement of differences in the larger interests of Muslim unity. In reaction to Nimr’s execution, Iran said: “The Saudi government supports terrorist movements and extremists, but confronts domestic critics with oppression and execution”.
While China is the biggest oil importer from Gulf countries to help meet its growing energy needs, Pakistan has also expanded its strategic military outreach into the Gulf waters, which carries around 90 percent of the world oil trade. It is also feared there could be frequent bomb attacks and assassinations in Saudi Arabia and Iran in the near future.
“Saudi Arabia has regarded Kerry’s cautious outreach to Tehran – and burgeoning relationship with its Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – with suspicion, and the London visit was created to rebuild trust”, notes AFP.
Sources said the main objective of the visit would be to convince both countries to reopen each other’s embassies, which have been shut down since the execution of the Shia cleric.
The Iranian government quickly distanced itself from the attack, saying the protesters had entered the Saudi embassy despite widespread efforts by the police to stop them.
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Pakistan is also not willing to contribute troops for the 34-nation Saudi alliance to fight terrorism. This suggests that Saudi Arabia has been transformed from a status quo country that had traditionally sought to preserve the political order, to one that actively wants to change it. This new Saudi thinking is largely a function of an acute sense that the country is facing serious threats to its security from two fronts: Iran on one and ISIS on the other.
