Iran on Thursday said the warplanes had attacked its embassy in Yemen’s capital on Wednesday, an accusation that exacerbated tension between the major Shi’ite and Sunni powers in the region. But guards at the Iranian Embassy and witnesses said the mission itself had not been bombed.
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They said an air strike had hit a public square about 700 metres (yards) away from the embassy and that some stones and shrapnel had landed in the embassy’s yard.
The Prime Minister has been accused of squandering almost £400 million in taxpayers’ aid to Yemen through its support for the Saudi-led military offensive in the country’s civil war.
A Saudi-led coalition has been bombing Yemen since March, in an attempt to repel the Shia rebel Houthi movement, which is allied with Iran.
About 2,800 civilians have been killed in the Yemen fighting, a majority of them by coalition airstrikes, according to the United Nations.
An investigation found that “the allegations are false and that no operations were carried out around the embassy or near to it”, a coalition statement said. Gen. Ahmed Asseri, according to Reuters. Under the JCPOA, limits are put on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for, among other things, the removal of all nuclear-related economic and financial bans against the Islamic Republic.
Savola, the kingdom’s largest food products company, which earns some 13 percent of total revenues from Iran, said on Tuesday it plans to maintain its investments there despite the standoff. “We continue to restrain ourselves”.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s eastern Shiite heartland prepared to hold a funeral service Thursday night to honor the executed Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr.
“It was stressed to the ambassador that the attacks on the Saudi Arabian embassy and consulate in Tehran and Meshed were completely unacceptable and inexplicable”, the statement read.
Zarif said Iran had “no desire” to escalate tensions further, but offered no compromise as he placed the blame for the crisis, and the wider turmoil across the region, squarely on Saudi shoulders.
On Thursday, Somalia joined Saudi allies such as Bahrain and Sudan and entirely cut diplomatic ties with Iran. He cited Saudi bombers hitting Iranian diplomatic facilities in Yemen several times, including on April 24 and September 18 previous year and January 7, “killing two local service personnel, injuring a number of Yemeni guards and inflicting damage to the buildings”.
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For the sake of its overall aims in the fractious and perilous Middle East, the United States should not allow itself to be drawn into the Sunni-Shiite battle through greater US arms sales and support to the Saudis.
