The State Department, responding to Riyadh’s Jan. 3 announcement that
it was severing diplomatic relations with Iran and giving Iranian
diplomats 48 hours to leave the country, urged maintaining diplomatic
engagement and avoiding actions that could further inflame regional
sectarian tensions.
“What we want to see is tensions caused by these executions reduced,
diplomatic relations restored, so that the leadership in the region can
focus on other pressing issues,” State Department spokesman John Kirby
told journalists at the State Department on Jan. 4. “We have
consistently urged everyone to deescalate tensions”
Secretary of State John Kerry worked the phones as he returned to
Washington from a brief New Year’s vacation in Idaho, during which much
of the painstaking diplomatic work he and allies had done the past five
months to try to get both Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the
Syria peace table looked at risk of being destroyed. Kerry spoke with
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Jan. 3 and with Saudi
Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir on Jan. 4, diplomatic sources said. He
also spoke with UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, who recently
announced
renewed talks between the Syrian regime and opposition would be held in Geneva on Jan. 25.
De Mistura, who was traveling to Riyadh on Jan. 4 to meet with Syrian
opposition representatives before heading to Iran later this week,
expressed alarm that the newly emerged diplomatic crisis could set back
his efforts.
The “sudden and acute crisis” in Saudi-Iranian relations “is a
very worrisome development,”
he told The New York Times in an email Jan. 4. “We must at all costs
avoid that it produces a chain of violent consequences in the region.”
While condemning the attacks on diplomatic facilities, former senior
US officials who worked on the Middle East expressed puzzlement and
dismay at the Saudi decision to carry out the execution of Saudi Shiite
cleric
Nimr al-Nimr, which was certain to stoke sectarian reactions across the region at such a sensitive moment.
It is “very unclear why the Saudis decided to do this now,” former
Obama administration Middle East official Ilan Goldenberg told
Al-Monitor by email Jan. 4. “A complete puzzle.”...
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