Iran accused Saudi Arabia on Thursday of an aerial attack on its embassy in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, escalating a conflict between the rivals that has put the region on edge, although witnesses said the building was not hit.
The attack, on Wednesday night, was said to have occurred as the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen carried out its heaviest air strikes in months over Sanaa. But guards at the Iranian Embassy and witnesses said the mission itself had not been bombed. Witnesses said the air strike hit a home across the street from the embassy, a residence that was said to belong to a son of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president who was overthrown in 2012.
Embassy guards were wounded by shrapnel, according to Noaman al-Idrisi, a Yemeni security official who was at the embassy. The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has exacerbated the civil war that began in Yemen last year. Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy intervened in the war in March, aiming to defeat Shiite-led Yemeni rebels, known as the Houthis, which the Saudis view as a shadow force for Iran.
Houthi rebels
About 2,800 civilians have been killed in the fighting, a majority of them by coalition air strikes, according to the United Nations. The Houthi rebels, allied with Saleh, drove his successor, President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, from power. Saudi Arabia supports Hadi, and the Saudi-led coalition has repeatedly struck homes belonging to Saleh, his family and his allies in populated residential areas in Sanaa.
A spokesman for the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Jaber Ansari, “strongly condemned” the attack,” the ILNA news agency reported. Ansari added: “This deliberate attempt by the Saudi government is in violation of all the conventions and regulation of international law on the protection and the security of diplomatic premises in all situations, and the responsibility for the action, as well as compensation for damage done to the building and injuries to the embassy staff, lies with the government of Saudi Arabia.”
The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen will investigate the accusation, said a spokesman for the coalition, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asseri, according to Reuters. Despite the harsh political speech, an influential Iranian analyst hinted that the country would not retaliate.
“Our patience with the Saudis has not yet worn out,” said the analyst, Hamid Reza Taraghi, who is close to hard-line Iranian leaders. “We continue to restrain ourselves.”
Still, the episode added another dimension to a dispute that has roiled the region since Saturday, when Saudi Arabia executed 47 men, including a dissident Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Enraged Iranians stormed the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and the Saudi Consulate in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city. Saudi Arabia responded by cutting ties with Iran, as did Bahrain and Sudan.
Kuwait has recalled its ambassador to Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, a significant trading partner of Iran’s, downgraded diplomatic relations.
The dispute has threatened to disrupt the negotiations to end Syria’s five-year-old civil war, as well as Iraq’s effort to repulse Islamic State. Earlier on Thursday, Brig Gen Hossein Salami, a commander of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, warned Saudi Arabia it would “face collapse in the near future” if it stayed on its current course.
Execution
Salami was speaking at a protest against al-Nimr’s execution. He compared the Saudis to Saddam Hussein, a Sunni leader of a majority-Shiite country who was toppled when the US invaded Iraq in 2010. Hussein ordered the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, in 1980, inflaming sectarian tensions that persist to this day.
“Saddam, in Iraq, took the same course, executed a leading cleric in Iraq and finally took resort in domestic suppression and aggression toward other countries, but ultimately his faith ended in humiliation,” Salami said.
–(New York Times)