The Arab League on Sunday backed Saudi Arabia in its continuing diplomatic spat with Iran, condemning Tehran for failing to protect Saudi diplomatic sites in the Persian country, a Wall Street Journal carried the report on Jan. 10th, 2016.
“The Arab League won’t accept Iranian intervention in the Arab region and sowing sectarian strife,” Nabil al-Araby, secretary-general of the organization, said in a televised news conference following an emergency session of the pan-Arab group requested by Riyadh at its headquarters in Cairo.
The statement was supported by all the member states except Lebanon, which has a strong political ties with Tehran.
Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, two of the largest economies in the Middle East, are vying for more influence across the region, mostly along sectarian lines.
The statement stopped short of recommending any collective action against Iran—such as the severing of all ties with the Islamic Republic—but said diplomats from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia would form a subcommittee to continue discussions on the matter.
Mobs in Iran last week attacked Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Tehran.
Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir said in the news conference that this position by Arab countries was not just prompted by the attacks on its missions but rather as a reaction to what he described as three decades of destabilizing activities by Iran.
“Saudi Arabia and the Arab world have reached a point where we need to say ‘enough’,” he said. “If Iran wants to play a positive role in the region then it must deal with its neighbors based on the principle of good neighborliness.”
The Arab League session on Sunday comes after the Saudi foreign minister met his counterparts in the Gulf Cooperation Council—a six-country bloc comprising Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman—on Saturday, where they urged Iran to “stop activities that cause instability in the region.”
The Arab League is a regional organization that has 22 member states formed in 1945 to promote cooperation among Middle Eastern nations. It is headquartered in Cairo. Saudi Arabia enjoys influence within the group as a main conduit between the region and the West and as a provider of aid to many member states.
Mr. al-Jubeir said Sunday that he didn’t expect the latest crisis with Iran to affect the Syria talks.
Syria is one of a number of battlefields in the Middle East where Saudi Arabia and Iran are at odds. In Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition of mostly Sunni states is battling Houthi rebels who have Iran’s political backing.