Posted on 01/04/2016 8:35:05 AM PST by TroutStalker
Three Sunni-led countries joined Saudi Arabia on Monday in severing or downgrading diplomatic ties with Iran, worsening a geopolitical conflict with sectarian dimensions in one of the world’s most volatile regions.
The diplomatic protests from the three countries — Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates — came as Iran accused Saudi Arabia of using an attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran two days earlier as a pretext for diverting attention from its problems.
Iranian protesters ransacked and set fire to the embassy on Saturday, along with the Saudi Consulate in Iran’s second-largest city, Mashhad, after the Saudis executed a Shiite cleric who had criticized the Sunni kingdom’s treatment of its Shiite minority. The Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, was among a group of 47 people who were executed.
The cutting of ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia comes just weeks after a groundbreaking series of talks that brought rival powers to the table to discuss a road map for peace in Syria. In New York in December, the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers sat directly across from each other for several hours at a high-level meeting led by the United States and Russia.
Direct talks among the warring parties in Syria, overseen by a United Nations mediator, Staffan de Mistura, are scheduled to start on Jan. 25 in Geneva. There is still no clarity on who would represent either the Syrian government or the various opposition groups fighting it.
Mr. de Mistura said on Monday that he was en route to the Saudi capital, Riyadh, and that he then planned to visit Tehran in an attempt to defuse the tensions, which could set back the ambitious diplomatic effort to reach a negotiated resolution to the five-year-old civil war in Syria.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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They will understand the concept of someone else destroying their mosques which double as both a form of diplomatic mission and terrorist cell meeting place.
It’s a political battle rather than a religious one. Sunnis tend to take over governments and then it just sucks to be a Shiite.
In WW1, the Turks had to battle through Shiite regions as much as they had to fight the Brits.
Don’t let them get away with that./heh
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