As the United States-Israel war over Iran reaches its fourth week after sparking chaos in the Middle East, foreign ministers from Arab and Muslim countries have called for urgent discussions in Saudi Arabia.
The talks took place on Wednesday as Iran was targeting several energy facilities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar Retaliation against Israel’s attack on the South Pars gasfield, Iran’s largest source of energy. The attack came during a week in which Israel killed top Iranian security official Ali Larijani, Basij paramilitary commander Gholamreza Soleimani and intelligence chief Ismail Khatib.
The meeting of top diplomats in Riyadh was aimed at mobilizing a common response to Iran’s escalating retaliation against US assets and infrastructure in the region, which is not only threatening regional stability but also causing disruption to the global economy.
So what happened in Riyadh? How can these countries deal with Iran? And is Iran likely to listen?
Who was in the Riyadh meeting?
A joint statement issued on Thursday confirmed that the foreign ministers of Qatar, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates attended the meeting on Wednesday.
All of these countries have been affected by the war, whether in terms of direct attacks from Iran, secondary threats from falling debris, dwindling energy supplies or the threat of large-scale displacement if the war continues.
Lebanon has suffered heavy losses since Hezbollah launched attacks on Israel on March 2 in retaliation for the assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war two days earlier. Israel has launched attacks in Lebanon that have killed at least 968 people in less than three weeks and has also launched a ground offensive in southern Lebanon.
What was the decision taken in Riyadh?
The main conclusion of the meeting was that the 12 countries, which in the past had been largely sympathetic to Iran, now insisted on “the right of states to defend themselves”, citing Article 51 of the UN Charter on defensive action.
They collectively condemned “deliberate Iranian attacks” with ballistic missiles and drones that have struck multiple targets, including residential areas, water desalination plants, oil facilities, airports and diplomatic posts.
Foreign ministers called on Iran:
- Block its attacks.
- Stop “provocative actions or threats” targeted at your neighbors.
- End support, financing and arming pro-Iran proxy groups based in Arab states.
- Refrain from actions or threats that could block the Strait of Hormuz or jeopardize maritime security in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
He also condemned Israeli attacks on Lebanon and what he described as Israel’s expansionist policies in the region.
The meeting received a unified response to Iran’s increasingly unpredictable behavior. But the joint statement was vague about how countries would comply.
what happens next?
Speaking Thursday morning after the meeting ended, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud did not say when his country might take action to rein in Iran. He said, “Do they (the Iranians) have a day, two, a week? I’m not going to telegraph it.”
However, he left no room for doubt that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states would take action if necessary, saying they had “very significant capabilities and capacities that they could deploy if they choose to do so”.
Emphasizing the right to defend one’s country, he said he hoped Iran had got the message and that its leaders would “quickly recalculate and stop attacking their neighbors”.
But he added: “I doubt he has that knowledge.”
The Saudi Foreign Minister said that although the war will eventually end, it will take time to restore relations with Iran because trust has been “broken”.
Saudi Arabia’s relations with Iran have historically been tumultuous, but the two countries began a rapprochement brokered by Beijing three years ago.
Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem said the Saudi response could be read as “the end of the beginning of Iranian-Saudi normalization that began a few years ago”.
What is Iran’s reaction likely to be?
With most of its leadership gone, the question is unclear who holds power in Iran.
New supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since being appointed as successor to his assassinated father, had never held government office before taking over the top post.
Late on Wednesday night, his official Telegram channel read: “Every drop of blood shed has a price, and the criminal murderers of these martyrs will soon have to pay the price.”
According to Iranian government figures, so far 1,444 people have been killed in American-Israeli attacks on Iran, while 18,551 people have been injured.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) issued a statement saying: “Operation True Promise 4 against US-linked oil facilities in the region was carried out with force,” dedicating it to Khatib and the “martyrs of the intelligence community.”
The statement cited by Iran’s IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency on Thursday said Iranian forces had responded to a “deceiving and lying enemy” that had targeted energy facilities in the country, referring to the Israeli attack on South Pars.
It said it “does not want to harm the economies of friendly neighboring countries” but had “entered a new phase of the war” to protect Iran’s infrastructure.
Commenting on the escalation, Al Jazeera’s Hashem said: “This is no longer the Iran we know. There is a new leadership, a new mentality and the main issue is that Iran is now in the middle of a war.”
