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Syria Denounces Saudi Criticism of Iran on Peace Talks Rancor Between Saudi Arabia and Iran Threatens Talks on Syria
(about 5 hours later)
Syria denounced Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Thursday in an acidic response to his comments about Iran’s participation in talks on the Syrian war, an ominous sign for the diplomacy aimed at ending the four-and-a-half-year conflict. VIENNA — When Secretary of State John Kerry sits down here Friday to push for a political settlement of the Syrian war, the immediate tension will surround his dealings with the Russians and the Iranians.
The talks in Vienna have attracted widespread attention because Iran, the regional ally of Syria’s besieged president, Bashar al-Assad, accepted an invitation to attend after the United States dropped its longstanding objection. But the bigger challenge may well be reconciling the Saudis and the Iranians, longtime rivals who have turned Syria into the main battlefield in a broadening proxy war for dominance in the Middle East.
The Saudis also acquiesced to Iran’s participation but expressed deep suspicion of the Iranians, their bitter rivals. The Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, told reporters on Wednesday, “If they’re serious, we will know, and if they’re not serious, we will also know and stop wasting time with them.” They have more invested in the outcome than any of the other participants in the talks to end the conflict, now in its fifth year.
The question of what role, if any, Mr. Assad would play after a settlement to end the war is central to the talks, which began on Thursday and will have delegations from about 20 countries, including Russia, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have insisted that Mr. Assad must leave power. Until two weeks ago, the idea that Saudi Arabia and Iran would sit at the same table was unthinkable. The Saudis outright refused, and the two countries have been accelerating an arms race to assure they prevail not only in Syria, but also in Yemen, Iraq and, less noticeably, in the street uprisings in Bahrain.
Mr. Assad’s government has not been invited to the talks, but it reacted furiously on Thursday to Mr. Jubeir’s comments. As the Iranians have entered a partnership of convenience with Russia to bolster President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the Saudis have responded by giving more sophisticated weapons to their Sunni brethren among the rebels seeking to overthrow him, including antitank missiles that can pierce Russian-provided armor.
The Syrian information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, was quoted by the official Syrian Arab News Agency as saying that Mr. Jubeir, “who has no clue how diplomacy and politics work, should keep his mouth closed and keep his country out of a matter that is none of his business.” When the Russians began bombing those rebels last month, they seemed to be aiming at Saudi- and American-backed forces.
American officials and diplomats trying to establish a framework for what they call a “managed transition” that would ease Mr. Assad out of power say the effort has been impeded by the antipathy between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which has never been worse.
On Thursday, just as Mr. Kerry’s plane was landing in Vienna and he was preparing for the negotiations in the Hotel Imperial, the two countries were at each other’s throats again. Iranian officials accused the Saudis of having used the chaos around a stampede last month in Mecca, where hundreds of Iranians died, to kidnap a prominent Iranian official, Ghazanfar Roknabadi, a former ambassador to Lebanon and a major figure in Lebanese politics and the Syrian war.
The day before, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, expressed doubt that Iran’s sudden inclusion in the talks here would help.
“If they’re not serious, we will also know and stop wasting time with them,” Mr. Jubeir said. “There has to be certainty that Bashar al-Assad will leave.”
Mr. Assad’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, responded Thursday by describing Mr. Jubeir as clueless and advising him to “keep his mouth closed.”
It took considerable work just to get the Saudis and the Iranians into the same room. Mr. Kerry went to Saudi Arabia last week and argued that the conflict would only further Syria’s destruction; add to the death toll, roughly a quarter-million already; and worsen the refugee crisis in Europe. President Obama followed up Tuesday with a call to King Salman of Saudi Arabia that White House officials described in vague terms. The two leaders, they said, “reaffirmed the need to cooperate closely to counter the shared threat from ISIL,” an acronym for the Islamic State militant group, “and to establish the conditions for a political transition in Syria.”
There was no mention of Iran in the statement.
Jan Eliasson, a veteran Swedish diplomat who helped broker a peace deal to end the Iran-Iraq war, said he had been struck anew by the depth of the divide between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the region’s two most formidable powers.
“One of the most important obstacles to progress in these conflicts,” said Mr. Eliasson, who is now the deputy secretary general of the United Nations, “was the deep mistrust between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”
This time, the Saudis seem convinced that Mr. Kerry’s effort here will collapse, in part because they believe Iran will support Mr. Assad at all costs.
“The Saudi approach is that it is very clear that Iran is part of the problem,” said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center who is close to the Saudi government. “By bringing Iran to the table, you are rewarding the interventionist aggressor, and the Saudis think it is very wrong.”
Although the Saudis hold little hope of progress at the meeting, Mr. Alani said, “Russian and American pressure convinced the Saudis that they should not be blamed as the party that blocked the political process.”
So they are attending, even as they prepare to escalate their military support for the anti-Assad forces.
For Mr. Kerry, the appearance of the Iranians and the Saudis together will be the most fraught element of the talks, but hardly the only complexity.
The group that will be around the table has grown every day; by the latest count, it is approaching 20 nations. In addition to the Iranians and Saudis, delegates from Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates will participate. American officials have expressed fear that attendance has swelled so much that it could impede progress.
Broadly speaking, there are two major groups: an American-led contingent that includes the Sunni nations of the Persian Gulf, which have been collectively unable to muster much of a response since the Syrian civil war began in 2011; and Russia, Iran and various Shiite proxies.
But that breakdown ignores one big reality: With the Iran nuclear agreement behind them, both Mr. Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, have a strong interest in building a relationship that addresses broader issues, notably the Syrian war, the refugee crisis and the future of the Middle East. They met Thursday night and ostensibly discussed the nuclear accord, but it seemed inevitable that Syria would come up.
“If there is to be a deal,” Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, wrote on Thursday, the United States and Russia “must create a center of gravity to pull the other players together.”
American officials say they think they have a shot at that, because Russia’s alternative is to be bogged down in the Syrian war. But the Saudis seem to think a far more active military role to counter Iran is imperative.
Under their new king, the Saudis have cooperated much more actively with Turkey to confront the Iranians in Syria. They say this is reflected in the advances into formerly government-held territory this year by the Army of Conquest, a coalition of rebel groups that receives some American support as well. The Russians have directly targeted the coalition, known in Arabic as Jaish al-Fatah, which the Saudis and Turks consider their client.
It is the Iranians, however, who remain the primary target in the Saudis’ view. Sectarian rhetoric about the menace of Iranian Shiism has risen in Saudi pulpits. In the Saudi news media, the country’s intervention in Yemen is described as a war of necessity, not of choice, because of the threat of Iranian expansionism. The news media portrays the kingdom’s foes in Yemen’s Houthi rebel faction as, effectively, an arm of Iranian influence reaching into the Arabian Peninsula and toward the Saudi border.
“It’s a frightening period for the Saudis,” said Joost Hiltermann, program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. “They need to be reassured — psychologically, politically — that, in fact, Saudi Arabia remains a staunch American ally and is protected from that encroachment by Iran.”
This explains, Mr. Hiltermann and others argue, why Saudi Arabia’s Western allies have said little about the excesses of its military operations in Yemen. The United States expressed no enthusiasm for an international inquiry into human rights abuses by the warring parties in Yemen, and last month, Western countries backed off a resolution by the United Nations Human Rights Council that would have established a mission to investigate possible war crimes.
Saudi Arabia’s Western backers said nothing this week about the allegation that a Saudi-led airstrike had leveled a charity-run hospital in Saada, Yemen. The United States and major European powers continue to offer arms to the kingdom, and the Pentagon continues to provide intelligence and logistical support.