Killing of cleric sparks dangerous escalation between Iran and Saudi Arabia

Whether you consider it a hot war or a cold war, a direct war or one by proxy, a war of religion or simply a battle for political domination of the region, the conflict between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran escalated dangerously this week.

Saudi Arabia executed Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a Shia cleric who had dared to suggest creating a new country for the Shia majority of Saudi Arabia's eastern province and neighbouring Bahrain, whose 80 per cent Shia population live under a Saudi-backed Sunni dictatorship.

Sheikh Nimr's killing provoked demonstrations outside the Saudi embassy in Tehran and a break in diplomatic relations. There were anti-Saudi demonstrations in Iraq, Pakistan and Indian Kashmir.

A two-week-old ceasefire in Yemen collapsed. Some 6,000 Yemenis, half of them civilians, have been killed and 2.5 million displaced since Riyadh started bombing pro-Iranian Houthi rebels there last March.

Tehran has backed the Houthis for the sole purpose of needling the Saudis, says the French expert Bernard Hourcade, director of research at the CNRS and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

On Thursday, Iran accused Saudi Arabia of "deliberately" attacking its embassy in the Yemeni capital Sanaa. Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the Iranian revolutionary guards, warned that the Saudis "will be buried under the avalanche they've created."

Political motive

Forty-three of the 47 men beheaded or shot by Saudi firing squads on January 2nd were Sunnis accused of belonging to al-Qaeda.

The inclusion of Sheikh Nimr was widely interpreted as a sop to anti-Shia public opinion, because al-Qaeda and Islamic State have a wide following in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf petroleum monarchies.

The US government saw the execution as an act of defiance by the Saudis.  Riyadh has not forgiven Washington for overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 2003 to replace him with a sectarian Shia government allied with Tehran.

The Saudis blame Barack Obama for dropping Hosni Mubarak, a stalwart Saudi ally, in Egypt, and for weaselling out of punishing Bashar al Assad for using chemical weapons. Most recently, the Saudis were horrified when the US was party to a deal on the Iranian nuclear programme last July 14th.

Obama repeated the words “Islamic Republic of Iran” twice in his speech. For the first time since the 1979 revolution, Iran received international recognition.

"One of the messages from the Saudis to the US was about the need to choose," Philip Gordon, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and until recently White House co-ordinator for the Middle East, said in a conference call with journalists.

The Americans had been thrilled to see Saudis and Iranians sitting at the same table in negotiations on the war in Syria, in Vienna last October.

The Saudis suspected the Americans would ask them to live with Assad and accept Iranian influence in Syria, Gordon says.

“And with this [execution of Nimr], they’re basically saying to the US: No, you’re not going to get us to compromise along those lines.”

Proxy wars

The Arab Spring and the demise of the Arab dictators created a power vacuum that Iran and Saudi Arabia are competing to fill. They are now engaged in proxy wars in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and

Lebanon

.

Borders between the latter three – on the southeastern flank of Nato – are increasingly irrelevant.

The region holds one-third of the world’s petroleum resources and Saudi Arabia purchases hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons from western countries.

But Syria is the most dangerous flashpoint. “Syria is 98 per cent a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran,” says Hourcade.

Over the first two years of Syria’s civil war, Islamist rebels backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies sidelined the secular Sunnis supported by the West. Islamic State emerged to take over a third of the country.

The alliance between Tehran and Damascus began during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

Tehran was not about to let Saudi Arabia’s jihadist proteges take power in Damascus.

The Islamic Republic dispatched revolutionary guard commander Gen Qassem Soleimani to Syria to save Bashar al-Assad. Iran's Lebanese Hizbullah allies, and pro-Iranian militias from Iraq have also helped to shore up Assad.

There was little hope of Tehran and Riyadh co-operating to end the war in Syria before Sheikh Nimr’s execution. There is far less now.

“Some degree of Saudi-Iranian tolerance . . . some modus for them and willingness to tolerate each other’s influence, is a prerequisite for bringing the war in Syria to an end,” says Gordon.

“As long as you have an Iran absolutely determined to back Assad militarily, financially and politically, but a Saudi Arabia absolutely determined to overthrow him and drive Iranian influence out of Syria, the war is going to go on.”

Fear of revolution

Hourcade cautions against seeing the Saudi-Iranian conflict through the cliches of age-old enmity between Persians and Arabs, or the Sunni-Shia schism that started some 13½ centuries ago.

Iran is the only country in the world that has occupied the same territory for 4,000 years, whereas, with the exception of Egypt, the Arab states were created in the 1920s.

The petroleum monarchies had no problem with Shia Iran when it was ruled by the shah; it was the example of a revolutionary republic that terrified them, and which they continue to reject.

Flush in the 1970s oil boom, Saudi Arabia began sending ulama or religious scholars to countries as far flung as the Philippines and Africa, propagating the fundamentalist, salafist beliefs that prepared the way for Islamic State.

“We’re paying the price today of 35 years of demonising Iran and whitewashing Saudi Arabia,” says Hourcade.

"The Middle East is in pieces. There will be not one million refugees but three, four or five million in Europe. "

The Saudi-led Sunnis are attempting to thwart Iran’s rehabilitation “by the war that we have financed”, Hourcade continues.

“We have created the Frankenstein that has come out of the petroleum monarchies. And now we must continue to support them, because if they collapse, Islamic State will take power in these countries.”