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Iran Accuses Saudi Arabia of Attacking Embassy in Yemen Iran Accuses Saudi Arabia of Attacking Embassy in Yemen
(about 5 hours later)
TEHRAN — Iran accused Saudi Arabia on Thursday of an aerial attack on its embassy in Sana, the capital of Yemen, escalating a conflict between the rivals that has put the region on edge, although witnesses said the building was not hit. TEHRAN — The already volatile showdown between Iran and Saudi Arabia escalated in Yemen on Thursday after the Iranians said their embassy had been hit by a Saudi airstrike, though witnesses said the building did not seem to have been struck.
The attack, on Wednesday night, was said to have occurred as the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen carried out its heaviest airstrikes in months over Sana. The Saudi-led campaign in Yemen carried out its heaviest airstrikes in months over Sana, the capital, on Wednesday, when the Iranians said the attack on the embassy occurred. The coalition also dropped cluster bombs on the capital, according to witnesses and Human Rights Watch.
But guards at the Iranian Embassy and witnesses said the mission itself had not been bombed. Witnesses said the airstrike hit a home across the street from the embassy, a residence that was said to belong to a son of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president who was overthrown in 2012. A spokesman for the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, condemned what he called “the Saudi aircraft missile attack on Iran’s Embassy in Sana,” and claimed that a number of the building’s guards had been wounded.
Embassy guards were wounded by shrapnel, according to Noaman al-Idrisi, a Yemeni security official who was at the embassy on Thursday. But after guards at the embassy and witnesses told reporters that the building had not been hit, the spokesman later told the IRNA news agency that a missile had landed near the embassy and “one of the security guards sustained serious injuries.”
The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has exacerbated the civil war that began in Yemen last year. Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy intervened in the war in March, aiming to defeat Shiite-led Yemeni rebels, known as the Houthis, which the Saudis view as a shadow force for Iran. The guards said the airstrike had hit a building across the street, a residence said to belong to a son of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president, who ceded office in 2012 after a popular uprising. Shrapnel wounded some of the guards, according to Noaman al-Idrisi, a Yemeni security official who was at the embassy on Thursday.
About 2,800 civilians have been killed in the fighting, a majority of them by coalition airstrikes, according to the United Nations. The deepening enmity between Iran and Saudi Arabia has threatened to worsen conflicts across the region, including the civil war that began in Yemen last year. Saudi Arabia took an active role there last March, aiming to defeat the Shiite-led rebels, known as the Houthis, who are viewed by the Saudis as proxies for Iran.
The Houthi rebels, who are allied with Mr. Saleh, drove his successor, President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, from power. Saudi Arabia supports Mr. Hadi, and the Saudi-led coalition has repeatedly struck homes belonging to Mr. Saleh, his family and his allies in populated residential areas in Sana. About 2,800 civilians have been killed in the fighting since then, most of them in airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition, according to the United Nations.
A spokesman for the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Jaber Ansari, “strongly condemned the Saudi aircraft missile attack on Iran’s embassy in Sana, which caused damage to the embassy building and wounded a number of the building’s guards,” the ILNA news agency reported. The Houthis, who are allied with Mr. Saleh, drove out his successor, President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Saudi Arabia supports Mr. Hadi, and the airstrikes have repeatedly struck houses belonging to Mr. Saleh, his family and his allies in heavily populated parts of Sana.
Mr. Ansari added: “This deliberate attempt by the Saudi government is in violation of all the conventions and regulation of international law on the protection and the security of diplomatic premises in all situations, and the responsibility for the action, as well as compensation for damage done to the building and injuries to the embassy staff, lies with the government of Saudi Arabia.” The embassy episode added another dimension to a dispute that has shaken the Middle East since Saturday, when Saudi Arabia executed 47 men, including a dissident Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen will investigate the accusation, said a spokesman for the coalition, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Asseri, according to Reuters. .
Despite the harsh political speech, an influential Iranian analyst hinted that the country would not retaliate. “Our patience with the Saudis has not yet worn out,” said the analyst, Hamid Reza Taraghi, who is close to hard-line Iranian leaders. “We continue to restrain ourselves.” In recent weeks, the Saudi-led military coalition has appeared to step up its efforts to achieve an outright victory. At the same time, the Houthis, who are from Yemen’s north, have escalated their attacks on the Saudi border, firing missiles and mounting cross-border raids.
Still, the episode added another dimension to a dispute that has roiled the region since Saturday, when Saudi Arabia executed 47 men, including a dissident Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. A spokesman for Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said earlier this week that civilian casualties had increased in December because of the intensified fighting, and expressed alarm at reports that the coalition was dropping cluster munitions in northern Yemen.
Enraged Iranians stormed the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and the Saudi Consulate in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city. Saudi Arabia responded by cutting ties with Iran, as did Bahrain and Sudan. Kuwait and Qatar recalled their ambassadors to Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, a significant trading partner of Iran’s, downgraded diplomatic relations. The Yemeni government reacted on Thursday by barring the high commissioner’s representative, George Abu-Zulof, from the country, accusing the agency of ignoring “systematic violations” by the Houthis and their allies, including a continuing, bloody siege of the city of Taiz.
The dispute has threatened to disrupt the fragile negotiations to bring an end to Syria’s five-year-old civil war, as well as Iraq’s effort to repulse the Islamic State. In a statement on Thursday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, condemned the Yemeni government’s decision and said that the Yemeni authorities had failed to uphold their obligations to let the United Nations do its work free of interference. “‘United Nations staff must never be threatened or sanctioned for doing their work,” Mr. Ban said.
Earlier on Thursday, Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, a commander of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran, warned Saudi Arabia that it would “face collapse in the near future” if it stayed on its current course. Despite condemnations over its deployment of cluster munitions, the coalition for the first time dropped the ordnance on neighborhoods in Sana this week, Human Rights Watch charged on Thursday. Markings on the bomb remnants indicated they had been manufactured in the United States in 1978, the group said in a statement.
General Salami was speaking at a protest against Sheikh Nimr’s execution. He compared the Saudis to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein — a Sunni leader of a majority-Shiite country who was toppled when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Mr. Hussein ordered the execution of a prominent Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, in 1980, inflaming sectarian tensions that persist to this day. The cluster munitions, which disperse bomblets over a wide area, killed Essa al-Farasi, 16, on Wednesday, his family said. The boy had been walking to a mosque near his home in the Mathbah neighborhood when he was killed, said his brother Ayman al-Farasi. “We are used to the sound of explosions, but it was like a large bottle had exploded and small things fell to the ground,” Mr. al-Farasi said. “We had never seen anything like it before.”
“Saddam, in Iraq, took the same course, executed a leading cleric in Iraq and finally took resort in domestic suppression and aggression toward other countries, but ultimately his faith ended in humiliation,” General Salami said.
“This regime, Saudi Arabia, has taken political refuge with the Americans,” he said, adding that the Saudi policies would create a “domino effect under which they will fall themselves.”