Storming an embassy was once a symbolic act, initiated by ardent revolutionaries to make their voices heard and championed by the most senior officials in Iran’s Islamic republic. But the familiar act, now considered merely hooliganism, is coming back to bite the hands of the very people who endorsed it in the first place.
In the latest episode, thanks to Iranian hardliners who set ablaze the Saudi embassy in Tehran and attacked its consular offices in the eastern city of Mashhad, the focus is now being shifted from the Saudi execution of 47 people in a single day to an ensuing diplomatic crisis involving Tehran.
This was the moment when Iran could have argued that Saudis were to blame for the growing sectarianism in the region, but instead it scored an own goal.
The focus is now less on the execution of the Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a serious critic of the Saudi monarchy, than it is on Saudi Arabia and its alliessevering diplomatic ties with Tehran. Whether more countries will follow suit remains to be seen.
Attacking a foreign diplomatic mission has a precedent in Iran. After the 1979 Islamic revolution, students – angry about US support for the despotic Shah –stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days, sparking a crisis whose reverberations are still heard today. In 2011, another group attacked the British embassy in Tehran, ransacking offices and diplomatic residences, which resulted in Britain expelling all Iranian diplomats from London.
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