Saudi Arabia v Iran: Riyadh defiant and angry after turbulent week

On the surface, Riyadh’s diplomatic quarter looks perfectly calm, armed guards at checkpoints, Asian workers squatting between palm trees masking elegant modern offices and the crenellated towers of Saudi government buildings. Iran’s embassy is built in the national style – yellowish brick surrounded by high walls topped with surveillance cameras – with the green, white and red flag of the Islamic republic hanging limply in the winter sunshine.

But it has been a turbulent week. The Iranian mission now stands empty and silent, its diplomats ordered to leave en masse after the storming of the Saudi embassy in Tehran after Saudi Arabia’s controversial execution of a leading Shia cleric.

News of the death of Nimr al-Nimr instantly ratcheted up the already high tensions between two powerful countries ranged on opposite sides of a deeply unstable Middle East. Forty-six other Saudis – mostly Sunnis convicted for al-Qaida terrorist activities – were also beheaded or shot on 2 January. Three other Shias also died.On Thursday, this war of supposedly inviolate diplomatic quarters escalated again: Iran accused the Saudis of bombing its embassy in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, where Riyadh leads the coalition trying to restore the government of the Arab world’s poorest country – and Tehran backs the Houthi rebels fighting it.

Evidence of damage was flimsy and the Saudis quickly dismissed the charge as Iranian propaganda. Yet no one thinks that that is the end of this long-running story of strategic competition and sectarian hatred. “Iran,” declared Adel al-Jubeir, the combative Saudi foreign minister, “has been getting away with murder, literally, for 30 years.”

In Tehran’s view, echoed by western human rights watchdogs, Nimr was a political dissident who was judicially murdered by the Saudi state after a flawed and largely secret legal process. Saudi officials flatly reject this as a crude misrepresentation and portray him as a fanatic who promoted violence and fitna– sedition – in the eastern province, close to the border with Bahrain, the Gulf island state where another Sunni monarchy rules over a restive Shia majority.