Page 9 - IRANRptOct19

Mixed messages
“A friend for over 22 years”
More hope in statement from al-Jubeir
Rouhani said he told his cabinet that mixed messages about sanctions were received from the US while he was in New York last week for the United Nations General Assembly. It was, he said, not acceptable for Trump to say publicly that he would step up sanctions while the European powers told Iran in private that he was in fact willing to negotiate.
“The American president on two occasions ... said explicitly that we want to intensify sanctions. I told these European friends, so which part should we accept? Should we accept your word that you say America is ready? Or the words of the president of America who in 24 hours said explicitly twice ... that I want to intensify sanctions? [The Europeans] didn’t have a clear answer,” Rouhani said, according to a Reuters translation.
So tough are the US sanctions that Tehran describes them as an “economic war” and “economic terrorism”. There’s little love lost between Iran and regional arch rival Saudi Arabia and the fact that the Saudis are perhaps only behind the Israelis in their enthusiasm for the US plan to throttle the Iranian economy with sanctions—and thereby force Tehran to accept a diminished role in Middle East affairs and stop arming proxies in regional conflict zones—means the Iranians struggle to contain their anger at Riyadh. But October 2 also saw Iran’s oil minister, Bijan Zanganeh, attempting to ease tensions with Saudi Arabia, which threatened to boil over after the September 14 cruise missile and drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities. Zanganeh called his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, “a friend” and said Tehran was committed to stability in the region.
“Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has been a friend for over 22 years,” Zanganeh said, speaking at a top Russian energy conference chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin, where he met Prince Abdulaziz as well as OPEC’s secretary general Mohammed Barkindo.
Prince Abdulaziz, a senior member of the Saudi royal family who became energy minister last month, was later seen holding hands together with Barkindo and speaking on the sidelines of the conference, news agencies reported.
Washington and Saudi Arabia have both stated that Iran was behind the attacks, which wiped out half of Saudi oil production capacity. However, they have not presented conclusive evidence, and Iran is sticking to its claim that the attacks were launched by the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen who are fighting a vicious civil war against Saudi-backed forces. At the conference, Prince Abdulaziz notably refrained from commenting on who might have been behind the attacks.
Putin on the other hand weighed into the matter, saying: “We object to blaming Iran for this attack simply because there is no evidence. Yesterday, we discussed it with Rouhani. His position is simple—Iran is not responsible for this.”
More hope that a defusing of tensions between Iran and the US and Saudi Arabia is on the horizon was, a little ironically, brought by an October 2 statement from Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, in which he said reports that the kingdom had sent messages to Rouhani via the leaders of third countries were “not accurate”.
The claim was made on October 1 by an Iranian government spokesman. “What the Iranian speaker said about the kingdom sending messages to the Iranian regime is not accurate,” Jubeir said on Twitter.
“What happened was that sister countries sought to calm the situation, and we told them that the position of the kingdom was to always seek security and
9​ IRAN Country Report​ October 2019 www.intellinews.com