Crisis of confidence – Saudi FM speaks on US-Saudi Arabia relations

Saudi Arabia is extremely worried that the deal with give Iran a free-hand in the region at the expense of Gulf countries. “I hope that your words are genuine and I do know that you are a man who is true to his words,” was Prince Turki’s message to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

The former intelligence chief said that the agreement signed last month between the worlds’s leading powers and Iran over its nuclear programme was the result of ten years of negotiations and that it was an interim accord. “Saudi Arabia has welcomed in its statement the interim agreement, but it wants to see a permanent agreement to remove all weapons of mass destruction in the region, and this does not mean only Iran, but also Israel,” he said.

Answering a question on developments in Syria, Prince Turki said that people witnessed every day the sufferings and tragedies of the Syrian people and the acts of destruction.

“Saudi Arabia has tried since the first day to communicate with [Syrian President] Bashar Al Assad and then through the Arab League and the United Nations,” he said. The former intelligence chief said that the decision by Saudi Arabia not to take the rotating Security Council seat to which it had been elected was not improvised. It is one of the wisest decisions ever made in response to the lack of credibility of the UN organ, he said. Riyadh in November formally rejected the seat, citing the inability of the Security Council to address Arab issues and its failure to act over the 32-month-old conflict in Syria.