Iranian state media has buried news of the Saudi foreign minister's visit following a diplomatic incident that left the regime red-faced.
Prince Faisal bin Farhan arrived in Tehran on Saturday and immediately held a meeting with his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, followed by a joint press conference where the top Saudi diplomat realized he was standing in front of a picture of IRGC general Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s architect of proxy wars in the Middle East, including arming Yemen’s Houthis against Saudi Arabia.
Prince Faisal immediately requested the venue of the press conference to be changed and the Iranian side complied in a bid not to tarnish the newly revived relations between the two countries after years of tension which isolated the Iranian régime in the region.
Soleimani was killed in an air strike in January 2020 ordered by former US President Donald Trump - a victory for many in the region who saw themselves as victim to his reign of terror.
Farhan later met with President Ebrahim Raisi, though there was almost nothing about the meeting on government news websites on Sunday morning other than a few relatively independent websites which carried the news of the incident at the press conference, including critical comments.
Even in Saudi, the embarrassing incident was avoided, the Saudi Press Agency only carrying a short and formal dispatch from both meetings, essentially saying nothing beyond formal diplomatic statements.
Fararu, a moderate website, simply reported on a tweet by reformist commentator Abbas Abdi, who quipped that if former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had acquiesced to the Saudi request to move the press conference, hardliners would have raised hell, but because now they are in charge it happened quietly.
“Don’t you feel shame? You stooped yourselves to the level of worthless pawns,” Abdi addressed the hardliners, pointing out that until recently they were chanting Soleimani’s name.
In his meeting with Prince Faisal, Raisi repeated the Islamic Republic’s anti-Israel rhetoric saying, “The Zionist regime is not only the enemy of Palestinians, but also a threat for all Muslims. Normalizing of ties by some countries with this regime not only does not contribute to security, but also contradicts Muslim opinion.”
Saudi Arabia has so far refrained from joining the Abraham Accords and establishing diplomatic ties with Israel, unlike some of its close allies such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
When in March Riyadh and Tehran announced their agreement to re-establish relations, some believed that Saudi Arabia wanted to create a regional balance in its foreign policy before joining the Abraham Accords. The United States has also been trying to encourage Riyadh, but so far there are no signs of a decision as Iran has encouraged Palestinians to engage in military confrontations with Israel since March.
The semi-official ILNA news website in Tehran, one of the few to report on the topic, quoted al Farhan as telling Raisi that “some countries in the world do not want peace and progress in the region. With emerging goodwill between Iran and Saudi Arabia and in the Muslim world, unlimited achievements become possible, and it also guarantees that no foreign countries interfere in the region.”
However, in the joint press conference the Saudi top diplomat sent a clear message to Iran regarding his country's expectations from the détente.
"I would like to refer to the importance of cooperation between the two countries on regional security, especially the security of maritime navigation... and the importance of cooperation among all regional countries to ensure that it is free of weapons of mass destruction," Prince Faisal said