March 25, 2022
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has announced that his government is prepared to hold a fifth round of talks with Iran on normalizing relations despite “a lack of progress” in the previous rounds. But on March 13, after Saudi Arabia executed 81 people on one day about half of them Shiites Iran said it was suspending the talks “temporarily.” The Saudis broke relations in 2016 after Iranian police stood aside as mobs attacked, ransacked and burned the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and the consulate in Mashhad. That attack was spurred by the Saudis’ execution of Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shiite cleric.