Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Sunday that Iran’s regime must change its “behavior” towards his country if it wants normal ties with the oil-rich Sunni kingdom.
Jubeir, speaking at a joint news conference with his South African counterpart, said Riyadh “wants to have peaceful relations” with Tehran and that it had tried to forge closer ties with Iran’s regime for more than three decades but “in exchange we received nothing,” the Agence France-Presse reported.
Instead of “relations and friendship” with Iran, Saudi Arabia has been “confronted with interferences in our domestic affairs… attacks against our embassy,” he said.
Saudi Arabia severed all links with the mullahs’ regime in Iran in January after crowds attacked the kingdom’s embassy in Tehran and a consulate in the second city Mashhad.
Saudi Arabia and fellow Gulf nations also accuse Iran’s regime of supporting Shiite rebels in Yemen, as well as attempting to destabilize their own states.
Jubeir said the Iranian regime “knows what to do to have normal relations with Saudi Araba and the rest of the Islamic world and that is to change its behavior… and the door will be open for normal relations.”