Kuwait recalled its ambassador to Iran on Tuesday, the latest country to side with Saudi Arabia in a widening diplomatic feud with Iran that has roiled the region, put the United States in a bind and threatened to set back the prospects for peace in Syria.
The decision, reported by the official Kuwait News Agency, came a day after Bahrain and Sudan cut diplomatic ties with Iran, and the United Arab Emirates downgraded relations with the country.
The feud was set off by a pair of events on Saturday: Saudi Arabia’s execution of 47 men, including a Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, and the outraged reaction of Iranians, who set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and the Saudi Consulate in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city.
The Kuwait News Agency quoted a Foreign Ministry official as calling the attacks a flagrant breach of international conventions and saying they violated Iran’s international commitment to the security and safety of diplomatic missions on its lands.
On Sunday, Kuwait condemned the storming of the Saudi Embassy, and on Monday, it denounced the attack as a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the 1961 accord that specifies diplomatic privileges.
Kuwait, like Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates, is a Sunni-led country and an ally of Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy. (Bahrain has a majority-Shiite population but a Sunni monarchy.) Iran, a Shiite republic that has been governed by clerics since 1979, sees itself as a protector of the world’s Shiites.
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