Hawkish minister leading campaign against Iran
BEiRUT: Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince relies on a small core group of advisers, none more provocative than Thamer al-Sabhan, the fiercely antiIran government minister whose fingerprints were on the hurried and ultimately unsuccessful resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister earlier this month.
As Saudi minister for Gulf affairs, Sabhan has a hand in helping shape the kingdom’s high-stakes gambles to counter rival Iran.
For days before Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s surprise resigna
tion, which the kingdom is
widely believed to have orchestrated, Sabhan issued threats against Lebanon’s government as well as Iran and its ally Hezbollah via Twitter, unnerving many Lebanese who feared being dragged yet again into the forefront of the Saudi-Iran rivalry for regional supremacy.
Three months earlier, Sabhan had been sent to Beirut to meet with Hariri and deliver a blunt warning against concessions that could favour Iran’s allies in Lebanon.
Hariri’s resignation, announced from Riyadh on Nov 4 on a Saudi-owned TV station, seemed to confirm fears that the kingdom’s rivalry with Iran could destabilise yet another country in the region, this time Lebanon’s delicate power-sharing system.
Mediation by France, a close ally of both Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, helped reverse the resignation, which Hariri suspended after his return to Beirut. Though Saudi Arabia may have succeeded in pressuring Hezbollah and bringing attention to the Syiah militant group’s expanding regional footprint, the kingdom’s political moves in Lebanon were largely seen as a debacle that backfired. The 50-year-old Sabhan was at the centre of it all. The 32-year-old Saudi crown prince’s hawkish policies toward Iran are largely embodied and amplified in Sabhan. Nowhere is that spelled out more clearly than on Twitter, where Sabhan has referred to the Iranianbacked Hezbollah – which means “Party of God” in Arabic – as the “Party of Satan”. A few days before Hariri’s resignation, Sabhan warned in an interview with a Lebanese TV station that there would be “astonishing” developments to topple the Syiah militant group in Lebanon.