Region in race to compete for influence in strategic Red Sea
The Saudi initiative comes to create an “umbrella” under which seven countries — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Jordan — could collaborate to protect the region, which has increasingly become an area of regional importance.
Reasons behind the Saudi initiative are many, said Abdul Aziz Al Saqr, chairman of the Jeddah-based Gulf Research Centre.
“But among the most important ones are the security reasons. The Red Sea region became an area where there is prominent regional influence,” Saqr told Gulf News, explaining that Turkey has a presence in Sudan, while Iran has presence in both Yemen and Djibouti.
Both Ankara and Tehran, Saqr said, are “rushing to have an influence in the Red Sea region because of the importance of the region’s millions of barrels of oil [that] are passing through the sea every day and 25,000 ships every year, apart from the shipping of goods worth $2 trillion (Dh7.35 trillion) a year through the strategic area, as well as huge Saudi investments in the region”.
Meanwhile, former Jordanian prime minister Taher Al Masri agreed in a statement to Gulf News that the Red Sea region is of extreme strategic importance. He said the Saudi initiative is an important one, and would lead to “preemptive cooperation [among the concerned countries] in the face of any future threats,” he said. “I believe such an arrangement could make the Red Sea region similar to the Arabian Gulf region, protected from foreign intervention,” Masri said.