Iran faces more isolation after embassy attack

TEHRAN, I ran — When a Saudi state executioner beheaded the prominent Shiite dissident Sheikh Nimr al- Nimr on Saturday, the Shiite theocracy in Iran took it as a deliberate provocation by its regional rival and dusted off its favored playbook, unleashing hard- liner anger on the streets.

Within hours of the execution, nationalist Iranian websites were calling for demonstrations in front of the Saudi mission in Tehran and its consulate in the eastern Iranian city of Mashad. The police, outnumbered, looked the other way as angry protesters set the embassy ablaze with firebombs, climbed the fences and vandalized parts of the building.

Now, Iranian leaders are suddenly forced to reckon with whether they played into the Saudis’ hands, finding themselves more isolated and in crisis at a time they had been hoping to emerge from international sanctions as an accepted global player.

“They knew we couldn’t look the other way,” said Fazel Meybodi, a cleric from the Iranian holy city of Qum, one of the world’s main centers of Shiite theology. “That they would actually go ahead with killing him? That caught all of us by surprise.”

After the embassy attack, Saudi Arabia officially severed diplomatic ties with Iran, and Bahrain and Sudan followed suit on Monday. The United Arab Emirates, one of Iran’s most important regional trading partners, decided to downgrade its relations.

The moves formalized the Sunni- Shia polarization that has fueled the chaotic proxy wars and maneuvering across the Middle East. And they seemed to put pressure on the United States and other Western nations to choose between their Saudi allies or the Iranians right at a time when those countries had been more closely engaging with Iran in hopes of easing the war in Syria.

Just in December, the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers sat directly across from each other during a high-level meeting in New York to talk about Syria. Direct talks among the warring parties in Syria, overseen by a U.N. mediator, Staffan de Mistura, are scheduled to start on Jan. 25 in Geneva. There was little clarity before about who would represent either the Syrian government or the various opposition groups fighting it, and now, after the diplomatic schism, there seemed to be even more confusion.