WASHINGTON: The United States had warned Saudi Arabia before the recent execution of a Shia cleric that executing Shaikh Nimr al-Nimr would have damaging consequences, the White House said.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest also told a briefing in Washington that the United States had regularly raised concerns about the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia, including in conversations between President Barack Obama and Saudi King Salman.

Shaikh Nimr’s execution has led to the breaking of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran while a number of other Arab countries have also either severed or downgraded their diplomatic relations with Tehran. The execution has also deepened the sectarian divide in the Middle East.

“There have been direct concerns raised by US officials to Saudi officials about the potential damaging consequences of following through on mass executions, in particular the execution of al-Nimr, the political opposition figure but also a religious leader,” Mr Earnest said.

“This is a concern that we raised with the Saudis in advance. And unfortunately, the concerns that we expressed to the Saudis have precipitated the kinds of consequences that we were concerned about,” he added.

Asked if Saudi Arabia gave the White House a heads-up before cutting off ties with Iran, Mr Earnest said: ‘I’m not going to get into the details of all of the diplomatic conversations between the United States and Saudi officials.”

The White House spokesman warned that the Saudi-Iran dispute would make it more difficult to seek a political solution to the Syrian conflict.

“It certainly is going to be even more difficult to get everybody back around the table if you have the Saudis and the Iranians trading public barbs and public expressions of antagonism between the two countries,” he said. The White House official said that the United States wanted Iran and Saudi Arabia to de-escalate the situation and was engaged with both to achieve this target.

“We are urging all sides to show some restraint and to not further inflame tensions that are on quite vivid display in the region,” Mr Earnest said.

He said US Secretary of State John Kerry had been in touch with his Iranian counterpart and US diplomatic officials had been in contact with Saudi officials to convey this message.

At the State Department, spokesman John Kirby said that while Secretary Kerry and other US diplomats have had direct meetings with both Saudi and Iranian officials, he was not aware of any US effort to bring both Saudi and Iranian officials together to resolve their differences.

But ‘we really want to see these issues resolved bilaterally,” he added.

Published in Dawn, January 6th, 2016