BAGHDAD/DUBAI: Iran and Saudi Arabia have resumed key talks after negotiations were suspended last month, a senior Iraqi official told AFP on Saturday.

“Talks resumed last Thursday in Baghdad,” the official said, without giving further details.

Iran’s Nour news agency confirmed a meeting attended by “senior officials from the secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and the head of the Saudi intelligence service”.

Shia-majority Iran and the Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia support rival sides in several conflict zones across the region, including in Yemen, where the Houthi rebels are backed by Tehran, and Riyadh leads a military coalition supporting the government.

In 2016, Iranian protesters attacked Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran after the kingdom executed revered Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr.

IRGC commander targeted in border province

Riyadh responded by cutting ties with Tehran.

The talks in Iraq are the fifth round of meetings in the country in the past year between Tehran and Riyadh, aimed at restoring ties.

“It is expected that a joint meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries will be held in the near future,” Nour said, describing what it called the “positive atmosphere of the recent meeting, which raised the hopes of a resumption of bilateral relations”.

In March, Iranian media reported that Tehran had suspended participation in talks after Saudi Arabia announced it had executed in just one day a record 81 people convicted of various crimes related to “terrorism”, including men linked to Yemen’s Huthi rebels.

But in early March, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said his country and Iran were “neighbours forever”, and that it was “better for both of us to work it out and to look for ways in which we can coexist”.

The comments were welcomed by Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

“We have different views and approaches on some issues in the region, but the management of differences by the sides can serve the interests of the two nations,” Amir-Abdollahian said at the time.

Attack on Revolutionary Guards’ commander

Also on Saturday, gunmen opened fire on a car carrying a senior Revolutionary Guards commander in restive southeastern Iran, killing a bodyguard, Reuters quoted Iranian state media as reporting.

Brigadier General Hossein Almassi, a Guards commander in Sistan-Baluchistan province, was unhurt after the attack and the attackers were arrested, the official news agency IRNA reported.

Mahmoud Absalom, the bodyguard who was killed in the attack that occurred near a checkpoint in the provincial capital Zahedan, was the son of a senior commander in the region, IRNA said.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2022