An Iranian official announced Sunday that the Saudi King had invited the Iranian President to visit for the first time in 25 years.
After striking their historic peace deal which was mediated by China in Beijing over a week ago, Iran and Saudi Arabia continue to make strikes toward full normalization of ties, after being archenemies for decades – and before that their peoples having been rivals for centuries when it comes to the religious Shia-Sunni divide.
An Iranian official has announced Sunday that the King of Saudi Arabia has issued a formal invitation to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to visit Riyadh in an unprecedented move. Raisi is said to have “welcomed” the invite from King Salman. Now what remains is setting a date.
“In a letter to President Raisi… the King of Saudi Arabia welcomed the deal between the two brotherly countries, [and] invited him to Riyadh,” Mohammad Jamshidi, the Iranian president’s deputy chief of staff for political affairs, said on Twitter.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry also confirmed the upcoming meeting. Additionally FM Hossein Amirabdollahian said that “An agreement was reached two months ago for Iranian and Bahraini technical delegations to visit the embassies of the two countries.”
He added, “We hope that some obstacles between Iran and Bahrain will be removed and we will take basic steps to reopen the embassies.”
Such an official head of state visit hasn’t taken place in over 20 years, with the last Iranian president to visit the kingdom being President Mohammad Khatami in February 1998. That visit in the late 90’s was the first trip by an Iranian president to Saudi Arabia since the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution.
The China-brokered Saudi-Iran deal will deal a massive blow to the near-unlimited geopolitical sway that Washington held and change the Middle East.
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