Obama to Host Saudi King: Yemen, Syria Top of Talks
Local Editor
US President Barack Obama is to host Saudi Arabia’s King Salman in their first and long-delayed White House summit on Friday, with clashing views on Middle Eastern crises coming to the fore.
Salman’s inaugural visit as king - originally scheduled for May and canceled by Riyadh - has been billed as a way of reinforcing US-Saudi relations.
Yet, behind public statements of partnership, the meeting looks likely to be dominated by disagreements on Yemen and Syria as well as lingering doubts about the nuclear deal with Iran.
These meetings normally end in "some kind of public statement that puts as positive a spin as possible on the meeting," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
This meeting "is unlikely to be an exception," he said. "Both nations are close strategic partners in spite of their differences, and both states need each other."
Moreover, differences over Iran have exacerbated tensions between the United States and Saudi Arabia over the crises in Yemen and Syria.
In July, Obama and Salman discussed the "urgent" need to end fighting "and the importance of ensuring that assistance can reach Yemenis on all sides of the conflict."
Then, in late August, the White House expressed concern about Saudi-led airstrikes on the post city of Hodeida, a "crucial lifeline used to provide medicine, food and fuel to Yemen’s population."
This is while a Saudi-led coalition backed by the United States has been carrying out a military aggression on Yemen by launching airstrikes against the country since March 26. The airstrikes have not been authorized by the United Nations [UN].
The US-led Saudi aggression began in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and restore power to the country’s fugitive former Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Saudi Arabia.
The ’civilian’ death toll in Yemen has risen to at least 1,916, with another 4,186 civilians wounded since the escalation of the conflict in March, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR] reported recently last month.
