Saudi Arabia\u2019s new foreign minister voiced defiance on Friday in the face of international outrage over critic Jamal Khashoggi\u2019s murder, rejecting the kingdom was in crisis and his predecessor was demoted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe issue of Jamal Khashoggi. really saddened us, all of us,\u201d Ibrahim al-Assaf told AFP, a day after he was appointed foreign minister in a government reshuffle.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut all in all, we are not going through a crisis, we are going through a transformation,\u201d he added, referring to social and economic reforms spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.<\/p>\n
The prince, heir to the Saudi throne, has faced intense international scrutiny over the October 2 murder of journalist Khashoggi in the kingdom\u2019s Istanbul consulate which critics say has left the oil-rich Gulf nation diplomatically weakened.<\/p>\n
Assaf, a former finance minister who was detained last year in what Riyadh said was an anti-corruption sweep, replaced Adel al-Jubeir as foreign minister in the sweeping government shake-up ordered by King Salman.<\/p>\n
Jubeir, who sought to defend the tainted government internationally after Khashoggi\u2019s murder, was appointed minister of state for foreign affairs, which was widely seen as a demotion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saudi Arabia\u2019s new foreign minister voiced defiance on Friday in the face of international outrage over critic Jamal Khashoggi\u2019s murder, rejecting the kingdom was in crisis and his predecessor was demoted. \u201cThe issue of Jamal Khashoggi. really saddened us, all of us,\u201d Ibrahim al-Assaf told AFP, a day after he was appointed foreign minister in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51340,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51341,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51339\/revisions\/51341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}