Riyadh
\nUS Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is to launch a fresh bid Sunday to ease a crisis between Riyadh and Doha, both allies of Washington, but without high hopes of a breakthrough.<\/p>\n
Apart from the months-long crisis, Iran\u2019s rising influence in the Middle East is also expected to figure high on the agenda of America\u2019s top diplomat during talks in the two capitals.<\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt cut ties with Qatar and imposed an embargo in June, accusing it of supporting terrorism and cosying up to Iran. Doha denies the charges and has rejected their terms for a settlement.<\/p>\n
Tillerson made an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the dispute during a trip to the region in July. US President Donald Trump, after initially appearing to support the effort to isolate Qatar, has called for mediation and recently predicted a rapid end to the crisis.<\/p>\n
But before he arrived at Riyadh\u2019s King Salman air base on Saturday, Tillerson indicated there had been little progress. \u201cI do not have a lot of expectations for it being resolved anytime soon,\u201d he said in an interview with financial news agency Bloomberg. \u201cThere seems to be a real unwillingness on the part of some of the parties to want to engage.\u201d<\/p>\n
During his trip Tillerson is also to visit New Delhi in order to build what he said in a recent speech could be a 100-year \u201cstrategic partnership\u201d with India.<\/p>\n
Tillerson will stop in Islamabad to try to sooth Pakistani fears about this Indian outreach, but also pressure the government to crack down harder on Islamist militant groups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Riyadh US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is to launch a fresh bid Sunday to ease a crisis between Riyadh and Doha, both allies of Washington, but without high hopes of a breakthrough. Apart from the months-long crisis, Iran\u2019s rising influence in the Middle East is also expected to figure high on the agenda of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8270,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[315,87],"tags":[369,370],"class_list":["post-8269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-stories","category-world","tag-top-stories","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8269","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=8269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8271,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8269\/revisions\/8271"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}