Why Saudi Arabia and Iran are bitter rivals - BBC News

Why Saudi Arabia and Iran are bitter rivals
By Jonathan Marcus
Defence and diplomatic correspondent
18 November 2017

Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (L) and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Saudi Arabia and Iran are at loggerheads. They have long been rivals, but it's all recently got a lot more tense. Here's why.

How come Saudi Arabia and Iran don't get along?
Saudi Arabia and Iran - two powerful neighbours - are locked in a fierce struggle for regional dominance.

The decades-old feud between them is exacerbated by religious differences. They each follow one of the two main sects in Islam - Iran is largely Shia Muslim, while Saudi Arabia sees itself as the leading Sunni Muslim power.

This religious schism is reflected in the wider map of the Middle East, where other countries have Sunni or Shia majorities, some of whom look towards Iran or Saudi Arabia for support or guidance.

Historically Saudi Arabia, a monarchy and home to the birthplace of Islam, saw itself as the leader of the Muslim world. However this was challenged in 1979 by the Islamic revolution in Iran which created a new type of state in the region - a kind of theocracy - that had an explicit goal of exporting this model beyond its own borders.

In the past 15 years in particular, the differences between Saudi Arabia and Iran have been sharpened by a series of events.

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq overthrew Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab who had been a major Iranian adversary. This removed a crucial military counter-weight to Iranian influence in Iraq, which has been rising since then.