Lebanese FM Resigns due to Saudi Wrath

By Staff, Agencies 

Lebanon’s caretaker Foreign Minister Charbel Wehbe has stepped down from office, shortly after the Gulf kingdoms poured their wrath on him for accusing them for the rise of the Takfiri Daesh group in Syria and Iraq.

Wehbe handed in his resignation on Wednesday as he met President Michel Aoun at the Presidential Palace.

“In light of the recent developments which accompanied my latest TV interview, and out of my concern not to allow exploitation of what was stated in the interview to offend Lebanon and Lebanese people, I had the honor to meet His Excellency, the President, and submitted to him a request to be relieved of my duties and responsibilities as the foreign minister in the caretaker government,” the Lebanese diplomat said in a statement after the meeting.

Earlier, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain had summoned Lebanese ambassadors respectively to protest against Wehbe’s remarks.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry called in the Lebanese ambassador to Riyadh and handed over a memorandum to him, officially protesting “the offense” committed by Wehbe and his “shameful comments” toward the kingdom, said the statement released by the official Saudi Press Agency.

In a televised interview late on Monday night, Wehbe blamed “countries of love, friendship and fraternity” for “planting Daesh in the plains of Nineveh and Anbar and Palmyra” in reference to territory seized by the extremists in Syria and Iraq in 2014. He did not name any country, though.

The top Lebanese diplomat made the comments during a verbal duel with a Saudi guest on the show broadcast on US-based and Arabic-language al-Hurra television news network.

When asked if by “those countries,” he meant the Arab states in the Gulf region, Wehbe declined to name any specific countries. But answering another question about whether those Arab states had funded Daesh, he said, “Who funded them then, was it me?!”

The Saudi statement further said, “These statements violate the most basic diplomatic norms and don’t fit in the context of the historic relations between brotherly people.”

The UAE’s foreign ministry also summoned the Lebanese ambassador and handed him an official protest note.