Washington's ambassador to Riyadh: Iran, America and Saudi Arabia do not want war

The US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, John Abizaid, said the response to possible involvement of Iran in the bombing of oil tankers off the emirate of Fujairah at dawn on Sunday should not develop into war.

"We need to conduct a thorough investigation, to understand what happened and why it happened, and then we come up with a reasonable response that does not amount to war," Abizaid told reporters in Riyadh.

"It is not in the interests of Iran, the United States or Saudi Arabia to explode a conflict in the Gulf region," he said.

The Saudis were involved in the ongoing investigations to determine the nature of the tankers' targeting, including two Saudi carriers, and Saudi channels reported last night that preliminary inspections indicated that the vandalism caused holes in the four target ship structures (commercial ship and three tankers) ranging from 5 to 10 feet (between 1.5 Meters and about three meters).

The US ambassador's remarks in Riyadh, while a US official said that Washington, after an initial assessment of what was suspected of involvement in Iran targeting ships, but did not find definitive evidence to prove its involvement in the process.

Tehran described the targeting of tankers by the appalling and alarming order to effectively deny that they were behind the operation in the UAE's economic waters. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said these sabotage operations are questionable and aimed at destabilizing the region.

For his part, the Special Representative for Iran Affairs of the US State Department Brian Hawk said that Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo published information about what he described as escalating threats from Iran during meetings in Brussels yesterday with his Gulf counterparts and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Hawk declined to say whether he believed Iran had played a role in the attacks on the Fujairah coast, or that Pompeo had blamed Iran for the attacks. The UAE authorities did not say anything about who was behind the attack.

The targeting of oil tankers at dawn on Sunday took place amid intense tension between Iran and the United States, where Washington pushed military reinforcements to the region on the pretext of Iranian threats to its interests in the region, while Tehran confirmed that it is ready to respond to any American attack.