RAWALPINDI: Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa will visit Saudi Arabia this week to discuss regional security and Kashmir dispute with Saudi leadership.
This has been confirmed by Director-General (DG) Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar while talking to an international media outlet on Thursday. “Yes he [Gen Bajwa] is travelling,” Pakistan army spokesman Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar told Reuters.
According to sources, during the visit, General Qamar Javed Bajwa will have meetings with Saudi leadership. On Monday, Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, Admiral Nawaf Saeed Al-Malkiy, had met the COAS Bajwa.
Matters of mutual interest, regional security situation and bilateral defence relations between the two brotherly countries were discussed during the meeting.
Moreover, Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa will visit Saudi Arabia this weekend, officials said, seeking to calm diplomatic strains over Kashmir as financial support for Islamabad hangs in the balance.
The two countries are traditionally close and Saudi Arabia in 2018 gave Pakistan a $3 billion loan and $3.2 billion oil credit facility to help its balance of payments crisis. But Riyadh is irked by criticism from Pakistan that Saudi Arabia has been lukewarm on the Kashmir territorial dispute, two senior military officials told Reuters, motivating General Bajwa’s planned fence-building visit on Sunday. “Yes, he is travelling,” Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Major General Babar Iftikhar told Reuters, though the official line was that the visit was pre-planned and “primarily military affairs oriented.”
Pakistan has long pressed the Saudi-led Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) to convene a high-level meeting to highlight alleged Indian violations in the occupied Kashmir. But the OIC has only held low-level meetings so far. “If you cannot convene it, then I’ll be compelled to ask Prime Minister Imran Khan to call a meeting of the Islamic countries that are ready to stand with us on the issue of Kashmir and support the oppressed Kashmiris,” Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told local media last week.
Last year, Islamabad had pulled out of a Muslim nations forum at the last minute on insistence by Riyadh, which saw the gathering as an attempt to challenge its leadership of the OIC.–ISPR
