Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 11
By Khalid Kazimov - Trend:
Iranian Parliament speaker Ali Larijani has said that if Iran had not prevented the Islamic State (IS) group, the terrorists would have engaged the whole region.
Larijani made the remarks in a meeting with his Kuwaiti counterpart Marzouq Al-Ghanim in Kuwait City.
"In the previous years, no real fight has been launched against terrorism. Our observations are that in the past few years terrorism did not diminish, for example, when the US attacked Afghanistan to fight terrorism, we did not witness any decline in terrorism," the Iranian official stated, Mehr news agency reported March 11.
Some other approach must be taken in order to prevent other countries' interference in regional affairs, he said.
Larijani went on to say that Iran has never been a threat to its neighbors.
For example, when Saddam attacked Kuwait we stood by Kuwait, despite the fact that Kuwait had helped Iraq when it was in war with Iran, he asserted, adding that the Islamic Republic believes in peaceful coexistence.
" Iran has never held an aggressive view toward regional countries. The fact that we are helping Iraq today is that the country has requested it."
"If Iran had not stopped Daesh (IS), the region would have transformed and all the regional countries would have got involved," the Iranian parliament speaker further stated.
After IS took large swaths of Iraq in mid-2014, Iran started sending military forces to the country which it claims carry out consultation operations with Iraqi forces to fight IS.
Iranian military forces have especially helped preserve the Iraqi Kurdistan with the help of the local Peshmarga forces. Iranian and Iraqi Kurd officials have repeatedly said that only for Iran did the Iraqi Kurdistan survive IS attacks.
Frequent media reports that many of the Iranian forces have been killed while on mission in the neighbor country.
Edited by CN