'Targeting Iran or England, terror has one origin'
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Emergency response vehicles are parked at the scene of a terrorist attack during a pop concert in Manchester, northwest England, May 23, 2017
The spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry says acts of terrorism, whether targeting Iran or the United Kingdom, originate from one source.
Speaking on Tuesday, Bahram Qassemi strongly condemned a terrorist attack at a concert hall in the English city of Manchester, which killed at least 22 people, and said the origin of that attack was the same as the source of a recent raid that killed 11 Iranian border guards in the city of Mirjaveh on April 26.
“We believe that the taproot and the ideological origin of terrorist incidents in Iran’s Mirjaveh and the UK’s Manchester is one and the same,” Qassemi said.
While he did not elaborate, his remarks were most likely a reference to Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi regime is commonly known to be the major force behind the “ideology” of Daesh and other terrorist groups that mainly operate in the Middle East but also manage to target Europe and the United States with terrorist attacks every now and then.
Clerics, who are based in Saudi Arabia and who enjoy a Riyadh government approval to work, freely preach Wahhabism, a violent strand of “ideology” that declares people of other faiths “infidels” — a practice known as “Takfir” in Arabic — and allows killing them.
Qassemi said, “A serious, purposeful, and honest fight is needed [against terrorism] with the unity and [combined] determination of all countries that are victimized by the extremist and Takfiri ideology of these [terrorist] groups.”
The Iranian foreign ministry spokesman also made a tacit reference to a so-called anti-terror coalition formed by Saudi Arabia and said, “One result of [establishing] nominal and interest-based coalitions and of giving the wrong directions regarding the foundations... of terrorism is its (terrorism’s) cancerous spread all over the world.”
On Sunday, Saudi Arabia opened what it has called the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in the capital, Riyadh, in what was generally dismissed as a publicity stunt aimed at diverting attention away from its support for terrorist groups.
EA
