Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani accused the United States on Thursday of attempting to flood Afghanistan with Islamic State (ISIS) militants. Iran has repeatedly accused the United States of founding ISIS.
Speaking at a meeting with the vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Chen Zu, in Tehran on Thursday, Larijani spoke of Iran’s cooperation with other Asian countries in their personal fight against terrorism, according to pro-Iranian outlet Tasnim news.
Tasnim’s stated aim is “defending the Islamic Republic against negative media propaganda campaign and providing our readers with realities on the ground about Iran and Islam.”
“Cooperation among the six countries of Iran, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, and Afghanistan in counter-terrorism is very significant,” he said. “Over the past year, the United States has moved a large number of Daesh terrorists to Afghanistan, which could once again create the same troubles in some parts of Asia that it created in Iraq and Syria.”
Larijani did not explain how the United States was allegedly engineering such a movement of terrorists across borders, nor their objectives in doing so.
The agency goes on to claim that “Takfiri” terrorist groups like Daesh, Takfiri being a sectarian slur against Sunni Islam, are “believed to have been created and supported by the West and some regional Arab countries,” presumably with the aim of undermining the stability of the Iranian regime.
“The terrorist groups, which claim to be Islamic but whose actions are anything but, have been committing heinous crimes not only against non-Muslims but mostly against Muslims in the region,” the outlet wrote, underlying the sharp sectarian divides between large swathes of Shi’ite and Sunni Islam.
Afghanistan has long been one of the main strongholds of the Islamic State and other Wahhabi-backed terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda, with U.S. troops still fighting in the region over 18 years after they first entered.
Last month, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to Syria James Jeffrey warned that the Iranian regime may help fund or “create a new Daesh” if American fails to tackle the underlying problem of Tehran-allied Shiite militias operating across the Middle East.
This year, the U.S. once again named Iran as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror in its annual report on global terrorism, arguing that the regime and its proxies are responsible for worsening multiple conflicts and undermining U.S. interests in the region.
“Designated as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984, Iran continued its terrorist-related activity in 2017, including support for Lebanese Hizballah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various groups in Syria, Iraq, and throughout the Middle East,” the report said.
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.
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