Ali Akbar Velayati, Head of Strategic Research Center of the Expediency Council, addressed Iraqi clerics on Wednesday evening. Mr. Velayati believed that Iranian and Iraqis had been living in peaceful symbiosis during the history and they had not been isolated either culturally or politically; “Iraq is potentially and actively the most important Arab country of the region; Baghdad had been a center for centuries of Islamic caliphate which gave its people originality of culture along with wealth and recognition across the Islamic world; the natural resources of the country had garnered it only enemies and sycophants seeking its resources to be plundered,” told Velayati to the meeting.
“Iraqi solidarity is crucial to its integrity as a country; however, the same enemies have worked to divide the country to smaller warring parts to weaken so historically rooted a country, and the division and disintegration will have far-reaching impacts on the whole region including Iran,” Velayati criticized the US and the ‘Arab reactionary states’ of the Middle East as forces behind the disintegration plot. “The plot should be faced and aborted to save the whole region from yet greater plight of the disintegration. “Their alternative for Syria is a disintegrating and dividing adventure, with John Kerry the US Secretary of State famously saying that if peace talks failed to materialize in Syria, establishment of five independent regions would be an inevitability,” he asserted.
Velayati turned to Lebanon where he believed a similar situation had ruled the arrangement of political affairs; “in Lebanon as well, they have planted internal clashes only to harvest the current situation of instability; under such situations, Syria is the golden ring of the resistance chain the fall of which will release devastating forces of extremism and Takfirism across the Middle East,” he told the meeting.
Velayati criticized the Zionist regime as “implementing the ‘scorched earth policy,’ where it had exhausted all the land’s resources against its native people; “the key to solving the problems in the region is to bolster unity and internal solidarity in the face of plots and conspiracies which the US had led in the region; we see a promising and hopeful future for Iraq, and should appreciate the democracy of the country,” he concluded.
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