By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer
     
Acts of terrorism, especially by state actors on the assumption they can play chess, and that too with the grandmasters who invented the game, is a self-defeatist if not suicidal move on the regional board.
Though for the time-being, till all investigations are complete, diplomacy dictates us not to name the perpetrators of the two blasts that damaged the Iranian oil tanker, SABITI, some 60 miles off the port of Jeddah, while cruising through the Red Sea on its way to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal, we know the identity of those playing with fire.
Once the source of this fresh act of terrorism in regional waters is fully determined, the perpetrator should be ready for the dire consequences, since it has made a grave mistake by targeting an Iranian ship and inviting trouble upon itself.
The last time oil tankers were attacked in the region, was in June in the Gulf of Oman when the Marshal Islands-flagged ‘Front Altair’ and the Panama-flagged Japanese-owned ‘Kokuka Courageous’ were targeted by terrorist state actors in a vain effort to frame up the Islamic Republic, while Japanese Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo, was in Tehran discussing bilateral ties with his hosts.
These were copy book acts of the mysterious blasts a month earlier in May that damaged four oil tankers in the same waterway off the coast of UAE state of Fujeirah – also blamed by the U.S. and its clients on either Iran or the Ansarallah Movement of Yemen, when it is crystal clear that neither Iran indulges in such cowardly acts, nor do the Yemenis, who always assume responsibility for their retaliations against the crimes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the latest being last month’s devastating drone attacks on Abqaiq.
Friday’s targeting of the Iranian oil tanker in the Red Sea occurred at a time of lull in the almost daily bombing of the four-and-a-half year long US-backed Saudi war in Yemen as battered and bruised Riyadh has found no choice but to accept the Ansarallah offer of negotiations.
According to The National Iranian Oil Company, which owns SABITI, the ship was struck at 5 a.m. and at at 5:20 a.m. local time, but no passing vessel or the government of Saudi Arabia have offered any assistance to the crew members, who are safe and after dousing out the flames are steering the ship which is in stable condition, back to Iran.
Observers doubt the Saudis would be too foolish to commit such acts of open terrorism against Iran, which will definitely accelerate their doom.
Did the terrorist Zionist regime commit this blatant aggression?
It will soon be determined, and the perpetrator will surely rue the blunder it has committed.