BEIJING (Dispatches) -- President Ebrahim Raisi said here Wednesday a new world order with Asia as its epicenter is taking shape and replacing the previous one.
Addressing students, professors and academic personnel from Peking University, Raisi highlighted the importance of China in the emerging world order.
“A new world is forming and taking the place of the older one. The new world requires an up-to-date order in which real multilateralism, maximum synergy, solidarity and dissociation from unilateralism will thrive more than ever, and a fair and just order will accordingly emerge,” he said.
He said Asia lies at the center of the emerging global developments, stressing that protecting and promoting peace throughout the vast continent is not only a matter of choice but an absolute necessity.
Raisi noted that Iran’s military prowess and regional capabilities are directed at preserving peace and stability in other countries and will only be employed to counter threats from hegemonic powers.
“Among the Islamic Republic of Iran’s strategic achievements is its triumph over transnational challenges such as terrorism and extremism in West Asia,” the Iranian president said.
Raisi also hailed the age-old relations between Tehran and Beijing, saying that China joined the international community through the ancient Silk Road, and Iran provided a fertile ground for the progress and welfare stemming from the trade route.
“Not only did the Silk Road facilitate trade and cooperation among different nations as the most important route, but it also served as a cultural bond and connected different societies together throughout history,” he added.
Raisi went on to hail China’s Belt and Road Initiative, emphasizing that Iran and China, with the revival of this initiative in the

safe, “in order to start getting back to normal,” Tourism Minister Nuri Ersoy told a news conference in Malatya, some 160 km (99 miles)from the epicenter of the earthquake.
“We will quickly demolish what needs to be demolished and build safe houses,” Turkey’s Environment and Urbanization Minister Murat Kurum tweeted.
Across the border, in Syria, relief efforts have been hampered by a war that has splintered the country and divided regional and global powers.
Organized by Arab tribes, trucks loaded with blankets, food, medical supplies and tents arrived overnight in the militant-held rebel northwest from a region controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, a Reuters witness saw.
More aid was being collected, said Hamoud Saleh al-Darjah, an organizer. “This isn’t the last campaign,” he said.
But some in the region worried about how they could start again.
“The situation is really tragic,” Abdulrahman Muhammad, a displaced Syrian originally from the neighboring province of Aleppo, said in Idlib, where many had found refuge in the past decade from other war-torn provinces.
Parts of the provinces of Idlib and adjacent Aleppo held by Turkey-backed militants suffered the bulk of the quake’s casualties in Syria: over 4,400 of a death toll of more than 5,800, according to the United Nations and government authorities.
In Syria’s Mediterranean town of Jableh, Um Kanan recounted how she woke her three children and rushed them to a small closet in her bedroom for shelter, along with a collection of family photos and documents, when the earthquake hit.
The force of the quake brought their fourth floor apartment in crashing to the ground, but the four survived.
“I kept thinking to myself: ‘Can it be? Did the building just fall down? Is this a dream?’ I tried to move but I couldn’t,” she said. “The children and I, by some miracle, we ended up in this small space that I had left empty.”