FM Zarif: U.S. Regularly Relocating Daesh Terrorists

Date: 24 February 2018 - 21:58

News ID: ۵۰۴۰۹

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif said on Saturday the U.S. is regularly relocating Daesh terrorists to outside of the Middle East, where they had been based before losing all the territory they had occupied.
Zarif made the remarks during an event called the Patterns of Regional Order in the Post-ISIS Era at the Tehran University.
He said the U.S. transfer of the Daesh elements from the Syrian cities of Hasakah, Mayadin, and Dayr al-Zawr as well as other areas to outside the region "is a dangerous development that has had a regular pattern”.
The terrorists’ "communication network remains in place, their leaders remain alive or at large, and they still receive financial support; so we must expect the re-emergence of the threat any day”, Zarif warned.
The minister also stressed that although Daesh had been defeated territorially, its ideological and financial resources coming from the region and beyond had yet to be destroyed.
"One of the West’s major mistakes is that they believe that Daesh is over. But the conditions that created Daesh in the region are still present,” he said.
He said the regional governments’ failure to address the most important needs of the people in the region, including their failure to secure the rights of Palestinian people, also contributed to the creation of Daesh.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Zarif termed the Israeli regime as a "cancerous tumor” in the Middle East. He said the close relationship between some Arab states and Tel Aviv has also contributed to the creation and sustenance of the Daesh ideology.
Yet another contributor to the creation of the Daesh ideology has been efforts by some regional countries to cover up their domestic issues by playing a blame game and deflecting attention to a "foreign enemy”, the foreign minister noted.
The top Iranian diplomat also put forward an initiative for security in the region that includes dialogue in the Persian Gulf.
Earlier this month, the Russian presidential envoy to Afghanistan said that there were indications that the U.S. military was allowing Daesh terrorists to infiltrate Afghanistan after their defeats in Syria and Iraq.
"It’s noteworthy that the extremists themselves and weapons for them, according to numerous witness accounts, are often transferred to the territory of Afghanistan by helicopters without identifying insignia,” Zamir Kabulov said.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei had earlier made the same warning.

U.S. Conditions

Zarif also rejected as "improper" the conditions set by the United States for upholding the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, urging Washington to immediately fulfill its commitments under the deal.
"A party to a multilateral agreement cannot set conditions for the deal. They (the Americans) have previously set some conditions that were improper. Their new conditions are improper as well," Zarif told reporters here.
The Washington Post on Friday quoted a senior official with the U.S. President Donald Trump's administration involved in developing his Iran policy as saying, "The president laid out six major areas where he wanted the Europeans to work with the United States to put together a united front on demanding that the Iranians alter their behavior.”
They include alleged human rights violations, cyber threats and financial activities of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), the official added. Iran has repeatedly dismissed such accusations.
Zarif said the U.S. is using such demands as a diversionary tactic to evade accountability for its failure to fully honor its commitments under the JCPOA.
"The U.S. sets conditions that the international community completely knows none of them can even be considered," the top Iranian diplomat added.
"What is now necessary is that the international community must receive an assurance that the U.S. is fulfilling its commitments to preserve the rights of the Islamic Republic as a side that has remained committed to its undertakings. This is our current problem," Zarif said.