Iran-Iraq Fraternal Ties Break New Grounds to the Frustration of Enemies

Date: 19 January 2019 - 21:38

News ID: ۶۲۲۳۹

By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

The time-tested fraternity of the Iranian and Iraqi Muslim peoples has been a thundering slap on the faces of their common enemies as evident by two excellent examples of amity between the two countries in the week that went by.
If the goalless draw in Dubai during the preliminary rounds of the Asian Football Cup was played in the finest sporting spirit between the national teams of Iran and Iraq, the 5-day visit to the Land of the Two Rivers by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who held cordial talks with representatives of Iraq’s various political, religious and ethnic groups, proved once again that Iran-Iraq ties are of a special nature.
No wonder the Americans and their cronies in the Arab world, whose plots to sow discord between the two neighbourly nations that share a common history, religion, culture, and, of course, the same future and destination, have gone awry at every turn, are mad with anger and frustration.
We are unconcerned at the enemies’ wild accusations of a ‘fixed’ match in Dubai or why Zarif was hosted by the Iraqi government and people for full five days in contrast to the brief fruitless surprise visit of a few cold hours by the US Secretary of State, the gangster Mike Pompeo.
The facts on the ground speak for themselves. In Baghdad, Zarif announced well in advance of President Hassan Rouhani’s forthcoming official visit to Iraq to the applause of the Iraqi people and the populace, unlike US president Donald Trump’s stealth, uninvited and illegal Christmas popup at an American military base in Iraq – a trip blasted by the Iraqi media, denounced by the Iraqi people and given a cold shoulder by the senior officials who rejected his request for a meeting because of his violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.
The government of Iraq has not just decided to ignore Washington’s pressures for downgrading commercial ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran but has agreed to increase the volume of annual trade exchanges to a record 20 billion dollars.
Zarif visited all the centres of decision-making in Iraq – Baghdad, Arbil, Sulaimaniya, Najaf and Karbala – and discussed the further strengthening of diplomatic, trade, industrial, cultural, social and religious relations.
His variety of hosts indicates the sheer depth of Iran-Iraq ties that has withstood the satanic plots of their common enemies, including the 8-year war which the US had imposed in the 1980s through Saddam of the repressive Ba’th minority regime of Iraq, and which the Persian Gulf Arab potentates had funded with tens of billions of their ill-begotten petro dollars in a vain bid to create bad blood between the people of the two countries.
He met the politicians, the ulema, the merchants, the intelligentsia, the academics, and the tribal leaders. He held fruitful talks with the Kurdish leaders in both Arbiil and Sulaimaniya, where he gave rousing speeches and was met with statements of solidarity by his hosts, and that too in fluent Farsi.
Among those who called upon Zarif were not just the government officials or the custodians of the holy shrines and leaders of the popular Hashd ash-Sha’bi, but the religious and political leaders of the Sunni Muslims, as well as representatives of the Christian and Mandaean minorities.
These are the very factors that made Iran immediately respond to the emergency request of the government and people of Iraq when the US-Saudi supported Takfiri terrorists had tried to seize the country through macabre acts of mass murder and destruction of towns and cities.
Without the least doubt when the two fraternal Muslim peoples triumphed jointly over the terrorists, there is no question of their resolve to defeat the plots of the Americans and the Arab reactionaries, while building commercial and industrial ties on a solid basis.