The death of Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the hands of American military forces should bring to end US interventionism in the Middle East, says Iran’s government spokesman, noting that Washington’s policies are the main reason for the proliferation of Daesh and other Takfiri terror outfits.
Ali Rabiei wrote in an opinion piece on Sunday that Baghdadi’s death, while symbolic, doesn’t mean the fight against Daesh is completed, just as killing former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden didn’t bring terrorism to an end.
“Baghdadi’s death is the end of the symbol for injective-destructive terrorism: injecting a lethal ideology into the hearts of human societies and destroying the image of Islam in the eyes of the public,” he said.
“However, just as bin Laden’ death didn’t root out terror, Baghdadi’s death won’t be the end of Daeshism either,” he added.
The main reason for this, Raebiei argued, was the fact that Washington was not going to stop undertaking policies that nurture the same kind of extremist ideologies that Baghdadi represented.
“Deaths of bin Laden and Baghdadi only ended a chapter in the fight against the Daeshi brand of terrorism; it is the death of a symbol that is still thriving and evident,” he said. “It is thriving through American policies and regional petrodollars.”
It is the “terror-nurturing swamps that need to be drained,” Rabiei added.
The Iranian official said the United States was doing its utmost to depict “invasion and cruel sanctions” as part of its struggle against terrorism, while in fact terrorism in the Middle East and northern Africa is caused by “military-intelligence policies, plundering oil and supporting tyranny.”
He said the alleged killing of Baghdadi as part of a planned operation doesn’t take away from the “courageous efforts of the Syrian nation and its Iranian and Russian allies in liberating territories that Daesh had seized with direct and indirect backing by the US.”
Source: Iranian Agencies
