Targeting Iran or England, terror has one origin: Iranian Foreign Ministry

The spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry says acts of terrorism, whether targeting Iran or the United Kingdom, originate from one source.

Speaking on Tuesday, Bahram Qassemi condemned in the strongest terms a terrorist attack at a concert hall in the English city of Manchester, which killed at least 22 people, and said the ideological origin of that attack was the same as the source of a raid that killed 11 Iranian border guards in the city of Mirjaveh on April 26.

“We believe that the taproot and the ideological origin of terrorist incidents in Iran’s Mirjaveh and the UK’s Manchester is one and the same,” Qassemi said.

Though he did not name any party by name, he was most likely referring to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi regime is commonly known to be the major force behind the “ideology” of Daesh and other terrorist groups that mainly operate in the Middle East but also manage to target Europe and the United States with terrorist attacks every now and then.

Clerics, who are based in Saudi Arabia and who enjoy a Riyadh government approval to work, freely preach Wahhabism, a violent strand of “ideology” that declares people of other faiths “infidels” — a practice known as “Takfir” in Arabic — and allows killing them.

Qassemi said, “A serious, purposeful, and honest fight is needed [against terrorism] with the unity and [combined] determination of all countries that are victimized by the extremist and Takfiri ideology of these [terrorist] groups.”

Responsibility for the Monday attack in Manchester, which also wounded 59 people, was later claimed by Daesh, a terrorist group primarily influenced by Wahhabism. The terrorist group that carried out the attack on the Iranian border guards last month is also known to be Wahhabi and, like other such groups, linked to Saudi Arabia.

Qassemi also made a tacit reference to a so-called anti-terror coalition formed by Saudi Arabia and said, “One result of [establishing] nominal and interest-based coalitions and of giving the wrong directions regarding the foundations... of terrorism is its (terrorism’s) cancerous spread all over the world.”

On Sunday, Saudi Arabia opened what it has called the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in the capital, Riyadh, in what was generally dismissed as a publicity stunt aimed at diverting attention away from its support for terrorist groups.

Saudi Arabia ‘center for exporting terrorism’

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, who was speaking separately on Tuesday, referred to that development and said the opening of the center in the Saudi capital was “the right thing to do, because that very place (Riyadh) is the source of exporting terrorism.”

Addressing an open session of the Parliament (Majlis), Speaker Larijani said there was no doubt that Saudi Arabia was exporting terrorism to the world.

“It is a point historically evident that Saudi Arabia, since its inception, has been engaged in wars and terrorism,” he said.

He said the Saudi regime has for the past almost 60 years been spreading Wahhabism in the name of preaching Islam and through the building of mosques and training centers for the youth.

“If America manages to stop the flow from Saudi Arabia of funds, weapons, and gunmen to other places, there would neither be explosions on twin towers in New York nor would thousands of innocent people die in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon,” Larijani said.

Terrorist attacks on the former twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001 killed some 3,000 people. Of the 19 people involved in carrying out the attacks on that day, including by hijacking commercial planes, 15 were Saudi nationals.

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