Iran’s Top Commander Calls ISIL Dreadful Product of Zionists’ Media Hype

Iran’s Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi described the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant as a Frankenstein monster created through a media hype by the Zionists in a psychological operation to frighten the Muslim states and advance their goals, stressing that Iraq alone will be enough to annihilate the terrorist group.
“The ISIL is a dreadful creature which has been created through the psychological operations and hues and cries of the Zionist media,” Firouzabadi told reporters on the sidelines of military parades at the mausoleum of the Founder of the Islamic Republic, the Late Imam Khomeini, South of Tehran on Monday.

He said the ISIL is a monster just in the media, and not in reality, stressing that the Iraqi army and people enjoy the needed power and capability to confront and annihilate the ISIL by themselves.

“There is no need for any (foreign) military forces’ deployment in Iraq and you saw that the Iraqi people and army accompanied by religious leaders managed to make them withdraw.”

Asked if Iran has any independent plans to fight the ISIL, Firouzabadi said, “There is no need for the deployment of Iranian soldiers to fight the ISIL.”

He reminded the common borders of Iran and Iraq, and said Tehran is providing Baghdad with military consultations under the defense pacts that the two neighboring states have.

Firouzabadi had also earlier warned the US and its allies to avoid exercising new plots in the region, saying that fighting and bombing the positions of the ISIL terrorist group cannot be a pretext for violating the sovereignty of Syria and Iraq.

“Military experts know that aerial bombardment is not the solution in the fight against terrorism and it can only be one in the chain of the military actions needed for a comprehensive fight against terrorism,” Firouzabadi said last Monday, implying the United States’ theatrical moves against terrorism.

He said the experience gained in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq in the last few months showed that effective fight against terrorism should include a simultaneous use of a wide range of tactics and methods, and said, “The experienced Syrian army forces and the country’s popular forces as well as the Iraqi army and popular forces should have the main role in this campaign.”

“Bombing the ISIL terrorists can no way be a permission for violating the sovereignty of the Syrian and Iraqi states,” Firouzabadi added.

He stressed the necessity for the regional countries’ vigilance against the US plots, and expressed the hope that “those Muslim regional states that helped to the creation of the ISIL at the beginning of this game would relinquish this plot”.

His comments came after NATO heads of state convened in the Welsh city of Newport on 4-5 September. US Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told foreign and defense ministers participating in the NATO summit that the US was forming a broad international coalition against ISIL.

Ministers from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark met in Wales to hammer out a strategy for battling ISIL, but the policy was questioned by many regional officials and political leaders.