Iran’s Top Security Official Warns of US Revival of ISIL

Shamkhani made the remarks in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy Alexander Lavrentiev in Tehran on Wednesday.

He described double-standard approach towards terrorism as unacceptable, and said, “Settlement of the Idlib issue should be put on agenda as one of the priorities in the fight against terrorism.”

Shamkhani also underlined Iran’s opposition to Turkey’s military incursion of Syria, and said, “Any measure which exacerbates insecurity and increases crisis in the region should be halted immediately.”

“The regional crises, including the Syria and Yemen crises, have no military solution and they should be settled through diplomacy and Syrian-Syrian and Yemeni-Yemeni talks,” he added.

Shamkhani also termed insecurity in the international waterways as one of the dangerous factors of crisis in the region, and vowed that Iran will give a crushing response to the culprits behind the recent attack against an Iranian oil tanker.

Lavrentiev, for his part, presented a report on the latest political and military developments in Northern Syria, and said, “Continued cooperation between the two countries in the political and security dimensions can prevent spread and revival of terrorism and guarantee sustainable stability and security in the region.”

Shamkhani’s remarks came after a senior Iraqi security expert disclosed that Washington was attempting to transfer 3,000 members of the ISIL terrorist group from Syria to Iraq.

Hafez Al-Basharah told the Arabic-language al-Ma’aloumeh news website on Tuesday that the US which has created and supported the ISIL terrorists in the past few years was plotting to create a safe area for them in Iraq.

He added that Washington which had chosen three areas in Iraq for the ISIL relocation, wanted to transfer the militants first to the regions under Turkey’s military attacks in Syria and then to Iraq.

“The first region that the US intends to transfer the ISIL terrorists is an area between Albu Kamal in Syria and Qa’em in Iraq; the second region is Ein al-Assad base; and the third area is one of the US bases in the Iraqi Kurdistan region,” al-Basharah said.

The Arabic-language media outlets had reported in July that Washington planned to bring back a more dangerous version of the ISIL terrorist group to Iraq and Syria after its failure to achieve its mischievous goals in the region.

The Arabic-language website of the Russian Sputnik news agency quoted Hessam Sho’aib, a Syrian military expert on terrorist organizations, as saying that a recent report by the US-based Institute for Studies of War (ISW) on rebirth of the ISIL terrorists in Iraq and Syria exposes this reality that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has created the ISIL and is preparing the grounds for the return of the terrorist groups, specially the ISIL, to the region.

Sho’aib noted that the ISW’s report on ISIL’s dominance over several regions in Iraq and Syria such as Mosul shows that the US is not looking for establishment of peace in the region and ISIL’s retreat from Raqqa has taken place on CIA’s order and not a defeat in war against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

He reiterated that the SDF is also a part of the CIA’s plot for Syria, and said, “The US has come to know that it cannot conduct any kind of military operation against Iran, and therefore it has resorted to reviving the terrorist groups to carry out terrorist attacks as a much cheaper scenario for the region.

Sho’aib noted that Washington uses the terrorist groups in the region as a pressure lever, and said that the purpose for reviving the terrorist organizations is preoccupying the regional countries’ armies, specially Iraq, Syria and Iran.