Senior MP: NATO’s Missile Shield Harms Turkey’s Interests

A senior Iranian legislator warned Turkey against the dire consequences of hosting a NATO missile battery, and called on Ankara to call off the deal to save its interests.
“Turkey should know that the deployment of the missile shield will finally harm the country,” Deputy Head of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Hossein Ebrahimi told FNA on Tuesday.

Ebrahimi reiterated that Iran and all other Muslim countries are concerned about the deployment of the missile systems in Turkey, and said, “This means that once this missile shield is deployed and launched, a bad event will happen in the region.”

He called on Turkey to try to promote Islam in the region, and cautioned that the western countries, specially the US, are seeking to misuse Ankara in an attempt to increase their dominance over the region.

The Iranian foreign ministry had also earlier called NATO’s demand for the establishment of the new ballistic missile shield in Turkey as “seriously suspicious”.

“We think NATO’s objective in deploying military forces in the region is seriously suspicious,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast told a regular news briefing in October.

Mehman-Parast added, “We think the stationing of NATO military forces would disrupt security in the region.”

Also, a research center affiliated to the Iranian parliament announced in a report last month that the NATO’s defense shield in the neighboring country of Turkey should be viewed as a threat to the Islamic Republic.

“Deployment of a part of this missile system in Turkey and near Iran is generally a threat to Iran,” the report said.