‘9/11 pretext for US’s Iraq, Afghan wars’

Islamic Republic of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the US used the September 11, 2001 attacks as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan which led to huge human losses.

“This incident was a complicated game planned to influence the human community and a pretext to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, and cause more than one million people to lose their lives or get wounded,” Ahmadinejad said on Sunday.

He made the remarks in the opening ceremony of the fifth summit of the Ahl al-Bayt World Assembly in the capital Tehran, Mehr news agency reported.

The Ahl al-Bayt World Assembly summit is being held in the convention hall of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

On September 11, 2001, a series of coordinated attacks were carried out in the United States leaving almost 3,000 people dead.

During the incident, 19 reported al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners and crashed two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings.

The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington D.C.

The US, under the administration of former President George W. Bush, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after claiming that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by members of al-Qaeda harbored by the then Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The US also attacked Iraq in 2003 claiming that the Middle Eastern country was in possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

However, it was later revealed that not only was not executed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in possession of WMDs but also that US and UK leaders knew about the non-existence of such weapons.