TEHRAN, April 4, YJC - Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says the nationals of his country have good reason to believe Saudi Arabia is a state sponsor of terror.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC)- "Many Saudi nationals have carried out terrorist operations in Iraq, and every Iraqi citizen has a right to believe that Saudi Arabia is a supporter of terrorism,” he told Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television channel.
Saudi Arabia’s official radical ideology of Wahhabism, which is known for its lack of tolerance, informs the mindset of Daesh and other terrorist groups worldwide. Daesh has been ravaging Iraq, and neighboring Syria, since 2014.
On March 8, Fox News cited a senior Iraqi counterterrorism intelligence officer as saying that around 30 percent of the Daesh terrorists in Iraq had been Saudi nationals, who had entered the country over the previous three years via Turkey or through the Syrian border town of Abu Kamal.
Elsewhere in the interview, Abadi said it was too early to think that relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia had warmed. The normalization of the ties, he said, was only in its embryonic stages.
In January 2016, Thamer al-Sabhan became the first Saudi ambassador to be assigned to Baghdad in a quarter of a century. The two countries had severed ties following former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
However, in August 2016, senior Iraqi officials requested Riyadh to replace Sabhan. He had on occasions received warnings from Iraqi officials for interference in the country’s internal affairs. Riyadh later withdrew the ambassador, but instead of naming another one, it named a chargé d’affaires at its diplomatic mission in the Iraqi capital, in what was regarded as a unilateral and quick downgrading of the bilateral diplomatic ties.
In February this year, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir made a rare visit to Baghdad and met with Abadi, and the relations have been interpreted as being on the mend ever since.
(Source: Press TV)
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