TEHRAN – Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said on Tuesday that durable security and all-out development in Iraq will benefit Iran too, condemning ill-wishers who tried to destabilize Iraq in recent days.

Larijani made the remarks during a meeting with Shirko Miro, head of the Iraqi Parliament’s foreign policy committee, and some other Iraqi lawmakers on the sidelines of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) conference in Belgrade, Serbia.

“I am sure that the wise Iraqi people are capable enough to solve recent problems,” Larijani said in the meeting, adding, “But important issue is realizing the root causes of the incident.”

“Some countries do not accepts a secure and calm Iraq and tried to oppose Baghdad’s policies and launched terrorist operations in the country as soon as the new government took office, but Iran’s stance towards Iraq has always been clear,” he further said.
 
Larijani added, “Some of Iran’s problems with neighboring countries were for sake of Iraq, because Tehran wants Iraq to be democratic (but those neighboring countries do not want).”

The parliament speaker also refuted claims that Iran forces in Iraq, saying, “Only when Daesh invaded Iraq, Baghdad called on Tehran for further assistance and we accepted.”
 
Iraq was rocked by a new wave of protests over economic hardships and joblessness in early October. In stark contrast to claims that demonstrations were popular and spontaneous, new analyses revealed that 79% of hashtags about protests in Iraq on Twitter had originate from Saudi Arabia and only 6% were from inside Iraq.

However, the timing of the start of the protests with the great march of Arbaeen aroused suspicions.

Even the volume of hashtags sent from Kuwait was bigger than Iraq. 7% of pro-protest Tweets were from the tiny Arab country.

The UAE, Egypt, the U.S., and Yemen were the other countries where Tweets originated, promoting anti-government protests.
   
Earlier this month, a senior member of the Iranian Parliament National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said that joint plots orchestrated by Washington and Riyadh were root causes of the recent riots in Iraq.
 
Ala’eddin Boroujerdi said that Riyadh tried to push Iraq into anarchy on the threshold of the Arbaeen march to cover Saudi forces’ disgusting failures in Yemen.

“Recent developments in Iraq are definitely a result of provocations manufactured out of Iraq in which the U.S. played a pivotal role,” he underscored.

He went on to emphasize that “Iraq’s recent incidents are controllable and will fade soon without any influence on the largest world gathering of Arbaeen.”

MJ/PA