No need to join global agreements: Khamenei
LONDON, June 20, (Agencies): Iran’s nuclear chief said on Tuesday that Europe’s proposals to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal after the US withdrawal from the pact were not satisfying for Tehran, warning that all sides would lose if Iran is sidelined by the West, the IRNA state news agency said.
IRNA reported that the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi had shown Iran’s dissatisfaction with European proposals to save the nuclear deal in a meeting with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Referring to Iran’s important regional role, Salehi was quoted as saying: “if it continues like this, all sides will lose.”
Iran has “no need to join” global agreements on areas such as terrorism and money laundering, the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday as the issue divides parliament.
Describing parliament as “mature and wise”, Khamenei said lawmakers “must independently make legislation on issues such as terrorism or combating money laundering”.
which has seen clashes drop off dramatically since a sectarian conflict over a decade ago.
The Hezbollah Brigades joined the Hashed alliance — which came under the command of Iraq’s prime minister — after an appeal in 2014 by Iraq’s top Shiite cleric to stop IS rampaging across the country.
Iraq declared victory over IS in December last year after a punishing offensive that saw the Hashed on the front lines alongside government troops.
Independent of the authorities in Baghdad, the Hezbollah Brigades are also fighting on the side of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The group was targeted Sunday in air raids laid at Israel’s door that reportedly left some 50 people dead in eastern Syria, where forces on the ground are battling IS remnants.
Israel has pledged to take all steps to stop key Assad backer Iran or its “proxies” building up a military presence in Syria.
Iraq’s biggest tribe has appealed for weapons to defend itself against the Islamic State jihadist group after several of its members were abducted and killed in a central desert region.
The Shammar are a particular target for IS because they sided with the government in the battle with the jihadists, who were expelled from their last urban strongholds last year.
“We hold the security forces responsible for protecting civilians ... failure to do so is a failure of duty,” Shammar leader Sheikh Abdallah Hmeidi Ajeel al-Yawar said in a statement late Tuesday.
“If the security forces are unable to control these areas inhabited by the Shammar and other tribes ... the commander-in-chief (of the armed forces Prime Minister Haider Abadi) should open the door for volunteers to join the ranks of the army and form a brigade of sons of the region to protect themselves.”
A minibus driver was the latest member of the Shammar tribe to go missing on Tuesday in Wadi al-Safa in Salaheddin province, according to the police.
On Sunday, IS attacked several Shammar villages in Jazira, the vast desert stretching from the west of Baghdad right up to the Syrian border, and abducted 30 people.
The bodies of seven of them were later found.