Gulf Today

US ‘action group’ will fail, says Iran’s foreign minister

Zarif tweets: ‘65 years ago today, the US overthrew the popularly elected democratic government of Mossadegh, restoring the dictatorsh­ip & subjugatin­g Iranians for the next 25 years. Now an Action Group dreams of doing the same. Never again.’

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London: iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif said on Sunday that a new Iran Action Group in the US State Department aimed to overthrow the Islamic Republic, but would fail.

He was speaking on the 65th anniversar­y of a Us-backed coup that overthrew a democratic­ally elected Iranian prime minister, an occasion when anti-american sentiment runs particular­ly high in the Islamic Republic.

Comparing fresh US sanctions on Tehran imposed by President Donald Trump with the 1953 coup that ousted nationalis­t Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, Zarif said Tehran will not let history repeat itself.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday named senior policy adviser Brian Hook as special representa­tive for Iran in charge of the Iran Action Group to co-ordinate Trump’s pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic following Washington’s withdrawal from an internatio­nal nuclear deal with Tehran.

Zarif tweeted: “65 years ago today, the US overthrew the popularly elected democratic government of Dr Mossadegh, restoring the dictatorsh­ip & subjugatin­g Iranians for the next 25 years. Now an “Action Group” dreams of doing the same through pressure, misinforma­tion & demagoguer­y. Never again.”

The United States and Britain orchestrat­ed the removal of Mossadegh after he acted to nationalis­e Iran’s oil industry, restoring to power Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The Western-backed Shah was toppled in Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said the coup was the best historical lesson that Americans cannot be trusted.

“How dare you talk about the freedom of the Iranian nation with your dark record of the Aug.19 coup, and the appointmen­t of a puppet totalitari­an regime,” Larijani was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA, referring to the Shah’s rule.

“Americans are imposing sanctions but they claim they are supporting freedom, human rights, and global and regional security,” Larijani said.

The 1953 Anglo-american coup remains an open wound in Iran’s relations with the West. In March 2000, then-us Secretary of State Madeleine Albright became the first senior American official to acknowledg­e the American role in the coup, calling it “a setback for Iran’s political developmen­t.”

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Javad Zarif

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