The general in charge of Iran’s special forces in the Middle East said the United States and other global superpowers were not doing enough to stop Islamic State, and only Iran was committed to the task, a news agency in the country reported on Monday.
The comments were made by Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force, which is responsible for protecting Iran’s interests abroad. General Soleimani is a familiar face on the battlefields of Iraq, where he frequently outranks local commanders.
“Today, in the fight against this dangerous phenomenon, nobody is present except Iran,” the Tasnim news agency quoted Soleimani as saying on Sunday in reference to Islamic State.
Iran will do what it can to help those oppressed by the Islamic State, said Soleimani, whose force is part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), state-controlled Iranian news network Mehr reported.
ISIS, composed mainly of Sunni militants, has easily taken key cities in Iraq and Syria in the past week. The victories are attributed both to the size of the force as well as little will by Iraqi fighters to do battle.
“Obama has not done a damn thing so far to confront Daesh [ISIS]: doesn’t that show that there is no will in America to confront it?” Mehr quoted Soleimani as saying. Daesh is a derogatory Arabic term for Islamic State.
“How is it that America claims to be protecting the Iraqi government, when a few kilometres away in Ramadi killings and war crimes are taking place and they are doing nothing?”
ISIS poses an interesting problem for Washington. On one hand they create a problem for Iran, who must deal directly with ISIS because they operate in its back yard. This help U.S. interests.
On the other, ISIS is becoming large, powerful and increasingly wishes to do battle with the United States directly, via suicide attacks.
“We should immunise our borders against this great evil and we should help those countries that are suffering under Daesh,” Soleimani said in a speech to former and serving members of the IRGC in Kerman city.
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