Iranian FM Raps Hostile Attempts at Division among Muslims

The top Iranian diplomat held a meeting with the guests attending the 36th International Islamic Unity Conference in Tehran.

The Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies hosted the gathering on Friday.

Amirabdollahian welcomed the guests and offered them congratulations on the Islamic Unity Week. He also expressed gratitude for efforts by Hamid Shahriari, the general-secretary of the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought, in hosting the conference.

The foreign minister referred to remarks by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei in a meeting with the participants of the Islamic Unity Conference and elaborated on a tangible manifestation of enemy’s activities to divide the Shiite and Sunni Muslims in the course of the years of Iraq’s occupation by America.

In the years of Iraq’s occupation by the US following 2003, strange and unprecedented incidents took place in order to create a rift between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims, he said, the Foreign Ministry’s website reported.

Amirabdollahian enumerated examples of hostile attempts to divide Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis, saying, “We have witnessed numerous cases of the enemy attempts to create a rift in the Islamic Ummah in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon etc.”

He also pointed to the recent developments in Iran, adding, “Foreign parties have made attempts over the past weeks to exploit a domestic issue and meddle in our country’s affairs.”

“This is while hours after the death of Mahsa Amini, our country’s president called her father, offered sympathy, and ordered a swift investigation to shed light on the issue,” Amirabdollahian added.

“Who can believe that the death of a girl is that important to the Westerners? If it is so, what did they do vis-� -vis hundreds of thousands of martyrs and victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon? They sought to ignite sectarian war in Iran,” the minister said.

“Part of the peaceful demands have been and will be met, but we have witnessed the entry of firearms into the scene of some protests, which have been imported from abroad. We do not have such arms in Iran,” he stated.

“In the mayhem in Zahedan, there was no slogan or picture related to Mahsa. A known terror group tried to pit Shiites and Sunnis against one another and claimed responsibility for that. They did the same thing in a section of Kurdistan, but the insight of Sunni clerics and people foiled all their attempts,” Amirabdollahian said.

Elsewhere, the foreign minister said, “Imam Khomeini has left many legacies for the Muslim Ummah: one of them is the Islamic Unity Week and the other one is the designation of the International Quds Day.”

“We proudly announce that despite all the pressure by enemies, Iran has provided support to the Shiite and Sunni resistance, and even the Christian one, in Lebanon the same way as it did in the case of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance movements in Palestine,” he said.

Amirabdollahian further paid tribute to the late scholars who were present in the previous rounds of the Islamic Unity Conference, including Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Taskhiri, and prayed for divine mercy for them.