Iran to keep backing legal governments in Iraq, Syria: Official

A senior Iranian official says the Islamic Republic will continue its support for the legal governments in Iraq and Syria.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, said on Saturday that the Islamic Republic has already proven its support for Iraqi and Syrian governments, which are both confronting the Takfiri ISIL terrorists.

“As you know, ISIL and other terrorist groups came into existence with the cooperation of the United States and its allies in the West, in the same way that they created al-Qaeda,” he noted.

Velayati added that, having failed to overthrow the legal governments of Syria and Iraq, the US and its Western allies now intend to interfere in the internal affairs of these countries under the pretext of fighting the ISIL.

“Iraq and Syria oppose the US sending its planes into the countries’ legal spaces under the pretext of fighting the ISIL,” the official noted.

US President Barack Obama said on Friday that Washington is assembling an international coalition to "snuff out" the ISIL terrorist group, adding that such extremist groups have “no place in the 21st century.”

Ministers from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland, and Denmark met in Wales on September 4-5 to hammer out a strategy for battling ISIL.

ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, control large parts of Syria's northern territory. The group also sent its Takfiri militants into Iraq in June, quickly seizing large swathes of land straddling the border between the two countries.