By Alicia Powe.
A senior Iranian official warned Wednesday that the “outbreak of World War III” is coming in the near future and will be sparked by terrorists.
“The threat of the outbreak of the third world war by the terrorists is serious,” Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the chairman of Iran’s powerful Expediency Council, said in a meeting with Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni who was in Tehran this week.
Rafsanjani accused the United States and NATO for cultivating the conditions that will lead to World War III.
“The U.S. and the NATO had invaded Afghanistan to uproot terrorism and narcotics,” he said. “We saw that terrorism expanded in the form of the ISIL, Boko Haram and Al-Nusra Front to remote parts of the world from Al-Qaeda and Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Rafsanjani demanded that the U.S. and other Western countries “stop their support for the terrorist groups” in the region.
Iran and the United States the United States and Iran have are allies in the war to defeat the ISIS in Iraq, but are on opposite sides of multiple ethnic wars in Syria, Yemen and other parts of the Middle East.
Italy’s Gentiloni embraced Rafsanjani’s comments.
“In my meetings with Iranian and Italian officials I will mention this and I hope that your proposal will be a starting point in inflicting a historical defeat on the terrorists in different human societies,” he said.
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran recognized the dangers of the expansion of terrorism but did not directly state Iran’s efforts against it.
“Terrorism and insecurity is an epidemic disease which doesn’t belong to a special region, and efforts should be made to encounter extremism and violence to prevent its spread and we shouldn’t allow any innocent person, regardless of his/her nationality and religion, to become a victim of the terrorist groups,” Rouhani said following his own meeting with Gentiloni
