Iran rules out cooperation with US

He wouldn't be wrong.
Iran increasingly sceptical about 'murky' US intentions in Isis campaign

The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Kamenei, has denounced the US and ruled out military cooperation

the Guardian,

18 September, 2014

Iran has intensified its criticism of the US-led coaltion against the Islamic State (Isis), with key officials saying they doubt Washington intends to destroy the terrorist group.

Following Iran's exclusion from an international conference in Paris aimed at confronting Isis, senior government and military officials in Tehran have characterised the US efforts as a campaign for a further military presence in the Middle East, saying it will do little against the group and is doomed to fail.

Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, was quoted by the state-run Keyhan newspaper on Wednesday saying: "We have serious doubts that the US's intention is to obliterate [Isis]".

Iran's foreign ministry spokeswoman, Marzieh Afkham, said: "The pronounced goals of this coalition in the fight against terrorism are inconsistent with certain past and present deeds of its main architects and some of its members." According to the state-run Press TV, she said that any military intervention by the US-led coalition would be against international law.

The Iranian officials, previously quiet about US handling of the Isis threat, have come forward since the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made clear earlier in the week that there will be no military cooperation between Tehran and Washington, even though they are facing a common enemy. Khamenei said earlier this week that the US's "hands were dirty and intentions murky".

Iran's Revolutionary Guards have deployed members from their external arm – the Quds forces – in Iraq and Syria. Iranian forces led by the Quds's commander, Qassem Suleimani, are believed to have played a significant role in breaking the siege of Amerli, a town in northern Iraq, in recent months. They have also been coordinating with Kurdish peshmerga fighters and engaged in skirmishes near the Iranian border with Iraq, where the Isis fighters had been posing a direct threat.

Suleimani, who is a strong ally of Khamenei, has developed a strong influence in Iraq, especially among its Shia militias, over the past decade.

Iran is particularly irked by recent comments made by US secretary of state, John Kerry, who said in Ankara last week that Tehran was a state sponsor of terror and that it was not appropriate for the country to participate in the Paris meeting.

Senior French diplomats have indicated that Iran's presence at the conference was blocked by its political rival in the region, Saudi Arabia.

"Under the circumstances, at this moment in time, it would not be right for any number of reasons. It would not be appropriate given the many other issues that are on the table in Syria and elsewhere," Kerry said when asked about the prospects of having Iran in the conference.

Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), speaking to the Guardian after attending a conference in Riyadh where the Iranain involvement had been discussed, said that the distrust between Tehran and the Persian Gulf Arabs remained very high.

"The tone of the remarks at the conference I attended in Riyadh for the past two days was decisively against any cooperation with Iran," he told the Guardian. "The distrust with Iran remains very high from the Gulf Arabs, they would not have been pleased had Iran been invited to the Paris meeting."

Fitzpatrick said he is of the view that tacit cooperation with Iran agianst Isis makes sense but that those who believe that countries at the centre of the problem, like Iran, also really have to part of the solution are very much a minority among Arab leaders.

Despite American and Iranian denials of any military cooperation, the common battlefield in Iraq has made it difficult for the two countries not to cooperate, at least indirectly.

Fitzpatrick said that any such cooperation would not be likely to reach the extent to which Iran and the US shared intelligence to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan up until 2002. Despite such cooperation at that time, then US president, George W Bush, branded Iran as "an exis of evil", prompting outrage in Tehran.

"Iranians raise that at every opportunity, the sense of betrayal. Just after having assisted the US in ousting the Taliban they were branded evil; that shaped their memory and left a wound that is still festering," Fitzpatrick said.