Tehran, March 08: Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Monday that US and British forces are fomenting terrorism in the region.
“I accuse the US, Britain and their forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan of fomenting terrorist acts in the region,” Mottaki told a regional energy conference in Tehran.
Mottaki’s comments came as US Defence Secretary Robert Gates made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad other Iranian officials have repeatedly called for the withdrawal of US-led forces from Afghanistan, saying their presence is stoking the Taliban insurgency.
Ahmadinejad is not visiting Afghanistan on Monday, an official at his office said, after local news agency Mehr reported he was scheduled to make a one-day trip to Kabul.
But despite their rivalry, Washington and Tehran are both sworn enemies of Taliban.
The United States has made a number of efforts to involve all of Afghanistan’s neighbours, including Iran, in restoring stability to the country.
But they have been complicated by the lack of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington and the standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Iran, which has close ethnic and religious ties with Afghanistan, has long suffered from the effects of opium production in its eastern neighbour, with easily available heroin fuelling a rise in drug use at home.
On Saturday Ahmadinejad dismissed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States as a “big lie,” state media reported.
Ahmadinejad has on several occasions questioned the accepted version of the terror strikes on New York and Washington carried out by Al-Qaeda militants which killed nearly 3,000 people.
“September 11 was a big lie paving the way for the invasion of Afghanistan under the pretext of fighting terrorism,” he was quoted as saying by the state broadcaster.
Ahmadinejad also described the airborne attacks on the World Trade Center twin towers as a “scenario and a complex act of intelligence” services.
Meanwhile General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, charged Sunday that Iran is becoming a “thugocracy” in attempts to suppress popular anger over last year’s contested presidential vote results.
“I think you’ve heard it said by pundits that Iran has gone from being a theocracy to a thugocracy,” Petraeus, whose command stretches from Egypt to Pakistan and includes Iran, said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
“And that is again because of the emergence of this reform movement of the citizens who are outraged at the hijacking of the election that took place back last summer.”
Petraeus said it was not clear whether Tehran had definitively decided to pursue nuclear weapons.
But he said such a decision was “a little bit immaterial at this point in time, because all of the components of a program to produce nuclear weapons… have been proceeding.”
The United States is working with its UN Security Council veto-wielding partners — France, Britain, China and Russia — as well as Germany, to come up with new sanctions against Iran. Tehran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Petraeus said Iranian actions were making it easier for the United States to build a coalition and added: “President Ahmadinejad is often our best recruiting officer.”
Iranian authorities have freed five men, including reformist journalists and aides of opposition leaders, on bail after some of them paid hefty sureties, an opposition website reported late on Sunday.
Abdollah Momeni, Mehdi Forzandehpour, Ehsan Mehrabi, Akbar Montajabi and Vahid Pourostad were behind bars after they were detained as part of a crackdown on supporters of opposition leaders.
—Agencies