Iran's Foreign Ministry Welcomes US Withdrawal from Iraq, Calls for Accountability

Iran's Foreign Ministry issued a statement congratulating the Iraqi people and government on the withdrawal of American occupying forces and other foreign forces from Iraq after two decades of military presence. The ministry described the development as a very important and necessary step toward consolidating Iraq's national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence.

The statement said the 23-year military presence of the United States and its allies in Iraq, which followed the US-led invasion on March 20, 2003, under the pretext of confronting weapons of mass destruction, had irreparable consequences for Iraq and the entire region. It listed these consequences as the killing of more than one million Iraqis, including tens of thousands of women and children, hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to Iraq's infrastructure, environmental destruction, war crimes such as the torture of Iraqi men and women at Abu Ghraib prison, and the groundwork for takfiri terrorism and ISIL in Iraq and the surrounding region.

The Islamic Republic of Iran honored the resistance and steadfastness of the Iraqi people against occupation, terrorism, and sectarianism, and stressed the need to respect Iraq's national sovereignty and territorial integrity. It recalled that the military presence of the United States and its allies in the region's countries has brought nothing but the promotion of violence, insecurity, division, and terrorism.

Iran's Foreign Ministry commemorated the memory of hundreds of thousands of martyrs on the path of confronting occupation and terrorism, especially Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani, and stressed the need to hold the US government accountable and question it for the crimes committed and damages inflicted on the people of Iraq and other countries during the occupation period. According to Mehr News, the statement was issued by Iran's Foreign Ministry.