After killing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Western powers no longer have an excuse for invading Middle Eastern countries, the ISNA news agency quoted Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast as saying.
“Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran believes that no excuse is left for foreign countries to send forces to the region to fight terrorism,” Mehmanparast said.
“We hope the event [bin Laden’s death] would end the war, conflict and killing of innocent people and help establish peace and calm in the region,” he said.
Bin Laden, the symbol of global terrorism who was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, has been killed in a helicopter raid on his compound some 50km from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The operation was carried out by a small special forces team of US Navy Seals in the early hours of Monday.
Mehmanparast said the operation showed that “there is no need to send a massive army to confront only one person.”
Less then a month after the 9/11 attacks, the United States sent its troops to Afghanistan in a bid to capture bin Laden and defeat al-Qaeda and Taliban as part of a so-called “global war on terror” declared by then-President George Bush.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq to remove its leader Saddam Hussein, who was accused of funding terrorist organizations and developing weapons of mass destruction.
MOSCOW, May 2 (RIA Novosti)