to report «iusnews»; In a statement, Iran's Foreign Ministry congratulated the Iraqi people and government on the withdrawal of American occupying forces and other foreign forces from Iraq after two decades of disastrous military presence, describing the development as a very important and necessary step toward consolidating Iraq's national sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.
The statement said the tragedy of the 23-year military presence of the United States and its allies in Iraq, which followed the American military invasion of the country on March 20, 2003, under the false pretext of confronting "weapons of mass destruction," had irreparable consequences for Iraq and the entire region.
These consequences included the killing of more than one million Iraqis, including tens of thousands of innocent women and children, hundreds of billions of dollars in material damage to Iraq's material, security and governmental infrastructure, environmental destruction, heinous war crimes such as the torture of Iraqi men and women in Abu Ghraib prison, and the groundwork for takfiri terrorism and ISIL in Iraq and the surrounding region.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, while honouring the resistance and steadfastness of the Iraqi people against occupation, terrorism and sectarianism, 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, while commemorating the memory of hundreds of thousands of martyrs on the path of confronting occupation and terrorism, especially the martyrs Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani, 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.