Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said this Friday that the United States and Israel are the country’s “enemies” and that the law does not apply to Saudi Arabia, a country with which he resumed diplomatic relations in March after seven years without official ties.
“At the height of our dispute with Saudi Arabia, the leader of the revolution [ex-líder iraniano Ruhollah Khomeini] always stressed that we must not forget that the main enemies are the United States and Israel. We reject and do not accept that Saudi Arabia is considered our enemy,” he said in an interview with the official Syrian news agency SANA.
Riyadh and Tehran, leaders of the Sunni-Shia axis in the Middle East, recently reached a Chinese-brokered deal to restore relations formally severed since 2016, though the rivalry between them dates back decades.
“Today, the facts have become clear to many countries in the region, and the phobia of Iran that the American and Israeli aggressors spoke about was simply to sow terror in the region, it is an evil media machine of the enemy,” Ebrahim Raisi defended. .
In an interview published this Friday following a visit to a Syrian ally, the Iranian president also spoke of a “new and different global system” with entities such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or BRICS, both of which include Russia, China and India. .
“On the other hand, the possibilities of America and the West are constantly decreasing. Their role in the world has fallen, weakened and regressed (…). The United States used to frighten everyone with its military might,” Ebrahim Raisi said.