MOSCOW, June 12, /ITAR-TASS/. Prognosis for Iraq’s dramatic outcome has taken a practical contour and Moscow is concerned over the developments in that country, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.
“We are very worried with the events in Iraq,” he said. “We warned long ago that the misadventure, which the U.S. and Great Britain were the first to plunge into, would come to no good.”
He recalled that “eleven years ago the U.S. president announced the victory of democracy in Iraq... And since the events have been degrading exponentially and now Iraq’s unity is extremely vague.”
“Terrorism is in a free-for-all phase there as the occupying forces paid insufficient attention to it, due to intra-political processes, and did not encourage the national dialogue and were preoccupied exceptionally with their narrow interests,” Lavrov said.
“Because of the intra-political concerns inside the United States, the withdrawal of troops was taking place when the Iraqi security forces were unprepared in full for ensuring law and order in the whole country,” he said.
“In all the recent years we have persistently warned about the recklessness of this policy and unfortunately, our prognosis is coming true,” Lavrov said.
Russia’s foreign minister said that “Moscow is sympathetic with the Iraqi leadership and the Iraqis who have to restore peace and security in their own country.”
“Our Western partners’ actions have aroused lots of questions,” he said.
“The U.K. foreign secretary reportedly said that the events in Iraq were an illustration of the fact that lack of peace settlement in Syria had sparked a terrorist free-for-all in the entire region,” Lavrov said. “We know the ability of the British to distort and deflect just everything but I could not expect this level of cynicism even from them.”
“Events in Iraq are an illustration of a total failure of the misadventure once launched by the U.S and Great Britain and eventually breaking out of any control,” he said.
“I am hopeful that independent observers clearly understand what the whole story is about and they will not allow doing a snow job on the public opinion,” he concluded.