Iran parliament speaker says Mideast post-war order will exclude US

TEHRAN: Iran’s influential parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on Tuesday that the United States would not create the Middle East’s post-war order.

“The order here will change, but it will not be an order in which the will of the United States prevails,” Ghalibaf said in a recorded video interview, carried by Tasnim news agency and other media.

“This will be a regional, indigenous order.”

The speaker, a powerful figure in Iran and a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards, also denounced what he called a cycle of negotiations with the United States followed by military attacks on Iran, saying it would end.

“They (US and Israel) must know that we no longer accept this cycle,” said Ghalibaf.

Two days before Washington and Tehran were scheduled to hold technical talks, following three-rounds of Omani-mediated negotiations, the US and Israel launched a massive wave of strikes on the country.

The attacks on February 28, killed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggered a war that has spread across the Middle East.

Omani mediators had said there was “significant progress” in the talks, which had included discussions of Iran’s nuclear programme.

The strikes recalled the 12-day war in June last year, when Israel launched attacks just days before a planned sixth round of talks between Tehran and Washington.

The United States briefly joined those strikes, hitting Iranian nuclear sites.

“This cycle must be broken, meaning the threat must be removed from over the Islamic Republic and the region,” Ghalibafi said.