The United States did not invite Iran to Tuesday’s UN summit on combating ISIS and other violent extremist groups because it still designates Iran itself as a state sponsor of terrorism, The Guardian reported.
US State Department officials confirmed that Iran’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism was the reason for its exclusion from the countering ISIS summit being chaired by Obama on Tuesday.
Iran was first designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the State Department in 1984 and the designation has been rolled over each year. The latest State Department report said: “Iran continued its terrorist-related activity in 2014, including support for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, Lebanese Hezbollah, and various groups in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.”
The US also accused Iran of increasing assistance to Iraqi Shia militias, one of which was designated a terrorist organisation, “in response to the ISIS in Iraq and the Levant incursion into Iraq, and has continued to support other militia groups in the region”.
Ilan Goldenberg, a former senior State Department official who is now Middle East director at the Center for a New American Security think tank, said that the invocation of the state sponsor status was largely a matter of discretion and covered a host of underlying political problems.
“Politically, it is too soon for both sides,” Goldenberg said. “We still have the Arabs to manage. If we invite in the Iranians we anger the Saudis and the other Gulf states. And for political reasons, too, since the nuclear deal, the administration has tacked to the right.” He added that in Iran, the Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had declared himself opposed to greater engagement with Iran beyond the nuclear deal.
Speaking to Iran policy analysts in New York on Sunday, Rouhani indicated his views on combating ISIS were closer to Russians than to the West, insisting that priority be given to fighting the extremist group first without weakening the Assad regime in Damascus. Only after that, he said, should reform in Damascus be addressed.