Is the escalation between Iran and the United States marking time? Tehran seemed in any case to play the appeasement, Sunday January 12, with Washington. Even if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian supreme guide, denounced the "corrupt presence" of the United States in the Middle East, and even if the American president Donald Trump maintained the pressure with a new warning to the 'Iran.
In this tense climate, the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim ben Hamad Al-Thani, whose country is an ally of Washington but maintains good relations with Iran, met Iranian President Hassan Rohani and Ali on Sunday in Tehran. Khamenei.
"We agreed (...) that the only solution to (the) crisis is de-escalation and dialogue," said the emir. The situation calls for "more than ever a strengthening of relations between states" in the region, said Ali Khamenei.
Hassan Rohani also met with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, whose country has offered his good offices in an attempt to bring Iran and Tehran's rival Iran and the United States' great ally closer to Saudi Arabia.
Lasting calm still far from being achieved
In Washington, Pentagon chief Mark Esper said Donald Trump was still ready to speak to Iran "without preconditions". But true to his habit of muddying the waters, Donald Trump almost at the same time issued a new warning "to the leaders of Iran".
"Do not kill your protesters," he tweeted. "The world is watching. More importantly, the United States is watching." The day before, he had warned Tehran against "another massacre of peaceful demonstrators", in reference to the protest movement violently repressed in Iran in November.
Saturday's demonstration in Tehran sparked a new diplomatic hitch between London and Tehran, after a brief arrest by British ambassador Rob Macaire in the vicinity of the rally.
The "mistaken" strike on Tehran's Ukraine Airlines flight (176 dead) is the worst Iranian civil aviation disaster since 1988 and the Iran Air Airbus tragedy (290 dead) that the United States claims to have shot down by mistake over the Gulf.
On Sunday, the leader of the Revolutionary Guards, the Iranian ideological army, Major General Hossein Salami, testified before Parliament on the tragedy and the January 8 strikes. He made sharp comments about these strikes with earlier martial declarations. The objective was not "to kill enemy soldiers".
As a sign that lasting appeasement is still far from being achieved, eight rockets, of unknown origin, fell on Sunday on a base sheltering American soldiers north of Baghdad, without causing an American victim, according to Iraqi military sources. There were four Iraqi casualties.
With AFP
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