TEHRAN – A senior member of the Iranian Parliament National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said on Sunday that joint plots orchestrated by Washington and Riyadh were root causes of recent riots in Iraq. 

Ala’eddin Boroujerdi said that Riyadh tried to push Iraq into anarchy on the threshold of the Arbaeen march and ritual to cover Saudi forces’ disgusting failures in Yemen. 

“Recent developments in Iraq are definitely a result of provocations manufactured out of Iraq in which the U.S. played a pivotal role,” he underscored. 

He went on to emphasize, “Iraq’s recent incidents are controllable and will fade soon without any influence on the largest world gathering of Arbaeen.” 

Iraq has been rocked by a new wave of protests over economic hardships and joblessness since October 1.

In stark contrast to claims that demonstrations are popular and spontaneous, new analyses have revealed that 79% of hashtags about protests in Iraq on Twitter originate from Saudi Arabia and only 6% are from inside Iraq. 

However, the timing of the start of the protests with the great march of Arbaeen arouses suspicions, as new findings show that Riyadh is resorting to cyberspace to provoke the public.

A new analysis, released on Thursday, shows that, despite all the claims which try to present the unrest in Iraq as a popular movement with no political intention or affiliation, only 6% of the calls for street demonstrations originated from Iraq and the dominant majority belonged to Saudi Arabia where almost 80% of the social media content is devised and posted.

It is not a new revelation that Saudi Arabia uses dozens of Twitter bots that their job in massive scale is to call protesters to join violent street rallies.

Even the volume of hashtags sent from Kuwait is bigger than Iraq, and 7% of pro-protest Tweets are from the tiny Arab country.

The UAE, Egypt, the U.S., and Yemen are the other countries where Tweets originated, promoting anti-government protests.

MJ/PA