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Iran’s admission of its tragic mistake over the downed Ukrainian airliner reminds us who the real barbarians are
Tehran’s admission of responsibility over the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, just after it took of from the capital’s Imam Khomeini Airport not long after Iran had launched a missile strike against two US military bases in Iraq in retaliation for the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, marks an extraordinary denouement to one of the most telling and tragic episodes of recent times in this already tortured region.
It is rare indeed that a state embroiled in conflict should admit and apologise so fulsomely for such a tragic event as the accidental shooting down of a passenger airliner — doing so in the full knowledge that it will be weaponised against it by its adversaries at a time when its back is quite literally against the wall, beset on all sides by hostile forces and with its economy placed in a sanctions straitjacket after Trump unjustly and unilaterally withdrew from the P5+1 nuclear deal in 2018.
