A few days after U.S. President Donald Trump had doubled down with his attacks on Italian Prime minister Meloni, motivating his fury with Rome’s denial of the Sigonella Air Base for strikes against Iran, NATO secretary general Mark Rutte told journalists that indeed, over 500 US flights took off from bases in Italy during the Iran war. Rutte’s statements turned the bipartisan support for Meloni domestically, into a confrontation with the Parliament, which demanded to know whether the Italian government authorized those flights, and, more importantly, prompted the government in Teheran to issue a statement identifying Italy as an enemy, an ally of the illegal U.S. war against Iran,
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei wrote on X that Italy and Romania were “explicitly named” by the NATO secretary general as participants in the aggression against Iran. He argued that the two countries, along with other European states that supported what he called the “American-Israeli aggression,” should explain “to their citizens and the world” why they had chosen to “collude in this blatant act of aggression.”
