Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the Lieutenant Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), says all the enemies’ policies are aimed at toppling the Iranian government.
“The centrepiece of all these machinations, including any scenario orchestrated by the enemy and whatever policy adopted by them and put into practice, was to overthrow the [Islamic] System and bring back the rule of domineering powers into the fate of the Iranian nation and into the history of Iran,” said General Salami, as reported by Tasnim.
He said Iranians are people who grew up in tough battlefields and secured their dignity, power and grandeur while grappling with hardships.
He also reiterated that hegemonic powers bear animosity towards the Iranian nation.
The top general said the enemies wouldn’t have thought that Iran would be so glorious, great and invincible on the world stage 40 years after the triumph of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“Every single conspiracy engineered by them has helped boost and promote one dimension of our power,” he said.
“Today, we have an invaluable experience, and that is, we have grown up amid tough struggles. No nation becomes mature, tough and invincible on its own. When the war was imposed on Iran [by the former Iraqi regime in the 1980s], it resulted in the massive defence power that our nation has today,” he said.
“All major enemies are working in tandem and have vowed to deprive the Islamic Establishment of this overarching power,” the top general noted.
By trusting in God, he said, Iran kept the enemies’ dreams from coming true.
“When they besieged us, the beacons of science and knowledge began to glow in the country, and we managed to move neck and neck with modern countries in certain domains of cutting-edge technologies, so much so that the enemy put on its agenda the policy of putting the brakes on Iran’s scientific progress, even by assassinating [Iranian] scientists in the streets,” said the IRGC commander.
Elsewhere in his remarks, he underlined that the war between good and evil is full of wonders.
“This unequal battle has been a wonderful story full of great lessons for all humanity and history and all nations,” he said.
“Everybody would supply [former Iraqi dictator] Saddam [Hussein] with missiles to target Tehran, would give him aircraft that could disrupt the flow of our oil and energy. Iraq had weapons from all modern countries, but the Revolution, nation and the late Imam Khomeini, as the great leader of this nation, worked in tandem and managed to shatter that concentration [of arms],” said the senior commander.
“When our great leader held the flag in his hands, the battlefield changed. Instead of allowing the enemy to approach us, he approached the enemy. We moved towards our enemies; horizons opened up and fronts opened. The Hezbollah youth grew up in Lebanon, the army and Muslim youth in Syria, volunteer forces in Iraq inspired by the Revolution, Ansarullah in Yemen, the youth in Bahrain, […] and our enemies could only watch,” he said.
Emergence of Takfiris and ISIS
The top general also touched upon the emergence of Takfiris in Muslim territories.
“The enemies’ power had been exhausted and they were not able to use their forces. So, they formed Takfiri groups, but the followers of Islam and the Quran entered the scene and purged them from the territory. This showed the emergence of a new power called Islam and in the name of a great revolution, and today the enemy feels that it has lost parts of the territories that it dominated and feels it cannot take them back,” he said.
Sanctions and Using Economy as a Tool
General Salami further referred to the enemies’ new plots, saying, “Today, the enemy has pushed the war to other dimensions. The enemy feels today that it should make every effort, so it has gone into action by launching a major economic onslaught; but there is one reality: We have faced lots of threats and we are no strangers to threats.”
He further said the enemy wants to create the impression that members of some trade unions in Iran who have staged protests over livelihood issues and concerns over economy are against the Establishment, but that is not true.
He stressed that Iran’s plan is to defeat the enemy, and will do so.
