Mullahs In Iran Are Recruiting Suicide Bombers For Iraq Attacks
By The US Alliance For Democratic Iran (06/09/04)
There were more troubling reports coming from various corners of Iran’s political landscape last week. Iran’s refusal to allow U.N. inspectors visit military sites suspected of being part of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and President Khatami’s warning Thursday that Iran might resume uranium enrichment and halt snap inspections of its nuclear sites are certainly alarming.
Equally disturbing, the rubber-stamp parliament in Iran began its seventh session last Thursday with chants of "Death to America" and "Death to the occupiers of Iraq". One new deputy, former Revolutionary Guards member Mehdi Kouchakzadeh, led his colleagues in a chorus of anti-U.S. slogans which he said would "attract attention to the main task of the parliament."
Nonetheless, the most ominous news from Iran last week has to do with the formation of Karbala-bound Battalions tasked with carrying out suicide attacks against the Coalition forces in Iraq.
Iran is launching this requiting campaign under the religious pretext of defending the Muslim holy shrines against the infidels. In reality, this is a part of mullahs’ sinister goal of expanding their Khomeini-style theocracy into Iraq. Iran’s ruling regime has frequently and skillfully used the cloak of religion to legitimize its tyranny and advance its political and diplomatic goals. And this is just another example.
For the fourth time in little over a week, several hundred “students” demonstrated outside the British embassy in Tehran last Sunday in a government-sanctioned protest against “the actions of U.S.-led forces in Iraq.” The students, who belonged to the paramilitary force, the Bassij, also condemned “damage to a Shiite Muslim shrine in Iraq.”
The mullahs’ track record shows they have no heartfelt affinity for the sacred Muslim shrines. In 1990’s, the regime was behind a bomb explosion inside the most revered Shiite Shrine in Iran, that of Imam Reza, in city of Mashad. The explosion, which killed and wounded dozens, was promptly blamed on the Mujahedeen opposition group. Several years later, government officials finally admitted that Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MIOS) had planted the bomb and had the blessing of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to do so. And now Khamenei, shedding crocodile tears for "the sanctity of (the holy shrines in Iraq),” calls for a “national day of mourning.”
That was not all. A government-sponsored website in Iran quoted last week a member of a state-run paramilitary student organization as saying that: “Tens of students from the University of Science and Technology in Iran will be sent to Karbala on Thursday, May 27, as the advance party of the Karbala-bound Battalion to join the defenders of the holy shrines in the city and to fight the occupiers of Islamic lands.”
The website, Rouydad, added that state-organized groups such as Hezbollah and Bassij “have begun forming battalions of suicide bombers against Coalition forces in Iraq.” These moves “have gone beyond press releases in recent days and have entered operational stages,” according to the website.
It also quoted an official of the Revolutionary Guards, Hassan Abbassi, as saying, “Our main weapon is jihad… and through it, we are shaking the foundations of the infidels.”
He added, “Reconnaissance has been done on 29 weak points in America and the West to prepare attacks on them. Our plans aim at 6,000 nuclear warheads in America, so that they would blow up. By doing reconnaissance on their weaknesses, we will pass on the information to guerrilla groups and take action through them.” “We have set up a department to deal with Britain and the collapse (of the British government) is on the agenda.”
Meanwhile, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, the terror master, who directed the Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s and is believed to have coordinated the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barrack in Beirut, told the Arab satellite television network, Aljazeera, that armed attacks against occupation in Iraq is an Islamic resistance. Now a top advisor to President Khatami, Mohtashamipour was speaking in the ceremony marking the “Fourth anniversary of Liberation of Southern Lebanon,” where he demanded the opening of all Iraqi borders to the Enteharyoun (suicide bombers).
Contrary to assertions made by Tehran’s friends in some EU capitals that the mullahs’ are interested in a stable and secure Iraq, the mullahs’ tentacles of extremism and fundamentalism are fast spreading there. Blinded by billions of dollars worth of trade, these self-interested Europeans have been misreading the mullahs in the past quarter century and still do.
The sooner we acknowledge that Tehran has launched a multi-faceted, long-term campaign in Iraq, the better we can neutralize it. It is a mistake to downplay Tehran's mischief in Iraq and rely on its "good will". This policy must be corrected before “battalions of suicide bombers” from Iran strike.
(Printer friendly version) 
