Mr. Mohammad Mohaddessin, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of National Council of Resistance of Iran held an online conference on Iranian regime’s interference in the region on April 16. Below is the text of his remarks.
Remarks of Mr. Mohammad Mohaddessin, Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee of National Council of Resistance of Iran in online conference
Can Iran’s regional belligerence be rolled back?
April 16, 2015
According to the latest reports coming out of Iran, massive protests by the nation’s teachers are continuing to develop, encompassing 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces so far, including Tehran. There are more than one million teachers in the country, serving 13 million students, and they have widespread influence in Iranian society.
According to the latest reports coming out of Iran, massive protests by the nation’s teachers are continuing to develop, encompassing 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces so far, including Tehran. There are more than one million teachers in the country, serving 13 million students, and they have widespread influence in Iranian society.
Meanwhile labor strikes and protests also have taken on new dimensions, covering large parts of the country.
These are clear examples of widespread dissatisfaction throughout Iranian society and of the demand to overthrow the religious fascism ruling Iran.
Poverty, unemployment, rocketing inflation have been the results of the Iranian regime’s pursuit of regional influence and nuclear projects, and the people want to stop these trends.
Today the world and especially our region are faced with a major disaster in the form of fundamentalism and Islamic extremism with their epicenter in Tehran under the mullahs’ rule. The clerical regime has extended its interventions in recent years to Baghdad, Damascus and more recently the Yemeni capital of Sanaa. But this interference is not limited to these countries. Tehran’s apparatus is actively working to export terrorism and fundamentalism to Palestine and other Arab and Islamic countries such as Egypt, Sudan, Turkey and Afghanistan.
The main question here is how the international community can push back these interventions. Or should Iran’s hegemony in the region simply be accepted as a bitter reality? My short answer is that we can push back the regime’s wave of invasions in the region and free Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other countries from its occupation. Doing so would cost much more than many Westerners fear it would. Iran’s regime is extremely weak and fragile, although the regime would like the international community to believe the opposite: that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force is strong and mighty.
The terrorist Qods Force is not a powerful and invincible army, as it is portrayed. This force has spread itself in the region only because of the wrong foreign policies of Western nations, especially the United States. Through the years no barrier has existed against it except unarmed and defenseless people. And with the excuse of nuclear talks or fighting ISIS, this regime has been rewarded rather than being punished.
We have no doubt that if this regime is confronted with a firm policy, and if the international community and the countries of the region stand firm against its aggressions, the regime will necessarily withdraw to within the Iranian borders and then quickly will be overthrown by the Iranian people and resistance.
I draw your attention to four big and critical mistakes on Iran Over the past years,. These are factors for the current situation:
1- After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf war in 1991 we declared that Islamic fundamentalism was the new global threat to peace, democracy, and security of the Middle East and the entire world, and that its epicenter was in Iran. At the time, not only was due attention not given to this warning, but in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the Kuwait war, many Western governments paved the way for the Iranian regime. On the opposite side, they put pressure on its opposition, i.e. the Iranian resistance, and labeled it as terrorist. At that time, the US State Department authorities officially considered our warnings about the threat of fundamentalism to be exaggerations.
2- After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the danger of fundamentalism was clear for everyone. However once again, with the excuse that the perpetrators of September 11 were Sunni Muslims who had come from Arab countries, the heart of fundamentalism, i.e. the clerical regime was forgotten and Tehran continued the spread of fundamentalism in the midst of the Western fight against Al-Qaeda and the war with Afghanistan and Iraq.
3. The biggest mistake was that with the overthrow of the government in Iraq, the United States, rather than confronting the influence of the Iranian regime in Iraq, opened the gates through which Iranian spies, terrorists, and the mullahs flooded into the country. The US also disarmed and besieged the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), which was a strong political and cultural obstacle to fundamentalism, and subsequently in 2009 the US handed over their protection to Prime Minister Maliki, a mercenary of the Iranian regime. Handing over Iraq to Iran by the US government was the world’s greatest political disaster in the past 50 years. The danger of the Iranian regime’s meddling in Iraq is a hundred times higher than the danger of a nuclear bomb.
4. The West has also been silent in the fact of the massacre of the Syrian people by Bashar Assad and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
If each of these errors had not occurred the Iranian regime and the region would not be in their current situation; ISIS and Al Qaeda either would not have been formed or they would have been marginalized or small groups. The attack on Charlie Hebdo would not have happened. The Houthis would not have occupied Yemen. The situations in Libya and Palestine and other Islamic countries would have been different.
Development of a nuclear bomb is part of the regime’s policy for the export of terrorism and fundamentalism and a tool to exert hegemonic influence over the region. Some people mistakenly think that a firm policy against the regime in the region will cause the regime to refuse to sign an acceptable agreement in the nuclear negotiations. But on the contrary, just when the regime advances in the region, it demands more concessions on the nuclear issue, and when it loses ground it relinquishes demands.
Operation Decisive Storm was the first and most important regional act against the regime . Our detailed information from inside the regime shows that in this case the regime was quite surprised and did not expect such a reaction.
If this coalition in Yemen continues, there is no positive scenario for the regime. That is why it seeks ceasefire with all its power to maintain part of its position in Yemen in order to be able to exert its domination in the next step. The situation would have been different if the regime was confronted in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Today I declare that the entire region, particularly Yemen, Iraq and Syria, is an interconnected whole. Confrontational policy should not be confined to Yemen, and the regime must be evicted from Syria and Iraq as well. That is to say, its influence must be removed from the whole region.
With the continuation of the coalition, the crisis within the regime will escalate. The mullahs have lost their potential. We should not compare this regime to that of Khomeini in the 1980s. Its capacity for loss is very low and its vulnerability is very high.
Let’s mention a few points about developments in Yemen within the regime:
• The regime has heavily invested in it over the past 25 years. The Qods Force has long been training the Houthis and equipping them with weapons, and both politically and strategically it has followed their issues. The advances of Houthis from Saada toward Sanaa were completely planned and organized by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods Force.
• In the last year, Qods Force commanders were constantly traveling to Yemen and Houthis were present in Iran. In February 2015 a delegation of Houthis went to Iran and met with various organizations including the office of Khamenei, the Qods Force and other related organs. The issue of Yemen is under the auspices of Khamenei, and the Qods force follows this issue in direct communication with Khamenei. Many government agencies such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are active in this regard but they work under the auspices of the Qods Force.
• Based on the specific information of the Iranian resistance, Brigadier General Amiriyan is directly responsible for Yemen in the Qods Force.
• Following the start of the Decisive Storm operation and closure of previous means of aid to the Houthis, Tehran specifically has continued to help the Houthis in the following three areas:
1. Presence of Qods Force commanders In Yemen who are actually responsible for planning and for directing the Houthis.
2. Establishing the necessary communication systems such that the Houthis can communicate directly with the Qods Force in Tehran and get direction and guidance from there.
3. Dispatching more commanders and force from the Lebanese Hezbollah to help Ansarullah (Houthis): Given the intensification of war and confrontation, the presence of Iranians (specifically non-Arab forces) in Yemen has become more difficult, therefore, the focus has been on the deployment of members of Hezbollah who can maneuver and operate better than the Iranians given the current situation.
• Inside the regime, while all of the regime leaders such as Rafsanjani and Rouhani follow Khamenei’s lead in condemning the coalition and Operation Decisive Storm, and in using the strongest terms against the Saudi government But every day that passes, the differences and divisions within the regime about the performance of Khamenei and the Qods Force in Yemen increase and even within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, there are protests about this issue.
