Iran’s Revolutionary Guards rally to beleaguered President-elect

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Jul. 6 – The top brass of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps vowed to defend the country’s newly-elected ultra-conservative President in the face of “smear campaigns”, calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “a model Islamist”. “It’s necessary to declare the readiness of the green-uniform Guards and capable Bassijis … to support and cooperate with Your Excellency’s serving government,” Major General Rahim Safavi, Commandant General of the … Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Jul. 6 – The top brass of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps vowed to defend the country’s newly-elected ultra-conservative President in the face of “smear campaigns”, calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “a model Islamist”.

“It’s necessary to declare the readiness of the green-uniform Guards and capable Bassijis … to support and cooperate with Your Excellency’s serving government,” Major General Rahim Safavi, Commandant General of the Revolutionary Guards, said in a congratulatory message to Ahmadinejad.

The hard-line Revolutionary Guards Corps is the ideological army loyal to the Supreme Leader and committed to “the export of Islamic revolution around the world”, according to its charter. The Guards and the paramilitary Bassij, a force of Islamic vigilantes, have the task of “defending the Islamic revolution in the face of foreign and domestic threats”.

In a speech at the conference of Bassij commanders in Tehran, the Revolutionary Guards’ Second-in-Command Brig. Gen. Mohammad-Baqer Zolqadr said, “With the U.S. army on our borders, if the turnout had been low in this election, the enemy’s appetite would have been wetted”.

Zolqadr said that the outcome of the election “fulfilled all the objectives of the Supreme Leader”. He played a key role in organizing the 300,000-strong force of IRGC and the Bassij to influence the outcome of the elections through massive frauds.

“The world had been deluded into believing that the Iranian people don’t support the Islamic Republic. They made a lot of propaganda about this and some of these lackeys even called for a referendum and said the Iranian people are ready for regime change”, he said.

Zolqadr, who has been implicated in several terror attacks abroad and in the murder of prominent dissidents inside the country, said the new president “must choose pious and ethical men for his cabinet and pay no attention to political groups lobbying for more cabinet chairs”.

The Revolutionary Guards’ commanders’ praise for the new Iranian president came as Ahmadinejad broke his silence and dismissed the plethora of allegations over his past as “baseless” claims. He denied that he had any role in the slaying of Iranian dissidents in Vienna. He has also rejected separate accusations of being involved in the 1979 hostage-taking of Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran – claims made by several of the former captives.