Defence Minister confirms Iran training suicide bombers

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Sep. 29 – Iran’s newly-installed Defence Minister announced that the Islamic Republic had volunteers for suicide bombing that enabled the country to stand up to foreign enemies, a state-run weekly reported. Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Sep. 29 – Iran’s newly-installed Defence Minister announced that the Islamic Republic had volunteers for suicide bombing that enabled the country to stand up to foreign enemies, a state-run weekly reported.

Brigadier General Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar, a veteran Revolutionary Guards commander, told a gathering of Guards commanders in Tehran, “The Iranian nation has martyrdom-seeking Bassij forces, and so there is no need for nuclear weapons”, according to Parto-Sokhan, an ultra-Islamist weekly close to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Bassij – affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – are hard-line Islamist vigilantes loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“A nation which has a spirit of devotion, sacrifice, self-forgoing, and martyrdom-seeking does not need nuclear weapons and can use its devoted forces to stand against the enemies and neutralise all their threats”, Defence Minister Mohammad-Najjar said.

The Defence Minister was the first commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Middle East Force in the 1980s, and personally oversaw the suicide operation that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut in October 1983.

“Our martyrs have shown the world powers that Islamic Iran is alive, dynamic, and willing to make the biggest sacrifices to defend its values and dignity”, Mohammad-Najjar said.

In July, Parto-Sokhan conducted a series of interviews with the commander of a military garrison that was opened in Iran to recruit and train volunteers for “martyrdom-seeking operations”.

Mohammad-Reza Jaafari, a general in the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), told the weekly that the new “Lovers of Martyrdom Garrison” (Gharargahe Asheghane Shahadat, in Persian) would recruit individuals willing to carry out suicide operations against Western targets.

Parto-Sokhan is published in the Shiite holy city of Qom by the Imam Khomeini Educational and Research Institute. The institute’s chairman, hard-line cleric Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, is regarded as the ideological mentor of President-elect Ahmadinejad. The two had a meeting with each other in Qom on Wednesday.