Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Nov. 17 Fifty thousand Iranians have signed up for martyrdom-seeking operations and 1,000 of them have already been organised into operational units, Mohammad-Ali Samadi, the spokesman for a government-orchestrated campaign to recruit suicide bombers told an Iranian news agency. Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Nov. 17 Fifty thousand Iranians have signed up for martyrdom-seeking operations and 1,000 of them have already been organised into operational units, Mohammad-Ali Samadi, the spokesman for a government-orchestrated campaign to recruit suicide bombers told an Iranian news agency.
Samadi was speaking a day after a rally on Tuesday in the city of Shahroud, north-east Iran, where 1,000 volunteers signed up for suicide attacks against the West and Israel. A video film of the full speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on October 26, in which he called for Israel to be wiped off the map and threatened the leaders of other Muslim countries, was shown to the audience.
The rally, dubbed Palestinian Intifada and Martyrdom-seeking, was organised by the Headquarters to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement on campus at the Industrial University of Shahroud.
Up till now, 50,000 people have signed up for martyrdom-seeking operations throughout the country. Of these people, 1,000 have been organised into garrisons, Samadi told the Mehr news agency, which is run by the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Samadi is a senior officer of the Revolutionary Guards and his organisation is run by the IRGC in an effort to recruit potential suicide bombers. The representative of the militant Palestinian group, Hamas, in Iran, Abu Othmama, addressed the rally in Shahroud.
Similar rallies have been held in the Iranian capital Tehran, as well as Tabriz and Bushehr.
A film on the latest suicide operation in the Occupied Territories, carried out by Hassan Abu-Zaid, was shown at the rally and was greeted with great enthusiasm, the news agency reported.
Earlier this month, radical fanatics signed up for suicide operations in Tehran to mark the end of the month of Ramadan.
Samadi had previously announced that 40,000 volunteers for suicide bombing operations had enlisted to attack targets on the orders of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The groups organisers previously said that their targets were three-fold; U.S.-led forces in Iraq, Jews in Israel, and Salman Rushdie, who still has a fatwa against his head issue by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
