Mohammad-Ali Samadi, the spokesman for a government-orchestrated campaign to recruit suicide bombers said that Iran first developed the tactic during its eight-year war with Iraq, which left over a million people dead.
Samadis organisation, the Headquarters to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, is run by the IRGC in an effort to recruit potential suicide bombers. At a recent rally in the city of Shahroud, north-eastern Iran, it claimed to have signed up 1,000 volunteers for suicide attacks against the West and Israel.
The former regime of Saddam Hussein, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia disseminated negative propaganda against suicide operations to keep them apart from Palestinian culture, Samadi said.
Lebanese Hezbollah used its ties with Iran to adopt the Iranian model and utilised it successfully with light guns and light-weight short-range rockets, the senior IRGC officer said.
In October, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be wiped off the map and threatened the leaders of Muslim countries that developed ties with the Jewish state.
Earlier this month, Samadi told a state-run news agency that 50,000 people had enlisted for martyrdom-seeking operations throughout the country and were willing 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 him issue by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
