In his recent article at the official website of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Shahin Gobadi highlighted the Iranian regime’s foreign ministry’s involvement in terrorism for decades.
For the Iranian regime, diplomacy and terrorism go hand-in-hand, as acknowledged by Ali Akbar Salehi, the regime’s former Foreign Minister and Head of the Atomic Energy Organization. He also stated that all the regime’s major agencies and ministries are involved in its policy of exporting terrorism.
He made this unprecedented admission in his January 1, 2022, interview with the state-run Akharin Khabar website, on the second anniversary of Qassem Soleimani, the eliminated commander of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Quds Force.
Salehi explained that the regime coordinated with Soleimani and the Quds Force to appoint ‘special’ ambassadors to Libya and Tunisia. He said, “In other words, our ambassadors to those countries should have been diplomats and have field experience at the same time.” In the case of ‘field experience’, this is a phrase that the regime uses to reference terrorist activities.
In another acknowledgment, Salehi stated how many tactics were used by the regime to infiltrate disturbances in other Arab countries. One such method was having officials posing as workers for Iran’s Red Crescent, a non-governmental humanitarian organization.
It is worth noting that Saeed Ghasemi, one of the former IRGC top commanders, revealed in 2019 an interview with the state-run internet channel, Aparat, that in the 90s, he had visited Bosnia to train Muslim fighters against the Serbs while wearing the Iranian Red Crescent uniform.
Salehi stated, “When conflicts happened in Libya, I consulted [Soleimani], and he told me to travel to Libya. This trip coincided with Gadhafi’s downfall, and the conflict had not fully ended. In Libya, I saw our friends at the Quds Force had provided the means to produce prosthesis with the help of the Red Crescent to help the revolutionary Libyan forces.”
Salehi went on to claim that the IRGC’s Quds Force isn’t just a military force, but also partakes in humanitarian aid and promoting cultural activities. However, in practice, the Quds Force’s idea of providing humanitarian aid is far from the truth. Scenes of Syrian children butchered by them, or innocent Iraqis who were decapitated showed the IRGC’s true colors to the world.
Salehi also acknowledged Soleimani’s destructive role in Iraq and the use of proxy terrorist groups to implement the regime’s doctrine of exporting ‘revolution’ to the region.
He explained how many officials in Iraq befriended Soleimani, remained in close contact with him, and were in assistance during his achievements in Iraq. These officials were also operatives working on behalf of the Iranian regime. According to the Iranian Resistance, around 30,000 agents in Iraq were found to have been on the regime’s payroll in the early 2000s.
Amid the regime’s factional feuding, Salehi’s successor, Mohammad Javad Zarif, had also acknowledged in a leaked interview in April 2021 that the regime’s ‘Foreign Ministry had a security structure’.
Zarif, who previously had regular meetings with Soleimani, stated that in the 1990s, the regime closed down the economic branch of the Foreign Ministry and replaced it with ‘more political-security orientations’ as part of a regional administration.
With the Iranian regime having agents disguised as officials based in Iraq throughout the early 2000s, it came as no surprise when it was discovered that even Europe had been infiltrated by terrorist agents posing as diplomats in the late 2010s.
In 2018, Vienna-based Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi, along with three accomplices, were arrested by European authorities for their terrorist attempt to bomb an Iranian Resistance rally in France. The men were later tried and convicted to lengthy prison sentences in 2021.
This startling admission reaffirms what the Iranian Resistance has underscored for four decades, that Tehran uses its diplomatic outposts as a hub for espionage and terrorism. As such, it is high time for the West to take firm action and shut down the regime’s embassies and expel its agents.
