The official website of Iran’s Supreme Leader has published interviews with General Ghasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ expeditionary Quds Force, and Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Lebanon's Hezbollah — a clear attempt to flaunt the Islamic Republic’s proxies in the region amidst an increasingly tense political climate.
The posts, which include an unprecedented interview with Soleimani, appeared on the website on October 1, and send a clear message that Iran has no intention of surrendering to the demands of the United States and Israel.
Although the interviews repeat pronouncements made by the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah officials in the past, they reiterate the extent to which the Islamic Republic and the Lebanese Hezbollah have become closely intertwined. In his interview, Soleimani remembers how he and Imad Mughniyeh, the head of Hezbollah’s military wing, held an exclusive meeting in 2006 during the 33-day war between Israel and Hezbollah to make preparations to evacuate Nasrallah to another location. And in his interview, Nasrallah says that when commanders of Hezbollah met with Ayatollah Khamenei, they were so impressed with the Supreme Leader that they cried and kissed his hand. When one of them “bent down to kiss his feet, he did not allow it,” he said.
The Soleimani interview focused on the 33-day war with Israel, which inflicted extensive damage on Hezbollah. Later Hassan Nasrallah said that had he known that taking two Israeli soldiers captive would lead to such a war he would have never have ordered it.
On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah fighters fired rockets at Israeli border towns and launched an anti-tank missile attack on two armored vehicles patrolling the Israeli side of the border fence. The ambush left three soldiers dead and two Israeli soldiers were taken hostage. In his interview, Soleimani is profuse in his praise for Imad Mughniyeh, the commander of Hezbollah’s operations, who was assassinated in 2008. “I don’t know what title can describe him, I wonder if I can use the title General, which has become popular today,” Soleimani said. “The titles ‘general’ and ‘brigadier general’ are often used in our country. But he was beyond those titles; he was a general, in the true sense of the word... One of Imad Mughniyeh’s features was his meticulousness and his attention to detail. Hence, since he usually devised the operations himself carefully, the outlining of the plan was by him, and so was the implementation of it. And Imad came out victorious.”
At the time, the director general of Israel’s foreign ministry claimed that when the plane carrying Ali Larijani — the current speaker of the parliament who was at the time the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council — was at Beirut’s airport, the captured Israeli soldiers were put on to the same plane.
“I was there!”
The interview with Soleimani was a way of showing that he was present during Hezbollah’s operations at the time. He says that he was in Syria when the 33-day war started and on the very first day, Imad Mughniyeh came and took him to Lebanon via a “secret” way.
After Hezbollah’s attack, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went on TV on the same day and announced that he had ordered the launch of a war that would “annihilate” the Lebanese Hezbollah. In his interview, Soleimani does not hide the fact that Hezbollah suffered extensive damages and a high number of casualties. “The war was a different one; a technological and precise war,” he says. “Twelve-storey buildings were knocked down by a bomb. The targets were chosen with precision. In the meantime, when the war’s target had moved from Hezbollah to the Shia community in general, the situation was totally different in Shia-populated villages compared with a village where our Christian or Sunni brothers were living. That is, in one place people were safe and had their normal lives, smoking their hookahs, whereas in another place, thousands of bullets were fired.”
Soleimani says he returned to Iran a week after the war started to report to a meeting with the Supreme Leader and the heads of the three branches of the government. It was, he says, “a sad and bitter report” that showed “no prospect of victory.” But then, after listening to Soleimani, Ayatollah Khamenei conceded that it was indeed a difficult war, but he compared it to the Battle of Khandaq (“Trench”) during the early days of Islam, when the Prophet Mohammad and his outnumbered followers defeated a coalition of Arab and Jewish tribes in 627 AD.
Soleimani says Ayatollah Khamenei told him in that meeting, “‘It seems to me that Israel had prepared this project in advance, and wanted to conduct a raid to destroy Hezbollah by launching a surprise attack. The action of Hezbollah—capturing two Zionist soldiers — disrupted the surprise plan.’ I didn’t have this information; Nasrallah didn’t have this information; Imad didn’t have this information. None of us had this information.”
Soleimani added that some people might ask, “‘Why did Hezbollah endanger the whole Shia community by capturing two Zionists?’ But [Khamenei’s] perspective was promising and important, because by seizing two captives, Hezbollah had saved not only itself from complete destruction, but also the Lebanese nation.”
Hassan Nasrallah: Khamenei has given Israel “extra time”
Hassan Nasrallah’s interview, however, was more dedicated to praising Ayatollah Khamenei. For instance, he claims that Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, chose Khamenei, who was then the president of Iran, as his representative to Hezbollah in its early days, without mentioning other Iranian figures such as Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, who advocated the export of the Islamic Revolution and who is regarded to be the founder of the Lebanese Hezbollah.
According to Nasrallah, when Khamenei became Supreme Leader after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Nasrallah met with Khamenei and told him: “‘We would like to ask you to appoint a representative, so that we do not disturb you continuously.’ At this moment, the Leader smiled and said: ‘I am still young and I have time, God willing. I pay special attention to the issues of the region and the resistance and therefore we will remain in direct contact with each other.’"
In 2016, Ayatollah Khamenei predicted that Israel would not exist “25 years from now.” When asked about this prediction, Nasrallah said, “I was not personally surprised by the remarks made by Ayatollah Khamenei, because we had heard similar statements in our private meetings in the previous years, especially in 2000, after the victory over the Zionist regime. We paid a visit to Ayatollah Khamenei a few months after the victory, and he was very delighted about the victory. We spoke about the future. At that time, he said: ‘If the Palestinian people, the Resistance in Lebanon, and the nations of the region perform their duties appropriately, and we continue down this path, then certainly Israel cannot last for a long time in the region.’ At that time, he mentioned something less than 25 years.”
The fact that the reference to “25 years” has remained the same and yet 16 years have passed since Khamenei’s first prediction does not perturb Nasrallah. “So when I heard the Leader’s 25 years remark, I concluded that he has given Israel extra time,” he says. “That's why I was not surprised. On the other hand, it should be mentioned that the Leader's statement on Israel is absolutely serious. According to our experiences, some of which I already mentioned, we believe that the Leader is a person endorsed by Allah, the Almighty, and that what His Eminence states sometimes emerges from some other source — as happened in the 33-day war. It should be noted that all data, investigations and information show that such an event [the elimination of Israel] will occur, but the realization of this matter is not unconditional, and it will happen under certain conditions. Therefore, if we resist and continue on the path we have taken, factual and field conditions indicate that Israel will not be able to remain in the region over the next 25 years.”
The timing of the release of the two interviews appears to be a deliberate strategy on behalf of Iran’s Islamic regime: It has not changed how it views its role in the region, particularly with regard to the demise of Israel, and it wants the world to know.
Interested in writing for IranWire?
Share your stories.
comments