Iran’s senior officials to honour suicide bombers in ceremony

Iran Focus: a pro-MEK website

Volunteers for suicide bombing operations will be honoured during a ceremony attended by senior Iranian government officials later this month, the spokesman for the “Headquarters for Commemoration of Martyrs of Global Islamic Movement” said on Sunday.

The gathering which will take place in Tehran on October 30 has been entitled “Men of the Sun”, Mohammad-Ali Samadi announced in an interview with the state-owned Mehr news agency. READ MORE

Samadi said that forms would be provided to attendees to volunteer for suicide operations, adding, “Until now, 40,000 people have signed up for martyrdom-seeking operations and three battalions of volunteers for these operations have been formed and the formation of more battalions will be announced in due course”.

Last week, a top general of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) issued a direct threat to the United States and its allies, warning that the Islamic Republic had identified “all the weak points of our enemies” and has suicide operation volunteers “ready to strike at these sensitive locations” in retaliation to any attack.

“We know all of the enemies’ weak points and what to do against them. Today, we have martyrdom-seeking individuals who are ready to strike at these sensitive points”, Brigadier General Mohammad Kossari, who heads the Security Bureau of Iran’s Armed Forces, told the state-run news agency ILNA.

Last month, 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.

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 IRGC - 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.

“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 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.