- TEHRAN -- More than 10,000
Iranian revolutionary militia chanted "Death to America" outside
the former US embassy in Tehran on Sunday, wishing defeat in Iraq on the
"Great Satan."
-
- "The region will only see peace and calm when the
occupiers get out," Yahya Rahim Safavi, head of both the elite Revolutionary
Guards Corps and the Bassij militia, told the crowd of men and women who
had been bussed to the city centre compound.
-
- "We hope that the US is dealt a humiliating defeat
in Iraq, so the US warmonger administration won't get re-elected to send
US children to the Iraqi quagmire," he added.
-
- "The attack on Islam has begun, but the future of
Islam is to spread peace and security throughout the world," Safavi
said, standing behind a symbolic trench made of sandbags in front of the
main entrance to the former embassy.
-
- The Bassiji, the men wearing camouflage fatigues and
the women in the all-embracing black chador, who according to their own
estimate numbered around 15 000, chanted the usual slogans of "Death
to America" and "Death to Israel."
-
- On November 4, 1979, in the wake of Iran's Islamic revolution,
a group of Islamist students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held
about 50 diplomats hostage there for 444 days.
-
- The hostage crisis led to the suspension of diplomatic
ties between Washington and Tehran, which has endured despite attempts
at reconciliation.
-
- The United States remains the Islamic Republic's principal
"enemy", along with Israel. The former US embassy is now a Revolutionary
Guards base with a museum, a training centre and a forum for anti-American
rallies.
-
- The Americans have started "a new front in Iraq...to
dominate the Islamic world, and execute the Zionist regime's Nile to Euphrates
strategy," Safavi said, referring to Israel's alleged ambitions.
-
- "The occupation of Iraq is the second tragedy in
the Islamic and Arab world," he added, the first being the fate of
the Palestinians.
-
- The Americans not only invaded Iran's neighbour "to
dictate their policy" worldwide and to take over Iraqi energy resources,
but also "to save the Zionists from their inescapable death,"
Safavi said.
-
- The Bassiji "army of 20 million" - official
figures give 10 million - vows absolute loyalty to the founder of the Islamic
revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor, Iran's supreme
leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
-
-
- http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1452957,00.html
|
