Ayatollah Khamenei. Image Credit: Tasnim News, CC BY 4.0.
Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), boasted that Iran had “built power” to confront the US this week.
“We have built power to defeat the US. When we build power [to confront] man’s largest military empire, i.e. the US, small powers like the Zionist regime are no longer counted in our equations”, Salami was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency.
The “Zionist regime” is a shorthand for Israel commonly used by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Salami claimed that Iran no longer saw the US as a threat following the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.
Salami’s latest boasting came as Iran announced the planned resumption of talks to restore the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018.
The IRGC is a branch of the Iranian military, called an “industrial empire with political clout” by Reuters.
Since 1979, the Revolutionary Guards have been linked to terror attacks, hostage takings, domestic human rights abuses and the arming of militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
The IRGC has been implicated in malign activity against the UK, including the detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, attacks on UK shipping, and the stockpiling of weapons in northwest London.
The group has not yet been proscribed by the UK government.