Every day, the world is becoming more familiar with the destructive role Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in causing war and chaos in the region.

This reality has become so evident that politicians and lawmakers are describing the West’s continued dithering in proscribing the IRGC as political disgrace and backwardness. 

Many leaders, parliamentarians, and political figures around the world have acknowledged that the IRGC is the main and pivotal organ of domestic repression, warmongering in the region, and the expansion of hostage-taking and assassination in Europe and America.

Three decades ago, Mohsen Rafiqdoust, the former Minister of the IRGC, explicitly confessed to the regime’s involvement in the explosion of the headquarters of American and French servicemen in Beirut and the killing of 400 American and French military and non-military personnel, and said, “Those explosive materials that were combined with that ideology sent 400 officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers to hell at the Marines barracks. Both the TNT was Iranian and its ideology had come from Iran.” (Source: Resalat newspaper July 20, 1991)

This rhetoric continues until today. On November 8, the state-run Asr-e-Iran website quoted Rafiqdoust as saying, “In the region, we have hostages who, if there is a possibility of an attack against us, we can eliminate them within half an hour or an hour.”

On November 9, the state-run Sharq newspaper reported that Hossein Shariatmadari, a representative of regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei in the Kayhan newspaper, described Rafiqdoust’s statements as “resulting from inaccuracy and negligence in the use of common political and military terms and phrases,” and wrote, “It is possible to assume that by ‘hostages we have,’ he meant the enemy’s military bases in the region and their economic arteries, as well as their sensitive and strategic centers.”

Subsequently, Rafiqdoust, in a sarcastic manner, retracted his statement and said, “By ‘hostages we have’ in the region, I first meant the Zionist regime itself, which will be wiped out if it attacks our nation, and second, the US military bases in the region.” (Source: Tabnak newspaper, November 10)

The mullahs’ regime constantly tries to extort the world through terrorism and hostage-taking, even turning it into a revenue stream for the Quds Force and its proxy forces.

On January 26, 2020, in an article, with titled “By Taking Americans Hostage, We Can Generate $54 Billion in Revenue,” the state-run Bahar News website quoted Hassan Abbasi, an IRGC officer, as saying, “If you want the problem of sanctions to be resolved, every now and then, capture ten to twenty Americans and demand one billion dollars for each of them. If you receive one billion dollars per week, it will amount to $51 billion annually.”

These proposals reflect the nature of a regime that is trying to solve its domestic problems through crime, hostage-taking, and terrorism. On July 15, 2015, Mohsen Rezaee, the first commander of the IRGC, said, “If the Americans want to have an ill intention towards Iran and contemplate a military attack, rest assured that in the first week, we will capture at least a thousand Americans as hostages, and at that time, they will have to pay several billion dollars for the release of each one. At that time, our economic problem may also be resolved.”

Source: IFMAT

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