By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

On this day forty years ago when Operation Bayt al-Moqaddas triumphed in freeing the port city of Khorramshahr from the occupation of Saddam’s tyrannical Ba’th minority regime, there were shockwaves not just in Baghdad but also in Tel Aviv and Washington, because of the indomitable spirit of resistance of the Iranian people and the codename of their campaign which referred to the Zionist-usurped Islamic city.
The triangle of evil, which until now was confident of slowly bleeding to death the nascent Islamic Republic and turning the Iraqi occupied parts of Iran into a sort of Palestinian territories or Kashmir that will never be resolved through any negotiations, began to hatch intricate plots in an attempt to avert the inevitable.
Saudi Arabia, as the principal bankroller of Saddam’s persecution of Iraq’s Shi’a Muslim majority and the ethno-sectarian war imposed on Iran, was also a bit shaken by the liberation of Khorramshahr. King Khalid bin Abdul-Aziz, the blinded bigot that he was, sent a congratulatory cable to Saddam that read: Do not grieve (at the loss of some 35 thousand killed or captured mostly Iraqi Shi’a soldiers), “dogs are killing dogs”.
The US and Israel now resorted to organized terrorism against Iran including supply of internationally-banned chemical weapons to Saddam and open support for the MKO hypocrites whose ringleaders were soon shifted from France to Iraq, due to fears that Iranian victories on the battlefields would end Ba’thist rule in Baghdad, thereby opening the path towards the Golan Heights and the borders of Occupied Palestine, in view of the Islamic Republic’s already strong ties with Syria and the people of Lebanon.
The first step of the enemies in this regard was the targeted kidnapping by the pro-Israel Phalangist militia Beirut in July 1982 of Ahmad Motevasselian, the commander of the Mohammad Rasoulollah Brigade during the Bayt al-Moqaddas Operations that liberated Khorramshahr, who was serving as defence attaché at the Iranian embassy in Lebanon.
Motevasselian and his three companions in the car bearing diplomatic plate – Charge d’ Affaires Seyyed Mohsen Mousavi, embassy technician Taqi Rastegar Moqaddam, and journalist Kazem Akhavan – were transferred to the Zionist entity by their terrorist captors led by the now deceased Elie Hobeika and Samir Geagea, (recently elected to the Lebanese parliament), who is on record as saying the Iranian diplomats were murdered.
Today, Saddam and his Ba’thist clique have long been cast into the dustbin of history, the MKO hypocrites have fled to Europe in disgrace, and Iraq is now part of the growing Islamic Resistance Movement which has emerged as a solid chain stretching from Iran to the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
All this means that the epic liberation of Khorramshahr exactly forty years ago due to the national unity and religious solidarity of the Iranian people in spite of their being constantly targeted by the terrorists in Washington and Tel Aviv, is a firm indication that Operation Bayt al-Moqaddas did not end on 24th May 1982, but is firmly on its way towards the city of Bayt al-Moqaddas and the cherished goal of the liberation of Palestine.
Now we better understand why the terrorist cliques in the US and in the Zionist entity desperately target and kill such inspirational figures of the Islamic Revolution, as Commander of the 41st Tharallah Brigade during the liberation of Khorramshahr, Qassem Soleimani (in January 2020 in Baghdad).
The latest victim of this spate of terrorism is Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei of the IRGC division of the Defenders of the Holy Shrines who attained martyrdom in Tehran on last Sunday May 22, as a result of a cowardly attack by Zionist agents.
Vengeance is part of the liberating spirit of the Bayt al-Moqaddas Operations, and Insha Allah (God Willing) will soon see the dastardly terrorists brought to justice, whether they live in the US or in any other place.