THERAN - Chairman of Iran’s Expediency Council Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani says Iranian resistance has frustrated an attempt by the enemies to defeat the Islamic Republic.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Larijani compared the current war with Israel and the United States to Iraq’s failed invasion of Iran in the 1980s.
He said the main lesson of Iran’s eight-year imposed war with Iraq was that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his international and regional supporters had wrongly believed the newly established Islamic Republic’s military structure would collapse within days and Iraqi forces would reach Tehran.
That calculation, he said, was overturned by the participation of ordinary Iranians in the war, and their resistance eventually gave the country greater strength and international standing.
Larijani said he believed the same miscalculation had been repeated by the leaders of Israel and the United States, who, he said, had expected their campaign of assassinations and war crimes against Iran to bring the conflict to an end within a short period.
“Anyone who leaves the will of this nation out of their calculations will face no fate other than that of the Ba’athists,” Larijani wrote, referring to the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein.
He also invoked verses from the Holy Qur’an to frame the outcome as an example of an unchanging divine principle.
Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war from 1980 to 1988 after Iraq invaded Iran.
The Iran-Iraq War, known in Iran as the Sacred Defense, played a pivotal role in shaping the defense identity of the Islamic Republic.
This was not merely a war between Iran and the Baathist regime