TEHRAN -- A senior Iranian law enforcement commander said on Monday that terrorist groups had been organized and armed on Iran’s borders and were prepared to attack during the 40-day U.S.-Israeli war on the country.
Brigadier General Reza Bani-Asadifar, commander of the Protection Units of the Law Enforcement Command (Faraja), told a security coordination meeting in Karaj that Iran’s geography and resource wealth are the real target of plots by arrogance, describing ideology, religious doctrine and nuclear weapons as pretexts.
“We live in a country that is the anchor of the world and the beating heart of the world,” Bani-Asadifar said. “The reason you see arrogance plotting against us in various forms is that this geography has God-given capacities and abundant resources.”
He cited more than 20 years of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, asking what it had brought “other than destruction,” and pointed to the war in Gaza. “Therefore, for survival we are obliged to become strong,” he said.
The war started with Israeli airstrikes on border areas in order to degrade defensive fortifications and open routes for armed separatist groups. 
Iran’s army commander, Ali Jahanshahi, said this month that more than 50 combat and support units had been deployed along the country’s borders, and that the enemy had hoped aerial strikes would “open the way for their allied groups to break through,” a plan he said had failed.
A report citing a Haaretz investigation from July 2026 detailed a Mossad plan to train and equip roughly 16,000 armed terrorists in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, who were to cross the border under