NCRI – A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander has said that the Iranian regime now has a fighting presence in the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
“There was a time when our goal was to reach Basra [southern Iraq], but now by God’s hand, we are instead fighting the enemies of Islam in Baghdad and Samara. We have gone even further than that, and we are now fighting the enemies of Islam next to the Mediterranean,” said General Hossein Hamedani of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
His remarks were carried by state-run media including the Koolebar website on Thursday.
In October 2014, senior IRGC commanders claimed that Brig. Gen. Hossein Hamedani was leading the IRGC’s field operations in Syria in support of the Assad regime.
In June 2014, Hamedani claimed that parts of the regime’s paramilitary Bassij force were “being born” in Iraq, and a month earlier he claimed that the regime had trained 130,000 members of the Bassij who ready to join the civil war in Syria in favor of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
In 2009, Hamedani was the IRGC commander tasked with cracking down on anti-regime demonstrations in Tehran.