Iran News Round Up

A selection of the latest news stories and editorials published in Iranian news outlets, compiled by Ali Alfoneh, Ahmad Majidyar and Michael Rubin.  To receive this daily newsletter, please subscribe online.
 
(E) = Article in English

Politics

• Contrary to earlier reports, Asr-e Iran says Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei has returned to Tehran from New York.
• Asr-e Iran condemns the high cost of Ahmadinejad's 100-man entourage visiting the United Nations General Assembly.

Diplomacy

• [E] Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi speaks against foreign interference in Syria.  

Military and Security

• Nasser Maghsoudlou, Islamic Republic of Iran Navy Self Sufficiency Jihad deputy, says Iran is planning to build aircraft carriers.
• Al Qaeda condemns Ahmadinejad's 9/11 "conspiracy theory" as a part of Iran's "deceptive jihad against the United States" to win the hearts of the Muslims.
• Hojjat al-Eslam Abolqasem Alizadeh, representative of the Supreme Leader to the Fars province Fajr Revolutionary Guards unit, says those parliamentary candidates who "sincerely follow the guardianship and the leader" are desirable.
• Mohsen Rezaei, former Revolutionary Guards chief, gives details about the war with Iraq:
  • "I was preparing my ideas about the war that the Imam [Khomeini] appointed me Guards chief. Luckily, the ideas I was pursuing had already taken shape in my mind. After that the first successful operation, Thamen al-Aemeh, took place..."
  • "[After liberating Iranian territories] there was a debate. If the war continued, where should we be? Should we enter Iraqi territory? Although we had liberated important parts of Iran's soil, when the war was brought to Iraqi territory there were conflicts of opinion about whether to conduct an operation and end the war with the help of diplomacy or aim for victory and impose our will upon the enemy..."
  • "We often had discussions with Mr. Hashemi about this issue and we had conflicting views. Of course, the conflict of opinion did not have any impact on the operations. They impacted the strategy of the war. The commanders enacted the orders of the politicians because the final responsibility was given to them by His Holiness the Imam. In expert debates, there was talks about the end goals of the war..."
  • "If the war had ended sooner, Iraq and the West would have never agreed to submit to the rights of Iran. Therefore, the war would be prolonged. The [prevailing] view was that [Iran] should invest in the strategy of victory. Of course, our political friends hoped that if we conducted one [successful] operation the world would capitulate..."
  • "His Holiness the Imam [Khomeini]'s thinking, however, was beyond the thinking of the commanders. It was our perception that he believed that if you entered Iraqi territory you should not remain anywhere, and that one should continue to a certain point, which was logically nothing else but capitulation or total defeat of Iraq..."

• [E] Iran on Thursday equipped its air defense units across the country with large numbers of the home-made Mersad Air Defense Missile System in a move to further boost its defensive power and capability against enemy air raids.

Trade

• Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi says Iran is fully engaged in developing its extraction capacities at shared oil and gas fields.
• [E] Ahmadinejad, in a phone conversation with his Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov on Thursday, discussed the construction process of a key railway project linking Iran to Kazakhstan via Turkmenistan.

Religion, Society and Culture

• Yasser Khomeini establishes a theological seminary.

Photo of the Day

• Oil Minister Rostam Qassemi visits petrochemical plants.