The Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, General Mohsen Rezaei, reportedly claimed on Sunday (February 7) that Iran is now a superpower which controls 500 million people in 25 countries with an annual trade value of 800 billion dollars.

The general, one of the Iranian regime’s most influential figures close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, did not reveal or name the countries whose peoples fate he claimed Iran controls in his speech, in which he asserted that Iran is now a superpower. In General Rezaei’s speech, reported by Iranian regime mouthpiece, ‘Eqtisad News’, he also bragged, “At the present time, we have become a superpower that sends satellites into space and we enrich uranium, and we have entered the nuclear club."

Al Qabas reported that in his speech at an event held in the Iranian city of Zanjan to mark the 42nd anniversary of the ‘victory of the Iranian revolution’, General Rezaei, a former commander of the so-called Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), also stated, "The world is currently unable to stop Iran's progress in various fields, so it entered into an economic war against our country."

In the same speech, General Rezaei also bragged about a new Iranian project which he described as the “Iranian golden belt”, a name possibly modelled on China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, intended to fully control the Middle East and wield influence over world powers, which would extend from Afghanistan through Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. He added that "if there is a regional power controlling this belt, it will be able to supervise and manage the affairs of the entire region."

Published by Al Qabas on Monday February 8, 2021. Original article (in Arabic): https://alqabas.com/article/5836762