Filtered Javad Zarif recording sparks heated political debate in Iran Nuclear Energy News

Tehran, Iran – An interview with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that clearly discusses the backward maneuvers of Iranian politics has sparked heated dialogue and debate ahead of the country’s presidential election in June.

The more than three-hour audio interview with Saeed Leylaz, a government-aligned journalist and economist in March, was broadcast anonymously on a non-Iranian Farsi language on Sunday.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said the original interview lasted seven hours, was part of an oral history project that also included interviews with other ministers, and asked people to study it carefully because it could be leaked for political purposes.

In the interview, Zarif repeatedly uses the “field” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) to refer to military operations and politics driven by the outward-looking Quds Force and then-leader Quds Force. General Qassem Soleimani – Killed in a drone strike ordered by the United States in Iraq in January 2020.

According to the foreign minister, “rural operations” were never intended to pave the way for diplomacy, even though Iran finally got its 2015 nuclear deal to remove multilateral sanctions with world powers.

Instead, diplomacy was often “sacrificed” to advance operations across the region.

Army in Syria

Soleiman visited Russia in 2015 and met with President Vladimir Putin to discuss intervention in favor of President Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war.

Zarif reports a completely different account of what happened at the meeting in the leaked recording, that it was Putin who convinced Soleiman to bring Iranian troops to Syria, instead of convincing Soleiman to intervene in Putin.

“Putin entered the war with air weapons, but Iran also entered the war with ground forces. Until then, we had no ground force there, ”Zarif said.

The foreign minister said he first heard from his U.S. counterpart John Kerry that Iran Air Syria’s aircraft carrier had increased sixfold on Soleimani’s orders, something the transport minister also did not know at the time.

In addition, Russia actively sought to undermine the nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan (JCPOA), which did not favor Iran’s normalized relations with the West, according to the diplomat.

“We need to have relations with Russia and China, just as we need to have relations with the West, just as we should not have tensions with the US,” Zarif said.

“But I think our ties with other countries should be made with open eyes. Russia benefits from not having a crisis in ties with the West, but Russia does not benefit if ties with the West are normalized.”

Nuclear dialogue begins again

There have been talks to revive the JCPOA after the 2018 unilateral withdrawal from the US Vienna for weeks on end.

Delegations returned to the Austrian capital on Monday to resume negotiations aimed at lifting U.S. sanctions and putting limits on Iran’s nuclear program.

Zarif also said that in January 2020, senior Iranian security officials and immediately became aware that Ukraine International Airlines was flying two IRGC missiles were fired Above Tehran.

The foreign minister said security chief Ali Shamkhani and Hossein Bagheri had gone to a meeting with Armed Forces personnel two days after the incident, where he was strongly reprimanded when asked if the PS752 flight had been fired by missiles.

“They said they went to post a tweet and refused,” Zarif said, refusing the order.

It was finally approved by the IRGC he accidentally fired at the plane Due to the “human error,” tensions with the U.S. were so high that the IRGC immediately fired missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq as a result of Soleimani’s assassination.

Zarif said two Quds Force agents had reported missiles entering Iraq 45 minutes earlier, but the foreign minister was not notified within two hours of the attack.

After the interview was leaked, online discussions quickly prevailed as “Zarif” Farsi dropped to the top of the trending topics on Twitter in the language.

Tehran lawmaker Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani swore in a tweet that parliament would conduct an investigation into the leak, and that it would “bring traitors into the judiciary in the country and nation.”