Hardline sermon widens rift
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned his longsuffering people to prepare for more isolation from the Western world as he led Friday prayers in person yesterday for the first time in eight years.
Khamenei, speaking at the Grand Mosalla of Tehran, made no concessions to his critics or to protesters who have filled the streets in the past week after the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing 176 people.
His hardline response to the crisis threatens to widen a rift with the regime’s remaining moderate public faces such as President Hasan Rouhani, who sat through the sermon with a stony face. He made a show of leaving early, while the ayatollah was still leading prayers.
Rouhani’s son-in-law was earlier revealed to be one of 90 reformist candidates who have been banned from standing in next month’s parliamentary elections, in an apparent move to strengthen pro-Revolutionary Guard factions.
Iran has been in turmoil since the assassination of the ayatollah’s favourite general, Qasem Soleimani, in a United States drone strike at Baghdad airport earlier this month.
The Revolutionary Guard retaliated by firing missiles five nights later at two bases in Iraq housing American troops. Hours later, the Guard, expecting an immediate US response, mistook the Ukrainian plane for an incoming missile and shot it down.
The Pentagon, which had previously said there were no casualties at the Iraq bases, admitted yesterday that 11 soldiers had been treated for concussion. Khamenei acknowledged the blunder in his sermon, but avoided assigning any blame to the Revolutionary Guard and said the incident had been ‘‘taken out of proportion’’. He said the answer to the West’s hostility to Iran was not to put trust in Europe, let alone America, but to become strong both militarily and economically. In effect, it was an instruction to Iranians to tighten their belts in the face of a deepening sanctions regime.
He gave strong backing to the IRGC, dashing the hopes of many protesters that he would rein them in and focus on rebuilding Iran’s shattered domestic economy.
The ayatollah said that American officials who pretended they were ‘‘standing up for the Iranian people’’ – an apparent reference to a recent tweet by US President Donald Trump – were ‘‘clowns’’. He added that by failing to face down Trump over sanctions, European Union leaders had shown they were slaves of the US.