Director of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Intelligence Service, Hojjatoleslam Hossein Taeb, on Thursday announced that a terror plot against the IRGC Quds brigade chief, General Qasem Soleimani, had been thwarted, Mehr News reported.
Taeb claimed that “several years of orchestrating and planning by Hebrew-Arabic (sic) intelligence services” had been invested in developing the plot to assassinated General Soleimani, which also involved stirring up a religious war.
The Intelligence chief spoke at the 23rd Supreme Assembly of IRGC Commanders, saying, “After the failure of various sedition attempts and conspiracies to defeat the Islamic Republic of Iran, and to launch a bipolar war and resistance, the enemies of the Islamic Revolution and the noble nation of Islamic Iran sought to carry out their malicious objectives in the southeastern part of the country during the Muharram and Fatimiyah mourning ceremonies, but they failed thanks to the vigilant security and intelligence forces of the country as well as measures taken by IRGC’s Ground Forces.”
The Mourning of Muharram is a set of rituals associated with Shia Muslims which falls in Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. It features storytelling, weeping, self-flagellation, and reenactments of the Battle of Karbala in 680, between the army of the second Umayyad caliph Yazid I and a small army led by Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, in Karbala, Iraq.
Husayn ibn Ali was killed in that battle and Islamic history was henceforth dominated by the Sunnis.
Which is possibly the reason for the heightened militant religious sentiment in the already militant religious Iran, and why Taeb described those Hebrew-Arabic foes being “frustrated by their inability to carry out a hostile move, and thus orchestrating their vicious plan for several years to assassinate General Soleimani.”