Israel Matzav

Cracks in the Revolutionary Guard

Writing in Pajamas Media, Michael Ledeen says that Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed by Lebanese thugs from Hezbullah, acting on behalf of Ayatollah Ali Khameni for reasons that had little to do with politics: Mohammadi planned to leave Iran on a fellowship to Sweden.

Despite a torrent of disinformation from the regime, Ali-Mohammadi was not involved in the secret nuclear weapons project, and — again contrary to the regime’s lies — he was certainly not a regime loyalist. Indeed, he was among many university professors who supported Green leader Mir Hossein Mousavi during last spring’s heated electoral campaign (see the entry at 1259 GMT on Enduring America). Why was he killed now? Because he was planning to leave the country for Stockholm, where he’d been offered a one-year fellowship in his chosen specialty, particle physics.

According to Ledeen, the key fact here is not so much that the regime murdered someone who was essentially non-political, but the fact that it used the Guards' 'foreign legion' from Lebanese Hezbullah.

At the same time, the tensions within the regime are intensifying. The Guards commanders will not fail to draw a significant lesson from Tuesday’s events: the supreme leader turned to Lebanese Arabs, not to Iranians, to kill the dissident physicist. This bespeaks a certain lack of confidence in the Revolutionary Guards and the local security forces. If Khameni’s suspicions are justified, he will now have further reason to worry. As if to put an exclamation point on this fear, I have learned that the Deputy Commander of the Guards in the Greater Tehran area, Brigadier General Azizollah Rajabzadeh, is in intensive care following an axe attack to his cranium by one of his crack troops. This follows the shooting of General Ahmad Reza Radan by one of his men, about which I reported earlier.

Unfortunately, a lot more Iranians may die at the hands of the Revolutionary Guard's 'foreign legion.' And unfortunately, the President of the United States has no interest in taking advantage of the divisions within the Guard to promote regime change.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:47 PM