Totally Defeated, Enemies Are Not Safe in any Territory, IRGC Chief Warns

According to Iranian News Agency, Major General Hossein Salami made the remarks while addressing a ceremony in Tehran on Sunday evening, saying, “We are victorious today and this is what the facts of the field say.”

“Today, the swords of the Muslims to fight the enemies have been unsheathed, and [therefore], there is no safe territory for the enemies,” Salami said.

He also said Iran’s missile strikes against US military bases in Iraq in retaliation for the assassination of Lt. General Qassem Soleimani, Commander of the IRGC Quds Force, was a “slap on the face” of the US, which saw itself as the world emperor.

“Whose face was this slap delivered on?” he asked, rhetorically. “It was a stinging slap on the face to the United States, which considered itself the emperor of the world and did not stop making threats of tit-for-tat retaliations.”

General Salami further said that unlike the Americans, “we did not assassinate a defenseless and unarmed commander, who was fighting terrorism across the Muslim world and had traveled to Iraq at an official invitation, with a drone and in the dead of the night.”

Lt. General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s world-renown counter-terrorism Commander, along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Second-in-Command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), and their companions were martyred in a US drone strike authorized by former US President Donald Trump near Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020.

Two days after the attack, Iraqi lawmakers approved a bill that requires the government to end the presence of all foreign military forces led by the US in the country.

Both commanders were highly revered across West Asia because of their key role in fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria.

On January 8, 2020, the IRGC targeted the US-run Ain al-Asad Airbase in Iraq’s western Province of Anbar by launching a volley of missiles in retaliation.

According to the Pentagon, more than 100 American forces suffered “traumatic brain injuries” during the counterstrike on the base.

Iran has described the missile attack on Ain al-Assad as a “first slap.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, General Salami asserted that Iran’s enemies have been defeated.

“Depression and despair can now be seen on the faces of officials from our enemies since they cannot advance their policies,” he noted.