After the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, Iran, whose dream of a “neo-Persian empire” came to an end, is trying to recover from its disappointment. For this purpose, Iran sent Shiite volunteers from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Syria under the names of Fatimiyyun and Zaynabiyyun, added Hezbollah and the militias of the so-called Al-Quds brigades and began to occupy and assimilate the country step by step.
In 2015, Ali Yunousi, Iran’s vice president, positioned his country, which he referred to as a “growing empire,” as follows: “Both the Ottoman generation and the remnants of Rome, who are competing with us in the region, object to our current support for Iraq. We will establish an Iranian Union against them in this region.”
However, after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in 13 days, Iran threw all its plans in the trash and started to increase its hateful, threatening rhetoric against Türkiye after the anonymous criticism of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. On the anniversary of the Battle of Çaldıran, Iranian State Television broadcast a clip in which insults were hurled at Ottoman Sultan Yavuz Sultan Selim Khan and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev also received his share of these insults.
However, it was not enough for the Iranian media. Mahdi Khanalizade, the director of Press TV, one of Iran’s public televisions, came out. In a recent television program, he declared that his country, Iran, could cooperate with the United States in Syria, just as it did in Iraq.
To the reporter’s question, “Against whom?” he bluntly replied, “Against Türkiye.” He explained that Türkiye is against the PKK terrorist organization and its Syrian wing YPG and that they can make an alliance with the U.S., which protects the YPG, to support the terrorist organization. As if they haven’t done enough.
Of course, what a member of the media says about Iran-U.S. cooperation does not mean much on its own. However, when we recall the statements of three figures who served as presidents of Iran for 24 of the 45 years since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, we realize that the issue is not something to be glossed over.
The first of these names, Mohammad Khatami, who served as Iran’s minister of culture for 10 years and as the president for eight years, declared their support for the U.S. during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took over the presidency of Iran from Khatami and stayed in office for eight years, also declared that his country had helped the U.S. during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan but that he had not been given the recognition he deserved.
Hassan Rouhani, who succeeded Ahmadinejad, went further and boasted at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 that his country had helped promote democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and could do the same in Syria and Yemen.
Iran did not hesitate to defend Armenia against Azerbaijan with the comfort of the progress it had made on the path opened to it by the Obama-era U.S.
At this point, Iran has become a country that can no longer sell the tales of the “Axis of Resistance” to anyone except a handful of its followers. It is a country that has been expelled from Syria, a country that is about to be expelled from Iraq, a country whose current president’s biggest concern is to conserve electricity. Hopefully, they will learn a lesson.