Iran Signs Up Killers For Suicide Attacks on Yanks, Israelis
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON – Registration forms being filled out in the offices of an Iranian aid group and in the presence of Iranian government figures offer volunteer suicide commandos the following three options, it emerged yesterday: attack American soldiers in Iraq, kill Israelis, or fulfill a 15-year-old fatwa ordering the assassination of the author of “The Satanic Verses,” Salman Rushdie.
The suicide commandos story, reported by the Associated Press yesterday in Tehran, puts into sharp relief the stakes of the latest round of nuclear brinkmanship between Iran’s ruling mullahs and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran reversed its position yesterday and said it would agree temporarily to halt enrichment of uranium.
If the Iranian regime were to obtain a nuclear weapon, it could make it harder for its targets to respond to terrorism from Tehran.
“There is no question the Iranian regime looks at the second Gulf War and says this would never have happened to Saddam if he already had nuclear weapons. This is like a license for Iranian adventurism because it immediately raises the cost to any party that chooses to object,” the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, said in an interview yesterday.
According to the wire report, an Iranian aid organization created to take care of the families of soldiers slain or injured in the Iran-Iraq war had boasted on November 12 that it had recruited 4,000 martyrs for operations against American troops in Iraq, against Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza, and to fulfill a religious decree ordering the murder of Mr. Rushdie.
A meeting where some 300 new recruits were enlisted also attracted a member of Iran’s Parliament, Mahdi Kouchakzadeh, and General Hossein Salami of the Revolutionary Guards. The wire dispatch quoted Mr. Kouchakzadeh as saying, “At a time when the U.S. is committing the crimes we see now, deprived nations have no weapon other than martyrdom. It’s evident that Iran’s foreign policy-makers have to take the dignified opinions of this group into consideration.”
The group in question, Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, enjoys a semiofficial status inside Iran. Earlier this year, many Persians protested because the aid organization had failed to deliver pensions to military families.
The wire dispatch also quoted the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Hamid Reza Asefi, as saying that the organization’s recruiting drive for terrorists had “nothing to do with the ruling Islamic establishment.”
The State Department, which has included Iran as a state sponsor, indeed, the leading state sponsor, of international terrorism since it began compiling an annual list in the 1980s.
The director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Matthew Levitt, said yesterday, “This comports with a long-term pattern for Iran.” Mr. Levitt, a former senior analyst of Hezbollah for the FBI, whose study of Hamas fund-raising and terrorism is due to University Press, said, “Recruits to Hezbollah and various Palestinian groups are invited to Iranian universities when they are also pulled aside for terrorist training. Iran is a charter member of the State Department’s state sponsors of terrorism list. Year in and year out the director of the CIA highlights the Iranians as the foremost sponsor of terror in the world. Beyond the issue of nuclear proliferation, we have another critical problem of proactive Iranian state sponsorship of terror.”
On December 19, 2003, the FBI director at the time, Louis Freeh, named a high-ranking Iranian official as a key planner and coordinator of the 1996 terrorist attack on American barracks in Saudi Arabia, known as the Khobar Towers. A suit brought by the families of the victims of the attack was seeking to recover Iranian assets frozen in America.
The New York Sun reported on April 29 that an FBI counterterrorism review concluded that between 50 and 100 Hamas and Hezbollah operatives had already infiltrated America in early 2002. In the November/December 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs, Georgetown University professor Daniel Byman estimates that Iran gives Hezbollah about $100 million annually. Furthermore, the master terrorist who orchestrated Hezbollah’s attacks on the American Marine barracks and embassy in Beirut in the 1980s, Imadh Mugniyah, is reported to be a citizen of Iran.