Some 200 masked young men and women gathered at a Tehran cemetery Thursday to pledge their willingness to carry out suicide bomb attacks against Americans in Iraq and Israelis.
| I'd call that an indication they see the 82nd Airborne in their immediate future... |
The ceremony was organized by the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement, a shadowy group that has since June been seeking volunteers for attacks in Iraq and Israel. A spokesman, Ali Mohammadi, described the group meeting Thursday as the "first suicide commando unit," though another official has claimed members already have carried out attacks in Israel. "Sooner or later we will bury all blasphemous occupiers of Islamic lands," Mohammadi said.
| How about a lot later, Clem? Like sometime after the dinosaurs come back? |
On Sunday, Iran's deputy interior minister for security affairs told reporters the movement had no official sanction and said such groups could operate only "as long as their ideas are limited to theory."
| I have a theory we'll be killing them in droves in the next year or two, unless the Medes and the Persians rise up in their wrath at this nonsense and string them up by their own turbans first... |
The group, though, has the backing of some prominent hard-line Iranian politicians. The deputy minister, Ali Asghar Ahmadi, did not say if the government had tried to crack down on the military style training the group claims to offer or whether officials believed any of its volunteers had crossed into Iraq or into Israel. Wives, husbands and children accompanied volunteers to the cemetery, which was decorated with posters denouncing America and Israel. "I joined the unit to fulfill my religious task for Palestine," said a volunteer who gave only his age -- 23. Thursday's ceremony included the unveiling of 6-foot stone column commemorating a 1983 attack on U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon as a major "suicide bombing operation against global blasphemy." |