Influential Iranian official and former diplomat Mohammad-Javad Larijani believes Soleimani’s loss is serious for Iran but that the regime’s supporters can move on from it through following “Jihad” in military and scientific fields. In an interview with Tasnim News he laid out Iran’s plans in the wake of Soleimani’s killing by the US on January 3. He argues that the US is hiding the real numbers injured and killed by Iran’s attack on Ayn al-Assad base in Iraq and that Iran has deterred the US for at least 10 years by firing ballistic missiles. Larijani is a member of a powerful political regime family which has recently lost some of its luster. His interview can be seen as representative of one view of where Tehran’s regime might head next. Iran’s “resistance” to the US achieved great success under Soleimani’s role over twenty years. It was able to penetrate and increase its influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Palestinian areas. “The US decided to eliminate that resistance,” by killing Soleimani, Larijani argues. But Soleimani was just one individual and the “resistance” will continue. Iran’s theory of resistance and a resistance front is one that links Iran to allied, mostly Shi’ite, groups in other countries. This includes Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Units in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and the Assad regime in Syria. It also includes Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Iran’s regime calls this “resistance” but what it means is to dominate the Middle East and remove the US and Israel and weaken the Gulf Sunni monarchies such as Saudi Arabia. Its goal only ends where it runs up against Turkey and Egypt, which it can work with after hollowing out other states. Larijani compares US and western actions to the law of the jungle or the “wild” where he says that the strong animals kill the weak. Oddly, this is the same view that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in arguing that countries that are weak will be defeated by the strong. Larijani argues that the US used maximum pressure and killing Soleimani to pressure Iran under the belief that average Iranian were angry that the regime was wasting their lives through war abroad, such as in Syria. Larijani analyzes Trump by arguing that Trump wants to work through what he calls the “milk cows” of Gulf states. Larijani calls these states the “servants” of the US and implies they created ISIS and other Sunni jihadist groups. He argues that all of this was done to support the “Zionist regime.” The goal of this policy was to weaken Iran and stoke “sedition” in Iran, by which he refers to the 2009 and 2019 protests. The Iranian official argues that Iran’s response to the killing of Soleimani, firing ballistic missiles at Ayn al-Assad base in Iraq where US forces are located, injured and killed US soldiers. The US has said that 34 soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries, a kind of concussion from the blast waves of the missile impact. Larijani believes this is a cover up and that 100 were killed and 200 injured. In this calculation the attack on Assad is an important deterrence against further US and western attacks. He believes it has bought Iran ten years of deterrence. In this estimation Iran’s ballistic missile attack could be the most clear response to Soleimani’s death and the next phase will be different. That means the next phase might not be another major dramatic attack, but other efforts to roll-back US influence in Iraq or to confront Israel in other ways. Larijani goes on to discuss some other conspiracies, such as arguing the West doesn’t want Iran to have elections because the West supports ISIS, even though ISIS is an enemy of the West. This is part of the usual Iranian regime theory that argues the US created ISIS.
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