On the morning of Wednesday, January 5, authorities in Shahrekord, Charmahal, and Bakhtiari Province unveiled a large statue of Qassem Soleimani, the eliminated commander of the terrorist Quds Force.
The statue, which took a year to build and at a huge cost from the pockets of the Iranian people, was meant to glorify the regime’s terror master, who was killed in a drone attack in January 2020. The statue was unveiled in the presence of officials of the clerical regime with great fanfare, with other ceremonies also scheduled at the square where the statue was unveiled.
At 9:30 pm, Iranian Resistance Units torched the statue. The daring act of the Resistance Units, carried out at great risk to their lives, prompted frantic reactions by the regime.
“In a brazen act, the statue of Lt. Gen. Haj Qassem Soleimani, unveiled yesterday morning, January 5, in the presence of officials in the Province in Hazrat Qamarbani Hashem Square in Shahrekord, was set on blaze last night by unidentified individuals,” the semi-official News Agency ISNA reported on Thursday.
Mohammad Ali Nekonam, the representative of the Iranian regime’s supreme leader in Shahr-e Kord, issued a statement on Thursday, in which he called the torching of the statue “a crime” that “would increase Haj Qassem’s popularity among people.”
Since Soleimani’s termination, the regime has gone to great lengths to portray him as a national hero and a popular figure. While the people of Iran are grappling with poverty and are struggling to make ends meet, the regime has spent huge sums out of the national wealth to install posters and statues of the terror master. At the same time, the regime rallied its apologists abroad to eulogize Soleimani. But the public reaction to Soleimani’s posters has shown what the Iranian people really feel about criminals like Soleimani. Torn and burnt posters of Soleimani have become a common scene not only in Iran but also in the neighboring countries where the regime has spent huge sums in propaganda efforts to glorify the terrorist commander.
The regime’s praise of Soleimani is emblematic of its nature and the divide between Iran’s rulers and its people. As the head of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force (IRGC-QF), Soleimani played a key role in the bloody crackdown of major anti-regime uprisings in Iran over the years, which resulted in 1,500 protesters killed during the November 2019 uprising alone.
Soleimani also oversaw the regime’s terror operations abroad.
He was the key figure behind numerous attacks against members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) in Iraq. He personally oversaw the brutal attack on Camp Ashraf in September 2013 and rocket attacks against Camp Liberty from 2012 to 2016. He was also behind the formation of Hashd al-Shaabi, a group of Iran-backed militia groups in Iraq who have been terrorizing the Iraqi people and carrying out other lethal attacks across the country.
Soleimani led the regime’s intervention in Syria, propping up the dictator Bashar al-Assad against the opposition forces by providing his murderous regime weapons, troops, and cash. Soleimani’s pivotal role in the deadly chemical attack in Ghouta in 2013 earned him the nickname “child killer.”
Wherever he went, Soleimani left his mark with death, violence, and terror. Last year, a senior Hamas official acknowledged that he had personally received more than $20 million in cash from Soleimani.
As many regime officials, including supreme leader Ali Khamenei, have acknowledged, Soleimani was a key figure in the regime’s domestic and foreign policies. His elimination constituted an irreparable blow to the regime.
But no matter how hard the regime tries to turn the now-dead criminal into a national hero, its efforts have been in vain. The people of Iran do not believe in the medieval ideology and politics of the ruling mullahs. And today, Soleimani’s legacy—and by extension that of the regime—can be seen in torn posters and burnt statues in different parts of Iran.
