Iran enjoys a unique position in the world of Islam due to, among other factors, its strategic location, natural resources, and historical and cultural role in the development of the Islamic civilization. Thus, the mullahs’ victory quickly turned Tehran into the world capital of fundamentalists-similar to the relationship between Moscow and Marxism. More significant than money or arms, Tehran provided the fundamentalist currents with inspirational, political, regional, and international support.
Fundamentalist movements, which till then were mostly isolated and weak, became the clerical regime’s arms for the export of terrorism and fundamentalism, and as such, the menacing phenomenon of terrorism became global. Attempts to separate terrorism from fundamentalism are dangerous or futile at best.
During the 1980s and 1990s, at least 90 percent of the major terrorist attacks were linked either to Tehran as the epicenter of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism or to its surrogates and agents and movements that managed to thrive only under the light of Tehran’s mullahs. Some of the terrorist attacks carried out either by Tehran or fundamentalists under its hegemony and influence are:
•The occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the taking of American hostages in 1979. This was, in fact, a clear declaration of war by this new phenomenon that effectively demonstrated its antiwest potential and hysteria.
•Taking Westerners, especially Americans, hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s.
•The explosion of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.
•The bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The explosion of an Air France 747 passenger jet in Tehran’s airport in 1983
•Several bombings in the streets of Paris in 1986, which caused many deaths and injuries among civilians
•The hanging of U.S. Colonel William Higgins, who worked for the United Nations, in Lebanon.
•The shipment of 51 packages of explosives to Saudi Arabia (which were discovered before detonation) in 1986 in order to kill many pilgrims. The massacre of more than 400 pilgrims to Mecca in 1987
•The bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.
•The killing of antifundamentalist intellectuals and authors in Turkey. . The decree to kill Salman Rushdie.
•The killings of many Iranian dissidents, particularly the Mojahedin, in Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates.
These terrorist attacks, which have left thousands of casualties behind throughout the world, are just a small fraction of the bloody record of Islamic fundamentalism led by the mullahs ruling Iran.
