Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian toured transportation and logistics sites damaged by U.S. airstrikes over the weekend, as state media reports implicitly conceded the impact of those strikes was much greater than the regime had previously admitted.
Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) published a dour account of Pezeshkian’s infrastructure tour on Sunday:
Officials briefed the president on the condition of border terminals, ports, road, rail, maritime and air transport networks, as well as the supply and distribution of essential goods.
Roads and Urban Development Minister Farzaneh Sadegh also presented a detailed report on damage inflicted on ports, border terminals, bridges, roads, railways, logistics facilities and other strategic infrastructure following US attacks.
Pezeshkian ordered faster reconstruction of damaged infrastructure, activation of alternative routes, and measures to strengthen the resilience of the transport network and ensure uninterrupted services.
Pezeshkian insisted on praising the Iranian military for “maintaining transport services” despite the damage and said “continued public support and government efforts would thwart the enemies’ plots to disrupt the country’s infrastructure.”
Pezeshkian and other regime officials maintained their stance that it was the United States that violated the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that inaugurated a ceasefire in June, completely ignoring Iran’s wanton attacks on civilian ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
“The MOU does not give them the right to launch drones and missiles against commercial shipping vessels. It doesn’t say you’re allowed to launch missiles and drones against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. They chose to violate that,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio reminded reporters at a press conference last week.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei peddled the regime line in an interview with Austria’s ORF television on Sunday, pretending the United States resumed airstrikes against Iran for no reason at all and denying any interest on Tehran’s part to negotiate a new ceasefire.
“The entire world expected that this time, at least, the United States would fulfill its commitments – but what the United States did was a flagrant violation of various provisions of this agreement, and for the third time, diplomacy was betrayed,” Baqaei said.
“Iranians have never sought war. We were attacked and forced to defend ourselves. We have shown the world that we are determined and steadfast in defending our sovereignty, territorial integrity, and dignity,” he insisted.
Baqaei hallucinated Iran’s attacks on shipping completely out of existence, bizarrely claiming Tehran was providing safe passage to the very same civilian ships it attacked with drones and missiles.
“Based on Article 5 of this memorandum, a 30-day period was foreseen to restore commercial vessel traffic in the Strait of Hormuz – from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa – to pre-war status. Iran fulfilled all its commitments to facilitate the safe passage of ships,” he said.
“However, on the 21st or 22nd day after signing the memorandum, the United States, under the pretext of incidents against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, launched a massive military aggression against Iran,” he continued, without bothering to explain that those “incidents against commercial shipping” were deadly terror attacks committed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Baqaei confirmed that Iranian representatives have passed messages to Washington through mediators from Pakistan, Oman, and Qatar, but said Tehran has no interest in resuming direct negotiations unless the United States accepts Iran’s framework of the Hormuz crisis.
The Iranian military on Monday played up the anniversary of the 1988 “Operation Mersad,” the final land battle of the long and grueling Iran-Iraq War, as a patriotic holiday whose themes of defiance and single-minded loyalty to the Islamic Republic are echoed in today’s “resistance” against the United States and Israel.
The commemorative statement from the Iranian military described the 1988 operation as one of the “golden pages” in Iran’s history, a demonstration that Iranian forces are always ready to “confront the ruthless enemy, and the mercenaries and hirelings of global arrogance” and “cut off the feet of any aggressor that steps on even an atom of the homeland’s soil.”
The Iranian army declared it will “not show the slightest negligence in safeguarding the independence and territorial integrity of the Islamic homeland, and will answer the enemies’ aggressions with even more severe and crushing attacks.”
The Iranian opposition smelled a hint of desperation in the Operation Mersad commemoration, noting it was a bit odd for the IRGC to issue an “urgent political warning” about a battle that took place 38 years ago.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said:
The statement presents itself as a commemoration of a historic victory. In reality, its language is dominated not by confidence, but by anxiety: repeated warnings about vigilance, infiltration, national unity and the continuing influence of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
The NCRI counts the PMOI/MEK among its member groups.
The NCRI noted that the IRGC linked Operation Mersad – a battle the Iranian resistance calls “Operation Eternal Light” – not only to its military engagement with the United States, but to its murderous suppression of unarmed demonstrators in January. This was an effort to reframe the regime’s merciless crackdown as a victorious battle against foreign saboteurs – and, perhaps, as a reminder to freedom-hungry Iranians that the regime is ready to slaughter them again.
The NCRI called the IRGC statement “a declaration of fear disguised as a victory statement,” and advised reading it as “a political assessment of the regime’s present vulnerability.”
“For all its claims of victory,” the NCRI concluded, “the IRGC’s message reveals a regime that remains preoccupied with the same possibility that terrified it thirty-eight years ago: that a nationwide uprising, joined with an organized resistance movement, could ultimately bring down the clerical dictatorship.”