Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian reacts after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awards an Iranian woman, who has been convicted of committing several instances of criminal activity against the Iranian nation and the country’s Islamic establishment.
“The most deserving symbol of international peace was the self-sacrificing general, who fought terrorism and the most violent criminals for two decades, and guaranteed the region and the world’s security,” the top diplomat wrote in a message on X on Friday.
He was referring to Iran’s top anti-terror commander, Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani.
For several years starting in 2014, General Soleimani led the Islamic Republic’s military advisory assistance to Iraq and Syria as the Arab countries were grappling with an unbridled terror campaign unleashed by the Takfiri Daesh outfit.
The assistance helped the countries defeat Daesh in 2017, ending the group’s ambitions for spreading its campaign of bloodshed and destruction to the entire region and far beyond. The general was, however, assassinated in a United States’ drone strike near the Baghdad International Airport in early 2020.
Amir-Abdollahian said monumental attendance at his funeral by tens of millions of people across Iran and Iraq, and the international sympathy that followed his martyrdom “amounted to the most splendid and lasting #peace_prize in history.”
Earlier on Friday, the Norwegian committee awarded the Iranian woman, Narges Mohammadi, with the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mohammadi has been in and out of jail for much of her adult life and is currently serving a prison term at Tehran’s Evin prison.
In 2016, an Iranian appeals court confirmed a 16-year sentence for Mohammadi on charges of colluding to act against the national security, engaging in propaganda campaigns against the government as well as forming and directing an illegal group.
She was released in 2020, but was sent back to prison in 2021 on charges that included spreading propaganda against Iran’s Islamic establishment.
The Norwegian committee, however, claimed that she had been fighting “against the oppression of women” in Iran and fighting to “promote human rights and freedom for all.”
Entitlement of the prize to Mohammadi was well received by the anti-Iran terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) cult, which is responsible for killing around 17,000 Iranian civilians and officials in violent attacks since the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel also welcomed the development in a Persian-language post on X, saying he had been “pleased” with her winning the prize, and adding, “We are victorious together…”
‘A political reward’
Iran’s top human rights official, meanwhile, said the prize had nothing to do with preserving and enhancing peace around the world, and promoting the sense of fraternity among nations.
“This political reward has rather turned into a [means of] financial support for the illegal activities of some of its winners,” said Kazem Gharibabadi, secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights.
He defined some of those, who were really deserving of receiving a peace prize as the victims of the West’s unilateral sanctions — namely the Iranian nation — as well as the victims of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s Western-backed war of 1980-88 against the Islamic Republic.
“A criminal and a lawbreaker,” whose reception of the prize has been warmly welcomed by the MKO and the Israeli intelligence chief, therefore, did not deserve a peace prize, Gharibabadi concluded, referring to Mohammadi.
