Iran Urges Worldwide Islamic Revolt

Middle Eastern Newsline | July 1 2005

Iran's president-elect has called for an Islamic revolution throughout the world.

In the first such statement by an Iranian president in nearly 20 years, Mahmood Ahmadinejad said his election would mark what he termed a new Islamic revolution. Ahmadinejad said such a revolution would spread throughout the world.

"Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 [the current Iranian year] will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world," Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official Iranian news agency as saying. "The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end."

It was the first time since his June 24 election that Ahmadinejad outlined Iran's policy to export Islamic insurgency. The Teheran mayor has served as a senior commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and has been identified as a suspect in the killing of Kurdish dissidents in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s.