A leaked interview in which Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif frankly discusses behind-the-scenes manoeuvres in Iranian politics has stirred fierce conversation and debate ahead of the country’s presidential elections in June.
More than three hours of audio from an interview in March with government-aligned journalist and economist Saeed Leylaz was anonymously leaked to Farsi-language media outside Iran on Sunday.
Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said the original interview was seven hours long, part of an oral history project that also includes interviews with other ministers, and urged people to analyse it with caution as it may have been leaked for political purposes.
In the interview, Zarif repeatedly uses “the field” in reference to military operations and politics driven by the outward-looking Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and its then-leader Major-General Qassem Soleimani – who was assassinated in an American-ordered drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
According to the foreign minister, “field operations” never budged to give way to diplomacy, even as Iran was in talks that ultimately led to its landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers that lifted multilateral sanctions.
Instead, diplomacy was, on many occasions, “sacrificed” for the advancement of field operations across the region.
Source: aljazeera.com
The post Leaked Javad Zarif recording stirs hot political debate in Iran appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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