Iran hosts Islamic resistance festival
Financial Times / Najmeh Bozorgmehr
06-Sep-2012

Often called one of the world’s most beautiful cities, Isfahan is famous for its elegant architecture and formal gardens. It is also the city that 500 years ago was pivotal in transforming Iran from a Sunni-dominated country to a Shiite one.

So it was the ideal backdrop for the government in Tehran to use as it hosts its “resistance” partners from the Palestinian territories and Lebanon this week to discuss how they will triumph over U.S. and Israeli threats to the Middle East, notably in Syria.

In a 300-year-old former caravansary, representatives from Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Amal movements, as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad from the Palestinian territories, gathered Wednesday for the start of the third International Conference and Festival of Islamic Resistance, a two-day event.

“Al-Qaeda, along with the U.S., Israel and Arab reactionaries, all intend to overthrow” Assad’s government, Ali-Akbar Velayati, senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the conference. “It is because Syria is the golden link of the resistance chain against Israel.”

>>>
recommended by Fred

Share/Save/Bookmark