TEHRAN — The commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has said that a military war against Iran is “basically abandoned”.

“They [enemies] have opened an economic infiltration and psychological war channel [against Iran],” Major General Hossein Salami told the parliament on Tuesday morning.

He made the remarks as the Sacred Defense Week, which marks the beginning of Iraq’s war against Iran, came to an end.

Salami said Iran should strive day and night to counter the enemies’ economic war, but argued that the country’s capacities are enough to defeat the enemies.

In Iran, the 1980-1988 war, which was imposed on Iran by Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein, is known as the Sacred Defense, and the Sacred Defense Week is held on the anniversary of the beginning of the war in late September.

This year, the outbreak of the coronavirus canceled military parades in commemoration of the martyrs of the war.

Pointing to the support Saddam received from all the powerful countries of the world to invade Iran, Salami said there’s no doubt that the war, which lasted 8 years, was a war imposed by the world on Iran.

“All of us know that while the front of war was the Iran-Iraq border, the supporters of the war were all of the big powers,” he stated.

Salami warns against interaction with enemy

Elsewhere in his remarks, the commander said the enemy is neither capable nor willing to resolve Iran’s issues.

“The path to our welfare never passes through interaction with the enemy,” he said.

“Even if we reconcile with [the U.S.], still it will harm us… and destroy our resolve,” Salami added.

U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, officially recognized as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in May 2018, and imposed the “harshest ever sanctions” on Iran to force it to negotiate a new deal.

Iran has strongly rejected Washington’s call for renewed talks, citing the U.S.’s bashing of the internationally-endorsed JCPOA as a manifestation of its untrustworthiness.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said last month that Trump is lost in a daydream when he says Iran will soon come to the negotiating table.

It came after the U.S. miserably failed to extend an arms embargo on Iran at the UN Security Council, with only the Dominican Republic backing Washington’s anti-Iran resolution.

The U.S. “killed” the JCPOA, “buried” it and held a “funeral” for it, but even the corpse of the nuclear pact defeated the United States, Zarif said after the U.S. failure.

MH/PA