TEHRAN - Hossein Amir Abdollahian, Iran’s Foreign Minister, has shown reaction after the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the Nobel Peace Prize to an Iranian woman who has been convicted of multiple instances of law-breaking and plot against the ruling 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 alluding to Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top anti-terror commander.

General Soleimani spearheaded the Islamic Republic’s military advice to Iraq and Syria for several years, beginning in 2014, while the Arab countries grappled with an unrelenting terror campaign unleashed by the Takfiri Daesh group. 

The advice was vital in the 2017 victory over Daesh, which put a stop to the group’s plans to wreak havoc over the whole region and well beyond. But in early 2020, a drone attack by the U.S. assassinated the general in close proximity to Baghdad International Airport.

Tens of millions of people from Iran and Iraq attended his burial in record numbers, and Amir Abdollahian said that this, together with the outpouring of sympathy from around the world after his martyrdom, “amounted to the most splendid and lasting peace prize in history.”

Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian woman, was given the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize earlier on Friday by the Norwegian committee.

Mohammadi has spent a large portion of her adult life in and out of jail, and she is now incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin prison.

Mohammadi was given a 16-year term in 2016 by an Iranian court of appeals after being found guilty of conspiring to act against the country’s security, spreading false information about it, and founding and leading an unlawful group. 

She was freed in 2020 but returned to jail in 2021 after being accused of disseminating misinformation about Iran’s Islamic establishment.

But according to the Norwegian committee, she had been battling “against the oppression of women” in Iran and “promote human rights and freedom for all.”

Entitlement of the prize to Mohammadi was well received by the cultish Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), which is responsible for killing around 12,000 Iranian civilians and officials in violent attacks since the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

In a Persian-language post on X, Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel said he was “pleased” with her receiving the honor and added, “We are victorious together.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s top human rights official maintained that the award had nothing to do with sustaining and developing global peace and creating a spirit of brotherhood 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 said those who were truly deserving a peace award were the Iranian nation, the victims of the West’s unilateral sanctions, and the victims of the 1980–88 war waged by the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein against the Islamic Republic with the support of the West.

Therefore, Mohammadi, whom Gharibabadi referred to as “a criminal and a lawbreaker,” and whose acceptance of the award has been warmly applauded by the MKO and the head of Israeli intelligence, did not deserve a peace prize.