TEHRAN – Aban 13 in the Persian calendar or November 3 in the English calendar, contains a lot of symbolic meanings.

The day marks three important events in Iran’s contemporary history: the anniversary of the takeover of the former U.S. embassy in Tehran by Muslim student followers of the Imam Khomeini Line in 1979, the anniversary of the exile of the late founder of the Islamic Republic Imam Khomeini by Shah in 1964, and the Pupil (Student) Day (marking the day in 1978 on which several students taking part in a protest rally against the Pahlavi regime were martyred.) Those three separate significant events not only did they change the foundation of modern Iran, but also dealt a blow to the contemporary world order and the US imperialism. 

One of the main reasons that the revolutionaries in Iran toppled the Shah regime was its high dependence on the United States and widespread Americans’ meddling in their country’s affairs. Aban 13 marks the firm resistance of the Iranians who relied on the insight of Imam Khomeini as a revolutionary leader to uproot the U.S. hegemony in their country. 

Americans played a role in every single affair in Iran during the Pahlavi regime. It was them who toppled the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 in a coup, something that the Iranians still have not forgot or forgiven.

The post-coup reforms in Iran such as the so-called Land Reforms and the subsequent White Revolution during the Shah regime were ordered by Washington fearing that Iran could fall into the Communist Bloc. 

As the current Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei noted in a speech in 2022, the Americans try to tell the Iranians that the enmity between Iran and the United States started in the 1979 takeover of their embassy in Tehran, but that is a big lie. The "starting point" of the row goes back to the CIA-orchestrated 1953 coup.

The 1979 embassy takeover also showed the valor and the boldness of revolutionaries against the United States. It proved their faith in the insight of the Ayatollah Khomeini. 

On the same day of the month of Aban back in 1964, Mohammadreza Shah Pahlavi forced Imam Khomeini into exile, first to Turkey, and next to Najaf in Iraq. He was sent to exile because of a speech he delivered to people and seminaries of Qom. He voiced his objection to the legal immunity of American agents. Historical documents in Iran’s contemporary history show that it was the American CIA that had ordered Imam to be exiled. At that time, Americans had tens of thousands of agents in Iran. They were political, military and security agents. They were among the people who used to manage Iran, in the army, in the intelligence organizations, planning centers, etc.

Imam Khomeini had objected that “If a low-ranking American agent insulted stomped on an Iranian prominent religious scholar in the country and committed whatever crime he wished, the Iranian legal system would remain totally neutral, and nobody would have the right to stop him.”

Moreover, on November 4, 1978, a few month before the victory of the Islamic Revolution, a gathering of teenage students on the campus of the University of Tehran was attacked by the Shah security forces. They were staging a peaceful rally calling for the return home from exile of their beloved leader Imam Khomeini. The clash began with tear gas and then with bullets. Every day on this day, also known as Pupil Day, Iranians remember the massacre of a number of Tehran students including students as young as 13. That event made it clear that the confrontation between the Pahlavi regime and the Iranian people had entered its final stage.

Month after the Islamic Revolution victory, the Iranian youth once again entered the scene and astonished the world. November 4 marks the day when the Muslim student followers of the Imam Khomeini Line stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 69 people, 17 of them were released at various times but the remaining 52 remained captives for 444 days.

There is a saying that the only country in which a coup did not happen was the United States because it does not have an embassy there.

It is noteworthy that the day the U.S. embassy was taken by young Iranian revolutionaries, the American government was several times more formidable and prestigious than today. The reality is that the US has lost a great deal of its prestige in recent years. 

The enmity between Iran and the United States has been amplified by interest groups, seeking to leverage US policy for their own ends. Powerful lobbies like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have sought to redirect the U.S. foreign policy towards Iran by blaming Tehran for Israel’s defeats at the hands of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups.