(UnitedVoice.com) – Almost 40 years ago, on October 23, 1983, terrorists bombed the US Marines Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The attack killed 241 American and 58 French service members. An Iranian official reportedly confessed to his country’s role in the attack.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) located an interview with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative in Lebanon, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai. He said he’d received orders of “martyrdom operations against the Americans.” Tabatabai went on to say that he “provided what was needed in order to” carry out the attack on the American Marine Corps unit.
In addition to the attack on the barracks, Iran was allegedly involved in the April 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut. That bombing killed 63 people, including 17 Americans.
Shortly after Tabatabai’s interview went public, the Iranian government allegedly tried to scrub it from the internet. MEMRI said the interview was taken down because “no official representative […] ever said that Iran had any involvement in ordering, planning and carrying out the” deadly bombings. The Iranian government has always claimed it had nothing to do with the mass killings.
The attack on the barracks occurred after two suicide truck bombers drove into the area and exploded. Of the 241 service members killed, 220 were US Marines, three were US Army soldiers, and 18 were in the US Navy.
Tabatabai said Iran was trying to establish Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Baalbek region. That’s where members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were located. In 2001, families of the hundreds of Americans killed filed lawsuits against the Iranian government. Fifteen years later, the US Supreme Court ruled families could collect nearly $2 billion in frozen Iranian funds.
An Iranian-American expert, Banafsheh Zand, told Fox News Digital that Tabatabai’s admission indicates “serious divisions among the [Iranian] regime’s top brass.” How deep those alleged divisions go is unclear.
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