In Iran, Terrorism Remains A Matter of Perspective

"By threatening them, we wanted to remind the Americans of the potential we have against them," Samadi said from behind a desk in Tehran where he was, at times, clearly bored to be giving yet another interview. Three young associates sat in, occasionally suggesting talking points.

"The core of this organization," Sadami said, "is writers."

Still, the group's public emergence was widely noted in Iranian political circles, where it was taken as particularly vivid evidence that religious conservatives were in firm control once again.

"There's no way this could have happened six months ago," said Saeed Laylaz, a reform economist and analyst.

Since reformist candidates were disqualified from parliamentary elections last February and hard-liners swept to power, the only question has been how hard of a line they will adopt. The Army of Martyrs is seen as a sign, having thrust itself onto a public stage already featuring a revival of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Revolutionary Guard has long been the primary bastion and incubator of hard-line resolve here. Formed by the Muslim clerics who came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution distrusting the army left behind by the monarchy, it has its own divisions, intelligence branch, prisons and responsibilities ranging from disaster response to, according to diplomats here, supervision of Iran's shadowy nuclear program.

It is also increasingly visible in politics.

Several dozen former pasdaran, as the Revolutionary Guards are known in the Persian language, were sworn into parliament last month on the slate approved by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who as supreme leader holds ultimate authority in Iran's theocratic system. Khamenei recently named a retired Revolutionary Guard chief to head state television and radio, one of the most powerful positions in government.

Last month, the Revolutionary Guard took over a new international airport near Tehran only hours after it opened. A public statement had called the hiring of a Turkish firm to operate Imam Khomeini International Airport a threat to "the security of the country as well as its dignity." The airport has remained shuttered.

"I think the airport thing was very significant," a foreign diplomat here said. "It had the form of a coup. I think it was the IRGC saying publicly, 'We can do what we want.' . . . The question is whether they're pressing their own agenda or doing Khamenei's bidding."

Others are more sanguine. Calling the Revolutionary Guard a "maturing" organization, another diplomat noted the restraint it had shown in Iraq, where it is the lead Iranian agency. But at a June 2 public conference, a brigadier in the guards lauded the effectiveness of "martyrdom operations," citing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as tactical operations that produced far-reaching strategic results, according to Iranian media accounts. But any formal link between the Revolutionary Guard and the Army of Martyrs is denied by both the government and Samadi.

Samadi said the Army of Martyrs was formed to protest a visible slackening in revolutionary zeal. A photo of flag-draped U.S. coffins decorates his office wall, beside a portrait of a Palestinian suicide bomber and her infant daughter. A third photo shows Khaled Eslamboli firing an automatic weapon at Sadat's reviewing stand during a military parade on Oct. 6, 1981. Samadi said the group's first act was a protest against dropping Eslamboli's name from street signs.

"We realized this was the initial step toward creating a gap between the revolutionary Iranians and other Muslims in other parts of the world, especially those fighting the Israelis in Palestine," he said.

Like many Islamic militants, Samadi describes suicide bombings as asymmetrical warfare, a military tactic that levels the battlefield between a technologically superior army and an oppressed population. He lamented that Iran is rarely credited with pioneering the form by sending car and truck bombs against the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s. When a reporter observed that Iran appeared to have forsaken the practice since a truck bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was traced to Iranian agents, the spokesman smiled.

"The U.S. has not really recognized that we have successfully transferred a good method of resistance to other countries," he said. "We do not have to mount foreign operations ourselves."

And yet, he said, Osama bin Laden threatens to give martyrdom operations a bad name. "What's the point of blowing up a civilian train in Spain, or the U.S. embassies in Africa where a lot of Africans are killed?"

The Army of Martyrs wants nothing to do with Hassan Sabah's Assassins, either. "The nature of the things they did is quite in line with what Osama bin Laden is carrying out," Samadi said.

No such talk is heard in Alamut, northwest of Tehran. "If Hassan Sabah was the ruler, it would be excellent," Safari said. "God bless him.

"Really. God bless him."