Iranian commander breaks silence on wartime arms imports
A prominent Iranian military figure who served as minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the Iran-Iraq War has broken the long tradition of silence surrounding Iran's arms imports during its war with Iraq.
TEHRAN, Iran — Prominent Iranian Brig. Gen. Mohsen Rafiqdoost went into unprecedented detail in a Sept. 26 interview about his time as minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, the IRGC had its own ministry within the administration that took care of its logistical affairs. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense was responsible for the logistics of the army.
In an interview with the Reformist Shargh Daily, Rafiqdoost said, “Although at the beginning of the revolution and during the early days of the war, the East and the West were coordinated [against Iran], we still built the defense capabilities of the IRGC with ‘Eastern weapons.’ My first time buying weapons, I bought 2,000 Kalashnikovs and 500 RPG-7s. Later, I would get weapons from Syria and Libya and eventually I connected with North Korea.”
Rafiqdoost spoke about the deep collaboration between Iran and the Eastern Bloc countries during the Iran-Iraq War, explaining, “After North Korea, I also connected with Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and the Eastern bloc, in that order. … Of course, we would buy ammunition for Western-manufactured cannons from Switzerland. … We needed surface-to-air missiles, which were more tactical, and therefore we went and negotiated and brought them to Tehran. In exchange, we gave them a Hague system. That is all. The goods we received from Libya, for free, were worth more than $800 million.”
Rafiqdoost finally spoke about the IRGC’s connections with Beijing and Moscow. “At a certain point we connected ourselves to Communist China, and when that happened, we were connected to the source. We halted our relations with other [weapons] suppliers almost completely. China sold weapons to us directly and did it in high volume. Gradually, it started selling us strategic weapons such as coast-to-sea missiles and other types of strategic missiles as well. Gradually, and because of our connection to China, the Russians started to sell us weapons too.”
