Tehran. Thousands of people gathered this Sunday in the capital of Iran, in front of the building that housed the United States embassy, to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the hostage crisis that marked the breakdown of relations between Washington and Tehran.
Protesters waved Iranian and Palestinian flags and emblems of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, a political movement supported by Tehran that is also made up of an armed militia.
“Death to Israel, death to the United States!” chanted the protesters in front of the former diplomatic headquarters, which is now a museum called the “Lair of Spies” and whose walls contain anti-American slogans.
Participants in this march, which takes place every year in Iran, also burned Israeli and American flags.
On November 4, 1979, nine months after the overthrow of Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, a group of students supporting the Islamic Revolution stormed the United States embassy in Tehran.
The students held 52 employees of the American diplomatic headquarters hostage for 444 days to demand that Washington extradite the ousted monarch, who was a strong ally of the West when he ruled and who was being treated for cancer in the United States.
Due to the hostage crisis, the United States officially severed relations with Iran in 1980, a relationship that has been frozen since then, and Washington also imposed harsh sanctions on Tehran.
“Towards collapse and destruction”
This anniversary is celebrated at a time of tension in the Middle East, fueled by the outbreak of war in Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Israel – the United States’ main ally in the region and a bitter rival of Iran – intensified the escalation in September with an open war against the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, an ally of the Palestinian group, in Lebanon.
Tensions between Iran and Israel have also escalated in recent months.
Tehran launched a missile attack against Israeli territory on October 1, in retaliation for the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader killed in September in an Israeli bombing, and the death of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas, at the end of July in an operation attributed to Israel.
Israel responded with bombings against military facilities in Iran on October 26.
Some of the protesters this Sunday held portraits of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or figures of the “resistance” against Israel, such as Nasrallah.
General Hosein Salami, head of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s ideological army, lashed out before the crowd in Tehran against Israel and the United States.
Israelis and Americans “cannot survive by massacring Muslims. We always warn them that if they do not change their behavior, they will go towards collapse and destruction,” he declared in a speech broadcast on television.
complicated relationships
“I am here for the destruction of Israel and the United States,” an attendee told AFP, who only identified himself as Hassani, 42, a government employee.
The United States “is the root of all these wars and this hatred” in the region, he said, in line with official rhetoric.
Two days before the presidential elections in the United States, Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris are pouring all their energy into the final stretch of the campaign, closely followed in Iran.
However, most Iranians present in Tehran have no illusions about the outcome.
“Relations between Iran and the United States cannot return to normal,” said Mohammadi, a 40-year-old housewife.
The Islamic Republic signed an agreement with the international community in 2015 to limit its nuclear program. The pact, in which the United States also participated, provided in exchange for a progressive lifting of sanctions on Iran.
However, the agreement was torpedoed three years later, when then-US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from it and reimposed sanctions.
“It doesn’t matter who the next president of the United States is (…) We have never liked any of them and [eso no cambiará] now,” said one protester.
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