The leaked audio of Iranian Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif's interview has caused a stir in which he is openly talking about the conflict behind the scenes. According to Al Jazeera TV, the audio is more than three hours long and is part of an interview that Jawad Zarif gave to Saeed Lailaz, a journalist and economic analyst with the government's coalition in March.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzada said the actual interview was seven hours long, while the leaked interview was out of context, aimed at gaining the political advantage at a time when the president was in office in June. Elections are coming up.
In the interview, Jawad Zarif has sharply criticized the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards. He called the Al-Quds Force operations "field operations" and said that they did not benefit Iran on the diplomatic front, but sometimes had to make sacrifices on the diplomatic front to continue "field operations" in the region.
According to Jawad Zarif, in 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin persuaded former Quds Force chief General Qasim Soleimani to join the war in Syria. Putin joined the war through the air force and brought Iran's ground forces into Syria. Al-Quds Force chief General Qasim Soleimani is thought to have been killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
He also accused Russia of trying to prevent Iran from reaching a nuclear deal with Western powers because Russia did not want Iran to have good relations with the West.
According to the BBC, Jawad Zarif also complained about how former Revolutionary Guards chief Qasim Soleimani often brought his demands to him.
Jawad Zarif also confirmed reports of civilian aircraft being used to deliver weapons and troops to Syria. In the tape, he complains that Soleimani used Iran's national airline, Iran Air, for military purposes and did not care what damage it could do to the country's reputation.
He says he found out about it two hours after Iran attacked an Iraqi military base on January 8, 2020, in response to the assassination of Qasim Soleimani.
