Istanbul cherish the memory of Iran's Khomeini

Uncommon at a mosque in Istanbul, young children sang military songs at a ceremony commemorating the 33rd anniversary of the death of Iran’s Islamic revolution leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Attended by Turkish and Iranian Shiite clerics, the ceremony also hosted a controversial speaker who was previously imprisoned for being an Iranian operative.

At the ceremony held on Sunday at the Imam Zin al-Abedin Mosque in İstanbul’s Bağcıar district, segregated children in uniforms sang the epic anthem “Salaam Fermandeh” (Commander), which was written for Khomeini, in Turkish and Farsi.

It should be noted that Iranian State media organizations affiliated with the Iranian state do not usually report on events organized by Shiites in Turkey in order not to attract negative reactions from the public.

Photos of Khomeini and Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei were hung in the mosque for the ceremony, although the photographs are strictly prohibited to hang photographs in mosques.

Members of the Turkish ruling party recently held several political meetings in the mosque, arousing the ire of many. However, children had never before been seen singing military songs under pictures of Iranian leaders.

The Zin al-Abedin Mosque is one of 40 Shiite mosques in Istanbul. The overwhelming majority of mosques in Turkey are under the control and supervision of the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet).

One of the speakers at the ceremony was Nureddin Şirin, well known by radical Islamists in Turkey. Şirin, now the editor-in-chief of the pro-Iranian Kudüs TV, was one of the suspects in an investigation in 2011, which uncovered a sophisticated espionage network run by the Revolutionary Guard in Turkey and exposed the depth and extent of infiltration of Turkish institutions by Iran.

The investigation also revealed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ties to IRGC generals and how Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkish Intelligence, played a central role in tightening Turkish ties with Iran and worked with the Iranian regime.

However, many investigators in the police department and members of the judiciary were jailed in 2014 for running the confidential investigation into the Quds Force. Most of them were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2020.

Şirin had previously been imprisoned for membership in a terrorist organization and committing a terrorist act on behalf of Iran and was released in 2005 after his sentence was reduced by the ruling party.

Sirin in 2020 surprisingly claimed that Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force killed in a U.S. raid, was instrumental in scuttling the attempted coup against Erdogan on July 15, 2016, and said on a television show a few days after the assassination: “Soleimani’s role was greater than anyone else’s in disrupting the coup.”

“President Erdogan knows what Soleimani did for Turkey on July 15,” Şirin said and the question remains unanswered until now, “What has Soleimani done?”