Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi said the Iranian deal will embolden Iran, and that it will cheat to get a nuclear weapon. PHOTO: Asharq Al-Awsat

The leader of an Iranian parliament in exile, told London-based Asharq Al-Awsat on Tuesday that Tehran will ultimately cheat on its agreement with world powers negotiated in Vienna this week to build a nuclear weapon.

Maryam Rajavi, President elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, added that the agreement will open the door to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and will provide the regime in Tehran with a renewed opportunity to expand its financing of terrorists in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.

According to Rajavi, an exile who lives in Paris, Iran’s ruling clerical establishment considers its nuclear program to be one of three pillars that will ensure the continuity of the control it established over Iran with the 1979 revolution. The other two pillars are suppression of domestic dissent and the exportation of terrorism regionally and internationally, Rajavi said.

She called on the international community to stand by the Iranian people and help them to remove the Tehran regime, noting that “the correct policy” for the West, “is to back the Iranian people and the Iranian resistance in order to remove the regime.”

She continued, saying that “capitulations by the West to the clerical establishment” are “in the opposite direction of history.”

Rajavi also called on the international community to challenge Iran’s attempts to interfere in the affairs of other countries in the Middle East, saying that without such an international stance, any country in the region will be able to demand the same concessions the West made with Iran, and a nuclear arms race will ensue.

She also warned that Iran will likely use funds from the sanctions relief granted in Tuesday’s deal to further its sponsorship and exportation of terrorism in the region, rather than to address the needs of the Iranian people.

Rajavi advised that the “monetary influx that will flow into the pockets of the regime must be subjected to strict supervision by the United Nations to ensure that it is spent on the Iranian people’s essential needs, otherwise the regime will spend this money on its policy of exporting terrorism and religious extremism to Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.”