Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Lauding the recent “liberation” of Aleppo as a major defeat for the West in general and the United States in particular, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force boasted about Iran’s prowess in the field of missile and aircraft design and production, the regime-aligned news agency Tasnim reported.

In a speech on Thursday, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh claimed that great strides had been made in the Islamic Republic’s self-sufficient military capabilities, stressing that its efforts and know-how were born out of a need to confront enemy threats, which it takes very seriously. According to Tasnim, Hajizadeh also claimed that all of Tehran’s moves on the this score have been “defensive in nature.”

As The Algemeiner reported in early December, however, in a similar story on Hajizadeh’s highlighting of Iran’s military advances, Tehran’s semi-official state news agency Fars reminded readers of the IRGC’s testing in March of long-range missiles, one of which was adorned with the Hebrew message: “Israel should be wiped off the earth.”

That report came amid daily threats from the Iranian regime to “retaliate” if US President Barack Obama approves the bill that Congress passed to extend the Iran Sanctions Act for an additional 10 years.

Later in the month, the deputy chief of Iran’s atomic energy agency (AEOI) declared that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program was in better shape since the forging of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with world powers in July 2015. In a press conference, Behrouz Kamalvandi said, “We are now in possession of some new reactors that are much technically superior to their previous versions.”

At the same time, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced that he had fulfilled his pledge to replace the country’s centrifuges with the most advanced and modern ones – and that the plan to make a nuclear propulsion system operative was underway.

In an interview with The Algemeiner at the end of November — following what foreign media outlets reported was an Israeli strike on an Iran-backed Hezbollah weapons convoy in Syria — former director-general of Israel’s Ministry of International Affairs and Strategy IDF Brig. Gen. (res.) Yosef Kuperwasser said that Iran has been stepping up the speed at which it is arming its proxies in the Middle East, due to its fear that after President-elect Donald Trump assumes office on January 20, its room to maneuver will be greatly curtailed.