DUBAI – Thousands of Iranians gathered on the anniversary on Monday of the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy in a jab at moderate President Hassan Rohani as he tries to ease tension with Washington and resolve the nuclear dispute. The rally outside the former embassy complex is an annual rite in Iran but took on extra resonance this year as a barometer of hardline conservative opposition to Rohani's diplomatic opening to the West after eight years of increasing confrontation under predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran has launched substantive talks with world powers on a peaceful resolution to the standoff over its nuclear program, and Rohani has won critical support from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for his conciliatory approach. But this did not prevent large crowds from gathering around the embassy building dubbed the “nest of spies” in the local press, holding up anti-US placards. Footage broadcast live on state television showed what appeared to be a crowd of several thousand and the walls of the embassy compound plastered with large posters intent on showing supposed deceptions of the United States. The 1979 siege began when, ten months after the fall of the US-allied shah, radical students stormed the embassy, taking hostage 52 staff for an eventual 444 days. There have been no US-Iranian diplomatic relations since. After 34 years of frozen mutual hostility, many Iranians applauded a short telephone conversation between Rohani and US President Barack Obama after the UN General Assembly in September, but it was met with suspicion by conservatives. “Thirty-four years ago, our nation showed the realities to the world, that American embassies are a place of espionage and hatching plots,” hardline war veteran and former chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili said in an address to the crowds. “The capture of the nest of spies showed that the revolution was on the right path,” he said, in remarks carried by the official news agency IRNA. But on Sunday, Khamenei delivered a strong public endorsement to current nuclear negotiators, an apparent warning to hardliners not to paint Rohani as a pushover towards Tehran's old enemy. – Reuters
