DUBAI, United Arab Emirates _ Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran had delivered a "slap to the U.S.'s image as a superpower" in this month's military confrontation, seeking to rally Iranians around an embattled establishment as he led Friday prayers in Tehran for the first time in eight years.
His comments came amid unprecedented international scrutiny over the Islamic Revolutionary Guard's unintentional shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane just hours after Iran had fired missiles into bases in Iraq housing American troops, without causing casualties. That attack was in retaliation for the killing of a top Iranian commander by the U.S.
"The Iranian people went through a lot," Khamenei said. He branded the U.S. "terrorists" for the Jan. 3 killing of General Qassem Soleimani, whom he credited with being the most effective force in defeating the Islamic State.
"They're hit by strikes in Syria, in Iraq, in Lebanon and in Afghanistan at the hands of the power of resistance, but this strike was greater than all of those, it was a strike on prestige," Khamenei said of the Iranian action. U.S. officials who claimed to be on the side of the Iranian people were "clowns," he said.
The downing of the plane shattered the sense of national unity that followed the killing of Soleimani, triggering street protests against the government just weeks after security forces in November crushed some of the biggest and most sustained anti-regime demonstrations in more than a decade. Human rights groups say hundreds of people were killed in the crackdown.
The downing of the Ukraine International Airlines plane killed all 176 people on board. Almost half of the victims were citizens of Iran and many others had Iranian ancestry.
Khamenei called the jet disaster an "extremely bitter incident" but said public opinion over the tragedy had been manipulated by U.K. and U.S.-based television channels. Thousands protested at the state's involvement in the debacle, with chants calling for the leader's downfall.
The top cleric directly instructed the military to ensure it investigated the jet disaster and guarantee that there could never be a repeat.
