image

I was the one Iran run to when they need funds to sponsor Hezbollah.

But after I met Jesus, I discovered I was doing the wrong thing.

There are billionaires in Iran that the world does not know about.

Men whose fortunes are hidden behind shell companies and secret bank accounts in countries across the globe.

Men whose wealth cannot be tracked by Forbes or any international organization because of sanctions and deliberate concealment.

men who have made their money from arms deals and oil and funding terrorism across the Middle East.

I know this because I was one of them.

My name is Kasm Muhammadi Nijad.

I am 73 years old.

For 40 years, I was the invisible hand that moved billions of dollars from Thran to Beirut to fund Hezbollah’s war machine.

I financed bombings that killed hundreds.

I funded rockets that destroyed homes and orphaned children.

I sat in private meetings with Ayatollah Kmeni himself and with Hassan Nasalla and with General Kazam Solmani and I did it all believing I was doing the will of Allah.

Then one night in 2020 motou my heart stopped beating in a hospital in Thran.

I was clinically dead for four minutes.

And in those four minutes, I stood face to face with Jesus Christ.

He asked me one question that destroyed everything I believed.

He said, “Kazm, why have you been funding the destruction of my children? Today, for the first time in my life, I am going to answer that question live on television before the entire world.

I was born in the spring of 1952 in the city of Tehran, the capital of Iran.

In those days, Thran was a different place than it is today.

The Sha was on the throne and the country was trying to become modern and western.

Uh there were cinemas and restaurants and women walking in the streets without covering their hair.

The mosques were still full of worshippers, but religion did not control every aspect of life the way it would later.

I grew up in a wealthy neighborhood in the northern part of the city where the air was cleaner and the houses were larger than anywhere else in Thran.

My family had money and status and connections to powerful people.

I never knew what it was like to be hungry or poor or desperate.

I never understood the struggles that ordinary Iranians faced every day.

I was born into privilege and I accepted it as my natural right without ever questioning where it came from or what it cost others.

My father was a man named Mustafa Muhammad Najat.

He was one of the most successful merchants in Thran during the time of the Sha.

He traded carpets and textiles and antiques with buyers all over the world.

He had warehouses in the bazar district and offices in Europe and connections to the royal court itself.

The Sha’s family bought carpets from my father for their palaces.

Foreign diplomats and wealthy tourists came to his showrooms to purchase the finest Persian rugs that money could buy.

My father was a proud man who believed that success was a sign of God’s favor.

He taught me that wealth was not something to be ashamed of but something to be celebrated and increased with every opportunity.

He taught me that a man’s worth was measured by the size of his fortune and the respect he commanded from those around him.

These lessons would shape everything I became in the years that followed and would lead me down a path that I could never have imagined.

When I was 18 years old in 1970, my father began teaching me the secrets of his trade.

He took me to his warehouses in the Grand Bazar and showed me how to judge the quality of a carpet by examining its knots and colors and patterns with careful eyes.

He took me to his offices and showed me how to negotiate with buyers and sellers from different countries who spoke different languages and followed different customs.

He introduced me to his context in the government who helped smooth the way for his imports and exports across international borders.

He taught me that business was not just about buying and selling goods in the marketplace.

It was about building relationships with powerful people who could protect you and help you grow.

It was about knowing which palms to grease and which favors to trade and which secrets to keep.

It was about understanding that the rules that applied to ordinary people did not apply to men with money and connections.

I absorbed every single one of these lessons eagerly because I wanted to make my father proud and prove myself worthy.

By the mid 1970s, I had become my father’s right hand in running the family business.

I traveled to London and Paris and New York to meet with buyers and established new markets for our carpets and textiles.

I negotiated deals worth millions of dollars with collectors and dealers and interior designers who wanted authentic Persian rugs for their wealthy clients in the West.

I was only in my early 20s, but I was already richer than most men would ever be in their entire lives.

I wore expensive suits tailored in London.

I drove expensive European cars through the streets of Thrron.

The I stayed in the finest hotels wherever I traveled around the world.

I ate at restaurants where a single meal cost more than what an ordinary Iranian family earned in a month.

I thought I had the world figured out.

I thought I understood exactly how everything worked and how to get whatever I wanted from life.

But I understood nothing at all.

I did not know that the comfortable world I had grown up in was about to be completely destroyed.

The first signs of trouble appeared in 1977 when protest began breaking out in cities across Iran.

People were angry at the sha for many different reasons.

Some were angry about corruption and inequality that left millions in poverty while the elite lived in luxury.

Some were angry about political repression and the Savak secret police who tortured anyone who dared to speak against the government.

Some were angry about Western influence and the way traditional Islamic values were being abandoned in favor of American culture.

The protests grew larger and more violent throughout 1978 as more and more people joined the movement.

The Sha tried to crush them with military force, but nothing worked because the people were no longer afraid.

They poured into the streets by the millions chanting slogans and demanding change and burning pictures of the sha.

And leading them from exile was a man whose name would become synonymous with revolution itself.

His name was Ayatollah Ruhola Kmeni and he was calling on the people to rise up and establish an Islamic government.

My family watched the revolution unfold with a mixture of deep fear and cautious hope.

In my father was worried about what would happen to his business empire if the sha fell from power.

He had built everything under the old system and he did not know if it would survive under a new government with new rules and new leaders.

But my mother was filled with excitement about the possibility of an Islamic government coming to power.

She believed with all her heart that Kmeni was a holy man sent by God himself to restore true religion to Iran.

She prayed for the success of the revolution every single day and encouraged all of us to support it as well.

When the sha finally fled Iran in January 1979 and kain returned in triumph on February 1st, my mother fell to her knees and wept with joy.

She said that a new and glorious era had begun for our country.

She said that God had answered the prayers of the faithful and that Iran would now become a shining beacon of Islam for the entire world to see and follow.

The revolution changed everything for my family and for every family in Iran.

The old elites who had been connected to the sha were swept away like leaves in a storm.

Some were dragged before revolutionary courts and executed.

Some fled the country with whatever they could carry and never returned.

Some lost everything they had worked their whole lives to build.

My father was terrified that we would be targeted because of his known connections to the old regime and the royal court.

But my father was clever and adaptable and he understood how to survive in dangerous times.

He quickly reached out to the new revolutionary leaders and offered his services and his loyalty to the Islamic government.

He donated large amounts of money to Islamic charities and foundations that supported the revolution.

He made sure that the right people in the new government knew that he was a faithful supporter of Kmeni and the new Islamic order that was being established.

His strategy worked brilliantly.

Instead of being destroyed by the revolution like so many other wealthy families, our business survived and actually grew stronger under the new regime.

The revolutionary government needed people who knew how to run businesses and manage large amounts of money.

it.

They needed people who had international connections and who could help them navigate the complex world of global trade, especially as Western countries began imposing sanctions on the new Islamic Republic.

My father was ready
and more than willing to serve these needs.

He positioned himself as an indispensable ally to the new rulers of Iran.

He taught me that survival was always more important than principles or ideals.

He taught me that a smart man adapts to whatever system is in power and finds a way to profit from it regardless of who sits on the throne.

I learned this lesson well, perhaps too well, because the adaptability that my father taught me would eventually lead me into a darkness so deep that only a miracle could pull me out of it.

In September 1980, Saddam Hussein sent his army across the border and invaded Iran.

The war that followed would last for eight terrible years and would kill nearly a million people on both sides.

It would destroy entire cities and leave scars on the land and the people that would never fully heal.

But for men like me, the war was something else entirely.

It was an opportunity.

The new Islamic government desperately needed weapons and military equipment to fight the Iraqis.

They needed bullets and rockets and tanks and spare parts for their aging Americanmade fighter jets that the Sha had purchased years before.

International sanctions made it nearly impossible for Iran to buy weapons through normal channels.

The Western countries that had sold arms to the Sha now refused to do business with the Islamic Republic.

So the government turned to men like me, men who had international connections and who knew how to move goods across borders without attracting attention.

Men who understood how to make deals in the shadows where no rules applied.

My father was the one who first introduced me to the world of arms dealing.

He had been approached by contacts within the new revolutionary government who asked if he could use his trading network to help acquire military supplies from foreign sources.

My father saw the opportunity immediately.

The profit margins on weapons were far greater than anything he had ever made selling carpets and textiles.

A single shipment of rifles or ammunition could earn more money than a year of carpet sales.

He brought me into these deals because I was young and energetic and I spoke English and French fluently, which made it easier to negotiate with foreign suppliers.

Together, we began building a new kind of business, a business that dealt not in beautiful Persian rugs, but in instruments of debt and destruction.

We sourced weapons from China and North Korea and Eastern Europe and smuggled them into Iran through secret roads that bypassed international sanctions.

The money poured in faster than I could have ever imagined.

Within two years of entering the arms trade, I had made more money than my father had earned in his entire career selling carpets.

I opened secret bank accounts in Dubai and Switzerland and Hong Kong to hide the profits from international investigators.

I set up shell companies in countries with weak regulations to move money around the world without leaving traces.

I learned the dark art of sanctions evasion and money laundering from experts who had been doing it for decades.

I became one of the most important suppliers of weapons to the Iranian military during the war.

Generals and I, our RGC commanders, called me personally to place orders for equipment they needed on the front lines.

Government ministers invited me to private dinners where deals were made over plates of saffron, rice, and kebabs.

I was becoming one of the most powerful men in Iran, even though almost nobody outside the inner circles of power knew my name.

It was in the spring of 1982 that everything changed in a way I could never have predicted.

I received a message through one of my government contacts telling me that I had been summoned to a private meeting at a secure location in Thran.

The message said that the meeting was being organized by the office of the supreme leader himself and I was told to come alone and to tell no one about the invitation.

My heart was pounding when I arrived at the location which was a large house surrounded by revolutionary guards with machine guns.

I was escorted through several checkpoints and searched thoroughly before being led into a room where some of the most powerful men in Iran were already seated.

There were senior IRGC commanders in military uniforms.

There were government ministers in suits.

There were high ranking clerics in turbans and robes.

And at the center of it, all sitting on a simple cushion on the floor, was Ayatollah Rouola Kmeni himself, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I had never been in the same room as Kmeni before that day.

I had seen him on television and heard his voice on the radio countless times.

But being in his physical presence was something entirely different.

He radiated an authority and a power that I had never felt from any other human being.

The room fell completely silent when he spoke.

Every man in that room, including generals and ministers who commanded thousands of people hung on his every word, like children listening to their father.

Kmeni looked at me with those deep piercing eyes, and I felt like he could see straight into my soul.

He knew who I was.

He knew what I had been doing for the war effort and he had something specific that he wanted me to do next.

Something that would bind me to the Islamic Republic and its mission for the next 40 years of my life.

Kmeni began by speaking about the situation in Lebanon.

He talked about how the Shia Muslim population in southern Lebanon had been oppressed and marginalized for decades.

He talked about how Israel had invaded Lebanon earlier that year and was occupying the southern part of the country.

He said that this was an attack not just on Lebanon but on all of Islam.

He said that it was the duty of every Muslim to fight against the Zionist enemy and to protect the oppressed believers in Lebanon.

Then he revealed his plan.

Iran was going to create and support a new armed movement in Lebanon.

A movement of faithful Shia Muslims who would fight against Israel and defend the honor of Islam.

This movement would be trained and equipped and funded by Iran through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard course guard.

It would become the tip of the spear in Iran’s resistance against Israel and American influence in the Middle East.

The name of this movement was Hezbollah, the party of God.

Kmeni turned his attention directly to me.

He told me that building this movement would require enormous amounts of money.

He said that my skills in moving money across borders and evading international sanctions made me the perfect person to help finance this sacred project.

He told me that funding the resistance against Israel was not just a political act but a religious obligation.

Then one of the senior clerics in the room opened a Quran and began reading verses that he sayeth proved that supporting jihad with your wealth was one of the highest forms of worship in Islam.

Uh he read verse after verse about how those who spend their money in the path of Allah will be rewarded with paradise.

He read about how the believers who fund the fighters are equal in reward to the fighters themselves.

He read about how Allah loves those who sacrifice their wealth for the defense of the faith.

Each verse hit me like a hammer driving the message deeper and deeper into my heart and my mind.

By the time the cleric finished reading, I was completely convinced.

I believed with absolute certainty that what they were asking me to do was not just acceptable but holy.

I believed that God himself was calling me to use my wealth for this sacred purpose.

I believed that funding the fight against Israel would earn me a place in paradise that no amount of prayer or fasting could ever achieve.

And I would be lying if I said that the religious argument was the only thing that convinced me.

There were other incentives as well.

The government promised me protection from any legal troubles.

They promised me exclusive access to lucrative oil contracts and government deals that would make me even wealthier than I already was.

They promised me influence and status within the highest levels of the Islamic Republic.

They were offering me everything a man could want, wealth and power and religious salvation, all wrapped up in one package.

How could I say no? What kind of fool would turn down an offer like that? I said yes to Kmeni that day.

I pledged my wealth and my resources and my networks to the cause of Hezbollah and the resistance against Israel.

So I shook hands with IRGC commanders who would become my partners in this enterprise for decades to come.

I left that meeting feeling like I was walking on air.

I felt chosen and special and important in a way I had never felt before.

I was no longer just a wealthy businessman making money from arms deals.

I was now a soldier of God fighting the greatest battle of our time.

I was a warrior for Islam using my wealth as my weapon.

I drove home that night and prayed with more passion and conviction than I had ever prayed in my entire life.

I thanked Allah for choosing me for this sacred mission.

I asked him to bless my efforts and to accept my sacrifice.

I had no idea that I was not serving God at all.

I had no idea that the path I had just chosen would lead me into 40 years of darkness and blood and destruction that would cost thousands of innocent people their lives.

Over the following months, I threw myself into the work of financing Hezbollah with everything I had.

I set up new shell companies specifically designed to funnel money from Iran to Lebanon without being detected by international authorities.

I created networks of trusted couriers who carried cash across borders, hidden in shipments of goods and merchandise.

I opened secret accounts in banks across the Middle East and Africa and Asia that could receive and distribute funds without leaving traces.

I worked closely with the IRGC secrets force which was responsible for coordinating Iran’s support for Hezbollah and other proxy groups across the region.

The amounts of money I moved were staggering.

Continue reading….
Next »