Breitbart.com reports: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed on Wednesday that Tehran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ was only made stronger by the fall of Bashar Assad, the Syrian dictator who was one of Iran’s top clients and vassals before he was overthrown by a lightning-fast jihadi insurgency last week.

Iran invested a huge amount of money and military force to keep Assad in power through a decade of civil war, but Khamenei insisted the demise of the Syrian regime at the hands of an al-Qaeda offshoot – militant Sunni Islamists who have no love for the Shiite superpower of Iran – was not a major calamity. In fact, Khamenei said Iran was better off without Assad.

‘This is what the resistance is, this is what the resistance front is. The more you push, the stronger it becomes; the more you commit crimes, the more motivated it becomes. The more you fight with them, the more widespread it will be, and I tell you, by the Divine Power, the domain of resistance will cover the entire region more than before,’ the elderly ayatollah ranted during a speech in Tehran…

‘I say that by God’s will and power and with the permission of God Almighty, Iran is strong and powerful and will only grow more powerful,’ he railed…”