iran panorama

By Mohammad Sadat Khansari Over the past week, a  protest movement  expanded to encompass much of the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchistan, following a clash on Monday between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ( IRGC ) and fuel porters in that region. Demonstrations of solidarity were also recorded in several major cities throughout Iran, with many participants using the opportunity to condemn the entire clerical regime and call for a regime change. This series of incidents signal that Iranian society remains in an explosive state more than three years after a  nationwide uprising  that brought the topic of regime change into mainstream public discourse. The most recent protests are not only another reminder of the regime’s vulnerability; they serve to highlight the brutality and contempt for human rights that makes that regime so unworthy of the international legitimacy it has been afforded in recent interactions with most Western nations. Even as the...

  By Ted Poe While working on terrorism-related issues during my congressional career, I soon understood not only that Iran had earned its reputation as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, but also that the country’s leadership considered terrorism a viable replacement for standard political and diplomatic statecraft. A recent criminal court ruling in Belgium reinforces this fact. Since the time of the 1979 revolution, the use of proxies in terror operations abroad afforded the regime some measure of plausible deniability and made it more difficult for the U.S. or its allies to hold Iranian officials directly accountable. Still, it was shocking when all such officials, including the regime’s representatives to foreign nations, evaded that accountability for nearly four entire decades. That streak was mainly attributable to the conciliatory Western policies. The impunity lasted until the summer of 2018, when German authorities arrested Assadollah Assadi, a top V...

  By: Alejo Vidal Quadras Last December, the International Trade Centre announced the cancellation of an event that was intended to explore the expansion of economic cooperation between Europe and Iran. The decision stemmed from several cancellations by prospective European participants in the wake of reports that Iran had executed a dissident journalist after luring him out of France in a sting operation. Ruhollah Zam  had been residing in Europe for years. The obviously political nature of his arrest made him an object of international activism, especially after it became clear that the regime intended to execute him. When that execution went forward in December, it raised immediate outcry from human rights defenders and Western government officials. While the controversy made it virtually unthinkable for European Union officials to participate in that month’s Europe-Iran Business Forum, it failed to give rise to increased pressure from the international communi...

  By Struan Stevenson It seems that the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, Josep Borrell, wishes to ignore the terrorist bomb plot that could have killed hundreds on European soil. It seems, from his silence on the  Assadollah Assadi  affair, that Mr Borrell is intent on business-as-usual with the criminal Iranian regime. Now he has even invited one of the Godfathers of terror,  Javad Zarif , the Iranian foreign minister, to participate in the Europe-Iran business forum that he has organised to take place from 1-3 March. Borrell has even kindly agreed that the EU should pay for this business-as-usual forum. We heard during the Assadi trial in Antwerp that the former Iranian diplomat also faces further terrorist charges in Germany. When he was arrested in Bavaria by German police, they found a notebook in his car which contained details of the bomb plot and the money paid to his co-conspirators. It also contained information about 289 ...

  By Mohammad Sadat Khansari It was recently revealed that two Europeans – a German citizen and an Iranian-French dual national – were arrested in Iran sometime before the February 4 conviction on terrorism charges for a high-ranking Iranian diplomat. The arrests were allegedly part of a broader effort to compel Belgian authorities to vacate the charges against  Assadollah Assadi , the former third counsellor at the Iranian embassy in Vienna who was identified in 2018 as the mastermind of a plot to bomb the annual gathering of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ( NCRI ). Assadi was arrested in Germany on July 1, 2018, a day after two co-conspirators were stopped on the way from Belgium to France, where they planned to infiltrate the  Free Iran rally  while carrying 500 grams of the high-explosive TATP. It was later revealed that Assadi himself had smuggled the explosives into Europe on a commercial flight, while traveling on a diplomatic passpor...

  Author:Mahmoud Hakamian Iran, February 19, 2021— As the Iranian regime approaches the 2021 Presidential Election, Tehran’s strategic impasse becomes apparent more than ever. For 42 years, Iranian authorities deceived the society by putting up a show of “reformists versus hardliners.” However, in recent years, Iranian citizens have clearly announced that they see no distinction between these supposedly rivaling factions. “Moderates and principalists are all cuts of the same cloth,” citizens say in their private gatherings. “Reformists, hardliners, the game is over,” people frequently chant in anti-establishment rallies and protests. “There are some groups and miniature parties that are made up of just two or three members. And there are only one or two parties with several hundred members that cannot hold a gathering with 50,000 people. They just become active during election campaigns and get help from influencers and celebrities to take a share in political power,” ...

  By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh On the surface, the Iranian leaders are pretending they are in no hurry to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal. For example, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei last month said in a speech, according to his official website: “We have no urge, no rush for America to return to the JCPOA. Our problem is not whether the United States will return to the JCPOA or not. Our rational demand is the lifting of sanctions.” However, the reality on the ground is that the regime is on its knees and desperately needs to revive the nuclear deal. This desire to return to the nuclear deal and have sanctions lifted can be seen in the writings of Iran’s state-owned newspapers, which are connected to the hard-liners and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Javan newspaper wrote: “The new (US) administration has spoken out on almost every issue in US foreign policy except the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the need to return to it, whil...

  Author:Mahmoud Hakamian Iran, February 11, 2021— In an interview with state television on Monday, Iranian regime intelligence minister Mahmoud Alavi acknowledged that the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) is behind a long list of TV series and films created to defame the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). “Given my experience in the ministry, we entered activities related to creating films and series to educate the public, protect the public against espionage, and achieve intelligence goals,” Alavi said. “The movies  Rubah  (The Fox),  Majerayeh Nimrouz  (The Nimrouz Affair),  Cyanur  (Cyanide),  Emkan-e Mina ,  Ruz-e Sefr  (Day Zero),  Shabi ke Mah Kamel Shod  (The Night of the Full Moon), and the TV series Puzzle, The Dream that was Interpreted in Reverse,  Saregh-e Ruh  (The Soul Thief), and  Khaneyeh Amn  (Safehouse) were the result of this collaboration with our de...

  By Amir Taghati On Tuesday, the Iranian regime’s Intelligence Minister  Mahmoud  Alavi took the rare step of acknowledging that the regime pursues the acquisition of a nuclear  weapon . His statement to that effect was presumably intended to increase pressure on the new US president to remove sanctions that were re-imposed and expanded by his predecessor. But in making that strategy more transparent, Alavi also ran the risk of undermining talking points that the Iranian regime has long used in order to suggest that Western concessions are justified and at low risk of backfiring.  Among the Iranian regime’s global adversaries, it is generally understood that the ultimate purpose of Iranian nuclear enrichment and development is to put the regime in a position to quickly obtain a nuclear weapon at some point in the future. Tehran has always denied this while insisting that its nuclear activities are intended solely...

  By Alejo Vidal Quadras It has now been several days since a high-ranking  Iranian diplomat  was convicted of plotting to carry out a major terrorist attack on European soil. One would think that this would be a major source of public commentary in Western policy circles and that this commentary would already be setting the stage for a coordinated political response to the underlying phenomena. Instead, the response from European leaders has been muted at best, raising concerns among critics of the Iranian regime about whether those leaders plan to sweep this entire incident under the rug. Unfortunately, it isn’t difficult to imagine why certain Western policymakers would be in favor of that outcome. Serious public comment on the recent conviction would undermine longstanding preferences for ordinary diplomatic dialogue and conciliatory relations with the Iranian regime. Such policies keep the door open for commerce and the purchase of Iranian oil, and they shun...