A new wave of pressure is mounting on Iranian Sunnis as the ruling council of Maktabe Quran, a Kurdish Sunni group, announced through a statement that a number of its members had been summoned and interrogated by the Ministry of Intelligence. Earlier, three medical students closely associated with the group had been denied the right to continue their higher education and were denied completion of their academic degrees.
Source: Iran Daily Brief
Ahmad Hashemi
Former Iranian Foreign Ministry employee who served as interpreter.
Inspired by the democratic movements all across the Greater Middle East region, known as “Arab Spring”, the Syrians, though cautiously at the beginning, took to the streets demanding for further political and social reforms and greater freedoms. Started on March 2011, the Syrian uprising was a first major sign of a popular resentment against authoritarian Ba’ath party rule since the bloody clampdown on a revolt back in 1982 in Hama.
With the escalation of the civil casualties and turning into a human tragedy of the uprising, few countries and organizations including Russia, Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, could afford to remain indifferent in what was happening inside Syria. Even Tehran’s mercenaries such as Hamas sided with the Syrian opposition. Having nothing to lose itself, Iran consumed the credit of its ally Hezbollah — gained after retreating of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon and strengthened by 33-day war with Israel in 2006 — and severely damaged the reputation and popularity of the so-called resistance front. Tehran put Assad as well as his comrades from Alawite sect at great risk because after the inevitable demise of the Baath party dictatorship, this minority would suffer the most and force to leave the post-Assad Syria or at least to move and take shelter at Alawite stronghold of coastal mountainous areas stretched across the Mediterranean sea with major provincial towns of Lattakia and Tartus to avoid majority Sunni retaliation.
As a politician who inherited power from his father, Bashar was smart enough to understand the consequences of the critical situation he was facing, in order to act properly, and if there was no Iran’s temptation, influence, persuasion as well as its all-out support, the regime in Damascus would most possibly have compromised a mutually agreeable solution with the opposition to bring about more liberties and to expedite reforms to stifle the public anger instead of defying and insisting on further bloodshed.
Iran seems not willing to allow Assad to even think of a possibility of any concession, whatsoever. Therefore, if no quick and effective step is taken by the world community, the worst is still ahead and the regime in Tehran, through providing both chemical weapons and its death technologies to Syrian regime, will try to keep the leader of the protégé state in power. Iran has the capability and motivation to deliver its lethal materials to the embattled ally to use it as the last resort. Iran also is very skillful and experienced when it comes to buying time for Syrian regime whereas Tehran is escaping major international punishments and a strong response with regard to its proliferation activities by misusing the so-called diplomacy and negotiation table and knows very well how to buy time in order to delay any would-be concession, so to realize its nuclear ambitions.
Although there are serious observations with regard to effectiveness of any military solution for bringing to an end of a brutal dictatorship and replacing it with a democracy, but in the case of Baath-controlled Syria, a military intervention for humanitarian purposes is increasingly becoming a necessity. Similar to what was experienced in the case of Libya, today; Syrian people need to see a firm support by the international community, i.e. a concrete step, a buffer zone implemented by NATO or a no-fly-zone carried out by US air forces over Free Syrian Army-controlled areas. The world needs to stop watching massacre and to step in to act before it is too late, in order to prevent materialization of the worst case scenario, actors of which will be Russia (diplomatic support) and Iran (military and logistic support via sending chemical and biological weapons and IRGC Qods forces to the battlefield in Syria). Otherwise, we will witness another Halabja this time in major Sunni-dominated towns of Syria.
According to my personal and confidential information gained by 4 years of involvement and working as Iranian Foreign Ministry’s interpreter including attending various OPCW’s inspection-related activities, Iran has every reason and the know-how to mass produce the WMD’s for both domestic purposes as well as providing them for its allies and when needed, Iran will never hesitate to supply Assad regime with Chemical and biological as well as other types of weapons of mass destruction. Assad has put everything at stake by placing all his eggs on the basket of the Iran’s IRGC-Qods force in the hope that when the worst case happened, it will save and grant him a safe haven in Tehran.
Syria of tomorrow
Within framework of a probably secular, democratic and federal structure of future Syria, the Alawites would need to accept a reality of a Sunni-dominated political system with retreating to their traditional stronghold across eastern Mediterranean coastal areas within a federal formula granting autonomy to non-Arab ethnic Kurds to the northeast and of course, the Alawite minority homeland to the west. The time has come for the international community, led by the UN, NATO, USA and the European Union to engage and intervene on humanitarian grounds.
Bashar has the same brutality and willingness of Kaddafi of Libya to fulfill what his fellow despot failed to, plus a firm and unwavering support by Tehran and Moscow, together with a considerable amount of chemical and other unconventional weapons is enough for him to commit carnage. What else he may need? He is no less dangerous and savage than Kaddafi and if Kaddafi couldn’t commit his mission to massacre it was merely because of timely international engagement that foiled his evil plans to kill more. It is believed that Syria has already acquired enough chemical weapons from Iran and North Korea and, if needed, Tehran can hand over the latest of its weaponries including its missiles technology and more WMD’s through different routes including but not limited to, Iraq of Nuri Al-Maliki, Eritrean Red Sea port, Sudan, terrorist groups like Salafi radicals active in north Africa particularly in post-Kaddafi Libya, Hamas and Hezbollah and by utilizing methods such as shipment under flag of other companies.
The fall of current regime in Syria will greatly pave the way for democratization of Levant region and severely weaken the position of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and to some degree Hamas as the mercenaries and front entities of the Islamic Republic. This will in turn, expose mullah thugocracy more vulnerable to internal thirst for regime change and external pressures. What matters the most at this conjuncture, is putting an end to inaction and offering a crushing response by the world community, which remains to be seen.
In a letter addressed to Sadeq Larijani, Head of the Iranian Judiciary, political prisoner Abolfazl Ghadyani asks him to stop the Intelligence Ministry interrogators’ “harassment and the corruption” of the families of political prisoners. The letter, published on Kaleme website on Tuesday, December 11, directly addresses the interrogator of Alireza Rajaee, a journalist and political prisoner whose wife has been harassed by this interrogator.
One day after the letter was released, in an interview with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Abolfazl Ghaydani’s wife Marzieh Rahimi said, “By writing this letter, Abolfazl showed that he is still committed to the promise he made to himself and his God that if someone’s rights are violated, he will not remain silent. I am not worried for my husband. What more would they want to do with a sick 67-year-old man? They have sent him to prison with his several illnesses and for each letter of objection he writes and publishes from prison they create another judicial case against him. So far, he has six or seven cases for the letters he has written. He has stopped participating in his court trials because he does not recognize these courts as qualified. They won’t be able to do much more to Abolfazl.”
In his letter, Abolfazl Ghadyani refers to Ali Awsat, the Intelligence Ministry interrogator responsible for Alireza Rajaee’s case. “From the beginning of Dr. Alireza Rajaee’s illegal detention, [Mr. Awsat] has repeatedly harassed his family through different means and has put them under a variety of psychological and mental pressures, creating the worst conditions for a respectable and oppressed family,” Ghadyani writes in his letter. “Recently he has taken brazenness and meanness to a new level by telling Dr. Rajaee’s wife, ‘I will exile him to Borazjan or Rajaee Shahr Prison,’ and has outrageously asked her to divorce her husband. If you and other senior authorities of the regime had the slightest honor, these filthy interrogators would have been exposed and punished with actions a lot milder than this so that such irreligious and immoral wills would not find the opportunity for action and people’s families would not be jerked around like this. But, unfortunately, today these individuals are even cheered and promoted by the country’s leaders.”
Kaleme website has published Ghadyani’s letter addressed to Sadeq Larijani. About the interrogator, the article states, “This interrogator’s real name is Ali Anvari, and he works for the IRGC’s Intelligence Unit under the pseudonyms of ‘Ali Awsat’ and ‘Ali Anvarizadeh.’ He is among the inner circle of Hossein Taeb, Commander of the IRGC’s Sarollah Base, and he was formerly head of IRGC’s operations in Arak.”
Marzieh Rahimi, Ghadyani’s wife, described the conditions of Alireza Rajaee’s wife from their meeting at the last prison visitation day. Rahimi said, “I always see Mrs. Rajaee very upset during visitations. Our visits are through the booth and because we sit very close to each other, naturally sometimes we hear what other people are saying. At our last visitation I saw her with tears in her eyes as she told Mr. Rajaee that his interrogator tells her things on the phone. We had heard before that that interrogator sometimes calls Mr. Rajaee’s wife several times a day and sometimes every other day, and says things like, ‘What does Mr. Rajaee have that makes you wish to wait for him?’”
Asked whether similar conversations have been quoted by the wives of other political prisoners, Marzieh Rahimi said, “Yes, regrettably such things do happen. We had heard before that a judge had said immoral things to the wife of a political prisoner, something like why doesn’t she divorce her husband, and of course that woman confronted the judge strongly and sharply.”
In his letter, Ghadyani writes, “As a political prisoner of the former regime, I announce that such treatment which you support does the deposed Shah’s SAVAK proud despite all its corruptions and tortures. In that regime, despite all its corruptions and oppressions, prisoners’ families were treated with respect and no problems were created for the spouses or children of political prisoners. Unfortunately, this is a permanent shame for this religious dictatorship state that would justify any inhumane means for accomplishing its goals, and would justify any mistreatment and abuse and pressure on the families of political prisoners, marking the height of moral and humane decline of those in power.”
Abolfaz Ghadyani is a member of the Central Council of the Islamic Revolution Mojahedin Organization who was arrested on January 9, 2010, and was sentenced to one year in prison on charges of “propaganda against the regime” and “insulting the Supreme Leader.” He was again sentenced to three additional years in prison in 2011. He did not attend his court trial, and in the defense bill he sent to the court stated that in the absence of a jury and with the trial being closed-door, he did not believe the court to be qualified to review his case. Ghadyani has written several letters from prison to the Supreme Leader and other top officials. In one of his letters to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he called for a boycott of the parliamentary elections and asked the Supreme Leader to take charge of the country’s affairs. This led to the formation of a new judicial case against him.
Source: Iran Human Rights
The seizure of five containers by the Maritime Police in the Port of Naples last Friday, Dec. 7 – before they were loaded on an Egyptian freighter – shut down two of Iran’s mainline clandestine arms routes to the Hamas-ruled Gaza from Kosovo and Macedonia via Croatia and Italy, DEBKAfile reports exclusively from its military and intelligence sources.
The Naples police acted on a tip-off from Israel. Iranian arms smuggling rings were then partly rolled up in other parts of Italy together with “another cache of weapons.”
Western intelligence sources say this Israeli undercover operation was equal in significance and scope to the bombing on Oct. 24 of the Iranian-Sudanese missile industrial center at Yarmouk and the destruction of a stock of Fajr-5 rockets that was bound for the Gaza Strip through Sinai.
The Naples operation shut down two more Iranian clandestine arms-smuggling routes and sources of arms for Palestinian terrorists – this one from southern Europe.
Contrary to the reports that the five contraband containers were seized aboard an Egyptian vessel anchored in Naples, DEBKAfile reveals that they were in fact removed from trucks entering the port with documents for loading the containers aboard that vessel. The documents described the containers’ contents as building materials coming from Verona, 570 kilometers to the north of Naples, which has large factories making tiles and other wares for bathrooms and kitchens.
Forewarned from Israel, Italian security inspectors ordered the truck drivers to pull over to an isolated section of the port and put up an entry forbidden notice. The first containers opened were packed with arms and other military equipment, including electronic devices for improving rocket accuracy, hundred of anti-tank missiles and a large quantity of snipers’ rifles for sharpshooting. The ship’s destination was listed as Alexandria, Egypt on the papers.
An Egyptian man waiting to place the cargo aboard the ship was detained for interrogation and charged with illegal possession of arms. Further arrests in other parts of Italy followed.
The Italian authorities have been uncharacteristically secretive about the identity of the Egyptian detainee, their additional arrests, the name of the Egyptian freighter and even the nationality of its flag – in consideration of the sensitivity of Israel’s undercover work against Iran’s contraband arms networks and routes.
According to DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources, Iran has developed highly sophisticated networks for smuggling arms to its allies which run by land and by sea. Two begin in Kosovo and Macedonia where local Muslim collaborators purchase the weapons and pack them on container trucks ready for their first lap to Croatia, then on to Verona, where they wait for weeks – or sometimes months – before continuing to the next lap. This break in their journey is used to make sure they are not followed and throw of the scent if they are.
For another route, our sources report that Italian sea smugglers offload containers from Iranian merchant vessels in the Adriatic Sea and bring them ashore at small inlets in the northern Italian province of Veneto. They too are trucked to the clandestine terminal Iran has set up in Verona. When they are certain they have not been spotted, the trucks are sent down the long road to Naples.
There, the containers are loaded onto Egyptian freighters bound for Alexandria and Port Said. But first, they stop off quietly at the northern Sinai port of El Arish, where Hamas operatives are waiting to offload the arms and push the new consignment through smuggling tunnels into the Gaza Strip.
Source: DEBKA
The European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought has been collected on behalf of the jailed Iranian human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh. It comes at a time of what many campaigners say is unprecedented pressure on the legal profession in Iran, reports BBC Persian’s Fariba Sahraei.
Kamal is a young Kurdish activist from north-western Iran.
When he was arrested during the post-election protests in 2009 his family started looking for a lawyer to represent him.
“We couldn’t find a single person in our whole town who would agree to take on my case,” he told the BBC.
“Everyone we approached came up with an excuse. I got the feeling they had been threatened by the security forces.”
Eventually Kamal was given a state-appointed lawyer who made little attempt to defend him.
He is now serving a 13-year prison sentence and spoke to the BBC while on day-release using a pseudonym.
Hunger strike
Iranian lawyer Shadi Sadr says stories like Kamal’s are not unusual, and they highlight what she says is an increasing campaign of pressure on the legal profession in Iran.
Ms Sadr told the BBC that since the wave of arrests following Iran’s aborted 2009 “Green Revolution” many lawyers have been under pressure not to accept politically sensitive cases.
And those that have, have been threatened, called in for questioning and even imprisoned by the security forces.
Several, like Ms Sadr herself, have been forced to leave the country.
One of the most prominent cases is that of Nasrin Sotoudeh, a well-respected and outspoken human rights lawyer known for taking on high-profile political cases in recent years.
A mother of two, she was jailed for six years in 2011 on charges of conspiring to harm state security.
Ms Sotoudeh denied the charges, which the UN said were believed to be linked to her work as a human rights defender.
Last week, Ms Sotoudeh ended a 49-day hunger strike after the Iranian authorities lifted a travel ban on her 12-year-old daughter, Mehraveh.
On Wednesday, five representatives received the Sakharov Prize on behalf of Ms Sotoudeh and Jafar Panahi, the Iranian filmmaker with whom she shared the award. Two empty chairs were put out by the European Parliament to symbolise the prize winners.
Families pressured
Ms Sotoudeh is a former colleague of the Nobel Prize-winning lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, who also now lives abroad.
Ms Ebadi told the BBC that the prison authorities in Tehran were putting Ms Sotoudeh under huge pressure to make a false confession, something which she continues to resist.
“The security services have been trying to force Nasrin to admit that she has been spying for the West, and to make a false confession against me too,” she said.
Ms Sotoudeh is not the only Iranian lawyer to find her family targeted.
Maedeh Soltani is the daughter of another leading human rights lawyer, Abdolfattah Soltani, whose past clients have included the dissident journalist Akbar Ganji,
Mr Soltani was sentence to 13 years in prison in 2011, but even before his arrest the security services were taking steps to silence his wife.
“My mum was put under severe pressure by the intelligence services,” Ms Soltani told the BBC.
“After calling her in for questioning they gave her a one year jail sentence. It was shocking news for us because she had absolutely nothing to do with politics.”
Independence threatened
Iranian lawyers are also concerned about a new bill currently up for discussion in parliament, which they say will deal the final blow to whatever independence the legal profession still has in Iran.
Under the current system, which has been in operation for the past 60 years, lawyers are licensed, regulated and supported by the independent Iran Bar Association.
The bill proposes establishing a new oversight committee for the legal profession, made up of seven people appointed by and answering to the all-powerful judiciary.
Sadeq Larijani, the influential head of the judiciary, is a strong supporter of the bill, which he says is designed to improve co-operation.
Ms Sadr says that the new system would enable the authorities to stop lawyers from getting involved in sensitive cases.
It would also make it even harder for opponents of the current government to hire anyone to defend them, she adds.
“If this bill is passed all independence for lawyers will be history,” she warns. “It will destroy us.”
Source: Inside of Iran
Yemen’s security chief has told Iran to stop training and funding Shi’ite Muslim rebels who, along with al Qaeda-backed Islamists and southern separatists, are staging one of three insurgencies threatening to pull the chaotic country apart.
Major-General Ali al-Ahmadi, president of Yemen’s National Security Board, also said al Qaeda appeared not to number more than 700-800 in the country, including a few hundred Saudis.
But the group’s Yemeni wing, which has plotted attacks on international airlines and sworn to bring down Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, had sleeper cells on top of this that authorities had yet to track down, he told Reuters on Sunday.
Ahmadi accused Tehran of backing the Houthi rebels who operate in northern Yemen near the border with Saudi Arabia – the world’s top oil exporter which is competing with Shi’ite Iran for regional influence.
“Iran seized a chance to broaden the conflict to play a certain role,” he said. “We have no hostility to Iran; all we ask is that they don’t interfere.”
“We have processed evidence of their presence and we have arrested a number of people and have sufficient evidence they are interfering,” Ahmadi added in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in Bahrain.
Iran has already denied interfering in Yemen’s affairs.
The Houthi movement, named after the tribe of its leader, says it represents the claims of Zaydi Shi’ite Muslims who ruled Yemen for over 1,000 years. Most Iranians follow a different Shi’ite sect but Yemeni officials say Houthis have travelled to Iran’s seminary city of Qom for indoctrination.
Yemen said in July it had arrested members of a spy ring led by a former commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the state news agency Saba said, adding that the cell had operated in the Horn of Africa as well as Yemen. An Interior Ministry official said all those detained were Yemenis.
Houthis have survived repeated government attempts to crush them. They fought a brief war with Saudi Arabia in 2009 after their conflict with Yemeni forces spilled across the border.
Sanaa has invited them to join Yemen’s national dialogue process aimed at reconciling the disparate groups that emerged before and during a political crisis last year.
SAUDIS IN AL QAEDA
Ahmadi also said the exact size of Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was unknown.
“Al Qaeda seems to me to not exceed 700-800 elements, but there are also sleeper cells we don’t know about. The majority are Yemenis,” Ahmadi said. “The second group are Saudis, of which there are hundreds, but it is very hard to be precise.”
Islamist militants exploited protests last year against then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to seize several towns in the south before a U.S.-backed government offensive drove them out. They included many Saudis who had fled after the kingdom crushed a wave of attacks in 2006.
Saudi officials have described AQAP as the kingdom’s most serious security threat and have worked closely with Sanaa against the group.
Security analysts in the Gulf say Saudis comprise much of the leadership of AQAP, but that a series of recent defections and assassinations may have weakened morale.
“Saudis bring ideology, funding and bomb-making expertise to AQAP,” Ahmadi said. “More than 13 nationalities have come to Yemen with al Qaeda. Most fighters are from inside the country but foreigners brought expertise and were misguiding and misleading young Yemeni people.”
Early last month a group of 12 Saudis and a Yemeni killed two Saudi security guards in an ambush as they tried to cross into Yemen, leading to the deaths of four of the men and the capture of the others, Saudi state media said.
Security experts say Saudi Arabia, under the direction of its Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef and intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, has a strong presence in Yemen helping the government to infiltrate AQAP.
“There’s full coordination between the counterpart services of the two countries to share information. There are different forms of units to co-ordinate,” Ahmadi said.
In April a Saudi diplomat was kidnapped by al Qaeda in Aden and is still being held. Another was shot dead near his home in Sanaa last month.
Source: Reuters
Activist Mahdi Hamidi Shafigh, who lives in the Azerbaijan Province, was arrested yesterday in Tabriz. Shafigh was summoned by the local Intelligence Ministry, where he was arrested and transferred to the main prison in Tabriz to serve a 21-month sentence. Last September, Hamidi Shafigh was arrested along with 28 other activists in the Kom Tapeh neighborhood and released after five months. He was released temporarily. Shafigh was charged with conspiring against national security.
Source: Iran Daily Brief
Hassan Kamran Dastgherdi, a member of the Majls National Security and Foreign Policy Committee (NSFPC), said that “Today, our technological might is fully tangible in the world, and the Zionists tasted it during the war against Gaza.” He added that that even the political and military arrangements of the US were disrupted after the “Palestinian nation’s victory against Israel,” which was achieved with Iran’s political and technological assistance.
Source: Iran Daily Brief
According to the report, Jalal Khoda Abadi was arrested 12 days ago in Sanandaj by security forces. To date, no reason for his arrest has been provided, but he might have been arrested for security reasons. According to another report, Hosein Danesh Payeh, another citizen from Mahabad, was arrested by security forces on charges of collaborating with opposition parties.
Source: Iran Daily Brief
This is something I had hoped never to be writing about, not because it’s secret, but rather because it is so gruesome I had purposely never brought it up, nor was I ever inclined to discuss the issue. It is one of those kernels of information best left unsaid and best left to the depths of the unconscious because dealing with it is profoundly awful.
Years ago, while in the Navy, I served as the Assistant District Security Officer of the Third Naval District encompassing the area from New York through New England. In preparation for those duties, I was thoroughly schooled in the horrific dimensions of atomic, biological and chemical warfare. A singularly unpleasant accumulation of knowledge.
Then, and as I presume now, other than atomic annihilation, the most effective and notorious weapon in any arsenal of destruction was the existence and capabilities of the nerve gas Sarin. Far more dangerous than the mustard gas of bygone days, and other more recent gas weapons, Sarin has the ability to kill ruthlessly with virtually no prospect of defense with barely viable and available antidotes. A mere drop of sarin nerve gas on the skin of any human is enough to break down a beings nervous system and cause inevitable death. It is a weapon to be feared and resisted at all cost.
That large stocks of sarin gas are held by the Syrian government is unnerving in the extreme. The slaughter that would ensue in its release would be enormous. That the stocks were permitted to be amassed is already a grave failing of national policies. However, given the precarious and bloody confrontations of Syria’s civil war already being suffered by the Syrian people, what has become gruesomely unacceptable is the willingness of the Iranian regime to encourage the Assad regime to resort to chemical warfare, that is to say Sarin warfare. As sourced by the AP and reported in the NYPost: “O warns Syria“:
“US intelligence has also intercepted a communication from Iran’s infamous Qud’s force urging Syria to use Sarin gas against rebels and civilian supporters in the city of Homs.”
Any nation so openly militating for the use of Sarin gas is beyond condemnation. They and their standards become a danger to the world itself. The world need take note and clearly understand who they are dealing with!
Source: Inside of Iran
