Iran’s oldest Kurdish separatist party, now based in neighboring Iraq, accuses Tehran of murdering one of its leaders. Mussa Babakhani, a member of the central committee of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), was “assassinated by a terrorist affiliated” with Iran, a statement from the party says. Tehran refers to the KDPI, which is based in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, as a “terrorist” group. Babakhani was “kidnapped Thursday by two terrorists and found dead and bearing marks of torture” on Saturday in a hotel room in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, the statement says.
Britain on Friday condemned the sentencing of British-Iranian dual national Mehran Raouf, a foreign office spokesperson said. Raouf was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison on national security charges by an Iranian Revolutionary Court, lawyers said earlier this week. “We strongly condemn the sentence given to Mehran Raoof (Raouf). We continue to do all we can to support Mehran and his family, and continue to raise his case at the most senior levels,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The prospect of a bill set to come before Iran’s parliament, backed by allies of the new hard-line president, has renewed fears that what Internet access remains to Iranians could soon be restricted even further. Next on the chopping block could be Instagram — home to precarious vestiges of community and commerce. Instagram is Iran’s most popular social media site — and one of the few among its peers not blocked by a government striving to control speech and the flow of information. Authorities prefer to push users to sites, often on Iran’s own homegrown corner of the Internet, that are easier to regulate and censor.
The execution in Iran of a man arrested at 15 is a “cruel assault on child rights,” Amnesty International said on Thursday, which also warned of more imminent executions. In August 2010, Sajad Sanjari — then 15 — was arrested over the fatal stabbing of a man. He said the man had tried to rape him and claimed he had acted in self-defense, but in 2012 he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Sanjari was executed in secret on Monday, but his family was only told of the killing after it happened when a prison official asked them to collect the body.
The softening-up process started with a beating from the guards in a solitary confinement cell. Then Reza Fallahi was dragged before prosecutors to negotiate for his life – before being thrown back into Iran’s brutal prison system. And he was one of the lucky ones. Of the 64 political prisoners taken from his section in Gohardasht prison in August 1988, only 12 of them were alive by the end of the week. The rest were strung up on the gallows during the notorious mass killings of an estimated 5,000 prisoners in jails across the country.
Iraj Mesdaghi, an Iranian dissident, can still describe the haunting moment, thirty-three years ago this week , when he was “suspended between life and death” in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons. He’d been hauled before one of the dozens of death commissions that had been secretly ordered by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1988, to question thousands of prisoners nationwide and execute political dissidents. “It is naïve to show mercy to those who wage war on God,” Khomeini decreed. Mesdaghi, who had already served seven years of a ten-year sentence, recalled the interrogation.
Efforts to release Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from an Iranian jail may have met a new hurdle after Iranian media reported Tehran had withdrawn a prison-swap offer to western countries. British-Iranian national, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was first jailed in Tehran in 2016 on spying charges, which she has always denied. On Tuesday, as the new Iranian hardline President Ibrahim Raisi was sworn in, the Iranian Nour news site reported that Tehran had shelved plans to release Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other Iranian-British prisoners, in a sign that British relations with Iran may be more difficult under Mr Raisi.
More than two weeks after the suppression of mass protests in Khuzestan province, Hamshahri Online reported on Thursday, that 300 people have been arrested in the city of Susangard alone. According to the report, Susangard had the highest turnout during the recent protests in Khuzestan, with rallies of an estimated 12,000 people. The report denied the use of live ammunition by the special police unit and called the killing of protesters at recent rallies “strange.” The Iranian regime long has blamed protesters for deaths during demonstrators in unrest, despite its history of bloody crackdowns.
Offering a cup of tea to a stranger is universally viewed as an act of hospitality. Except if you are a Baha’i in Iran, where this kindness can result in torture, imprisonment, or death, both for the offeror and the recipient. The danger springs from the recent escalation of a government-led propaganda campaign meant to instigate hatred against the Baha’is, whose religion, established in the 19th century, emphasizes the spiritual unity of humanity. The campaign casts the Bahai’s as disloyal to the regime, as agents for other countries, and, most notably, as “unclean.”
The plan to get to Canada was ingenious, complex and terrifying. Mahnaz Alizadeh was supposed to board a flight to Panama from Ecuador using her real Iranian passport. She was to carry a forged boarding pass that showed she was ultimately headed home to Tehran. Once she had shown that to gain entry to the international departures area of the Tocumen International Airport in Panama City, she was to discard it and take out a boarding pass for a flight to Toronto and a doctored Canadian passport, both under the same alias—Elina Adamlani. The passport, which she was told was made for her in Turkey, was likely good enough to pass only a cursory examination. Pages had been doctored: the passport numbers on two different pages didn’t match, the margin of one page was too small, and biometric data had been printed with an inkjet printer, not using offset printing. If a customs agent passed it under ultraviolet light, it would be immediately flagged as fake; the multicoloured pattern—with the maple leaf and Canada’s coat of arms—that shows up under UV light was missing.
The challenges awaiting Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s incoming president, range from insistent to enduring, with the country in the throes of a deadly coronavirus wave, an economy writhing under sanctions and flashes of bold, anti-government protests that signal deeper discontent. Abroad, Iran is acutely isolated and locked in a spreading conflict with Israel, including at sea. Negotiations with the United States and other world powers to revive a nuclear deal are at a standstill. Even before Raisi was sworn in Thursday, rights groups had called for him to be tried on charges of crimes against humanity for his alleged role in mass executions in Iran more than three decades ago.
According to collected reports by sources affiliated with the Iranian Resistance in July, there were at least 3,719 recorded protests. This is almost five times more than the number of protests in June when 765 protests were recorded. Most of the protests in July were from the Khuzestan water protests which started on July 15. The water protests amounted to 197 protests held in 73 cities, and from the oil industry workers who held 3,226 protests in 44 cities. Other sectors held 296 protests in 44 cities.
The commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), Falih Al-Fayyadh, has said on Sunday that his organization “owes its existence” to former Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was killed by a US drone attack in Baghdad in January 2020. Fayyadh, who is sanctioned by the United States(link is external) for human rights abuses in killing Iraqi protesters, met with Hosasein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, IRGC in Tehran during his trip to attend the inauguration of Islamic Republic’s new president Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi), which took place on Thursday, the official IRNA new website reported.
Iraj Mesdaghi, a former political prisoner in one of Iran’s most notorious jails, thinks he has found one of his captors. On Tuesday, that alleged jailer, Hamid Noury, will appear in a Stockholm courtroom accused of playing a key role in the execution of scores of dissidents — as well as the torture of Mesdaghi and many others — at the Gohardasht prison, outside Iran’s capital Tehran, in a 1988 purge. “Noury had an active role in that massacre,” Mesdaghi said. “I saw him, I know him well.” Noury denies the charges. The trial has been headline news in Sweden because of the seriousness of the charges that Noury faces — “gross crimes against international law and murder” — and its scale: the police case documents name 38 plaintiffs and the main hearing is expected to continue until April 2022 with three sessions a week.
Despite more than 40 years of living under a rigid and repressive theocratic regime, Iranians are not people to take government failure or flagrant abuse of power lying down. Time and again they have demonstrated a willingness to stand up and be counted, defying the determined efforts of the state’s security forces to suppress any show of dissent. At the moment Iran is suffering the effects of a drought described as the worst in 50 years. According to the Iranian Department of Water and Sewerage, at least 110 Iranian cities have been struggling with cuts in water supplies during the summer of 2021.
On Wednesday, July 28, the Iranian parliament reviewed a plan called “Protection of users’ rights in cyberspace and organizing social media.” Citing Article 85 of the regime’s constitution, the parliament instructed its cultural commission to discuss the issue further and avail its findings to the regime’s Guardian Council. In his Persian New year speech, Khamenei pointed out his desire to have a young Hezbollah government for the next government and remarked about the attributes of this new young government that he had in mind. In the same speech, he also pointed to the situation of the Internet in Iran.
Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s new president, has been widely condemned as a mass murderer. Specifically at issue is Raisi’s key role in the 1988 massacre of an estimated 30,000 political prisoners, most of whom were affiliated with the principal opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). There have now been key developments that will in all probability lead to serious political and legal challenges for Raisi and the regime. Internationally, calls to hold the regime’s leaders accountable for the 1988 massacre are becoming louder. The UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, in June called for the formation of an independent inquiry. “I think it is time and it’s very important now that Mr. Raisi is the president that we start investigating what happened in 1988,” he told Reuters.
س از برگزاری مراسم تحلیف ریاست جمهوری ابراهیم رئیسی در صحن علنی مجلس شورای اسلامی ایران، کانون مدافعان حقوق بشر با انتشار بیانیه اعلام کرد، ابراهیم رئیسی «یکی از ناقضان جدی حقوق بشر در طول ۴۲ سال حکومت جمهوری اسلامی و دخیل در کشتار بیرحمانه سال ۶۷ است. کانون مدافعان حقوق بشر ایران روز شنبه ۱۶ مرداد ماه با انتشار بیانیهای انتخابات منجر به ریاست جمهوری ابراهیم رئیسی را «غیرسالم و نامنصفانه و مهندسیشده» خواند و نوشت: «دستیابی فردی که کارنامهاش مملو از عملکرد ضد حقوق بشری است به مقام اجرا و پاسداشت حقوق ملت ایران، فاجعهای حقوق بشری است که باید در مقابل آن آگاهانه، هوشمندانه و قاطع ایستاد. این نهاد حقوق بشری همچنین با انتقاد به حضور معاون سیاست خارجی اتحادیه اروپا در مراسم تحلیف ابراهیم رئیسی در این بیانیه نوشت: «حضور مقام اروپایی در این مراسم، در تناقض آشکار با اهداف حقوق بشری اتحادیه اروپا قرار داشته و برای مدافعان حقوق بشر در ایران قابل تحمل نیست.
به گزارش خبرگزاری فرانسه، حزب دموکرات کردستان «حدک» شنبه ۱۶ مرداد با انتشار بیانیهای، جمهوری اسلامی ایران را متهم به قتل موسی باباخانی، عضو کمیته مرکزی این حزب، کرده است. بر اساس این بیانیه، آقای باباخانی بعد از ظهر روز پنجشنبه ۱۴ مرداد ربوده شده و صبح شنبه ۱۶ مرداد جسدش در حالی که «آثار شکنجههای زیادی» داشت، در هتلی در شهر اربیل پیدا شده است. در همین ارتباط، مدیریت پلیس امنیتی شهر اربیل موسوم به «آسایش» نیز با انتشار بیانیهای، ضمن تایید خبر قتل آقای باباخانی اعلام کرده تحقیقات خود در این زمینه را آغاز کرده و نتایج آن را متعاقبا اعلام خواهد کرد.
غلامحسین محسنی اژهای، رئیس قوه قضائیه جمهوری اسلامی روز جمعه ۱۵ مرداد از سه بند سیاسی بدنام در زندانهای ایران بازدید کرد. خبرگزاری قوه قضائیه نوشت که این بازدیدها سرزده بوده است و تعدادی از متهمان توانستهاند به صورت خصوصی با اژهای صحبت کنند. همچنین گفته شده است که اژهای با تعدادی از قضات و بازجوها در مورد پروندههای سیاسی صحبت کرده است. بند ۲۰۹ و ۲۴۱ که در اختیار وزارت اطلاعات است و بند ۲ الف سازمان اطلاعات سپاه، در برنامه بازدید قرار داشتهاند. این نخستین باری است که به رئیس قوه قضائیه اجازه داده میشود از بندهای تحت کنترل نهادهای امنیتی بازدید کند. هر چند محسنی اژهای پیشتر به عنوان وزیر اطلاعات از بند تحت کنترل این وزارتخانه بازدید کرده بود. این اقدام شاید نشانهای جدید باشد از همسویی و تسلط نهادهای امنیتی بر قوای اصلی کشور.