Ali Fazeli Monfared, a 20-year-old gay Iranian man, was allegedly killed in an “honor killing” by some of his male family members after they found out he was gay, according to an LGBTQ rights group in Iran and Turkey. Fazeli Monfared, who was known as Alireza by friends and family, lived in a city in southwest Iran. He had applied for an exemption from compulsory military service so he could leave the country and move to Turkey to live with his close friend, Aghil Bayat, according to 6Rang, the Iranian Lesbian and Transgender Network.
Members of Iran’s persecuted Baha’i community were shocked when, on April 23, the government announced that the only place they would be able to bury their loved ones was on top of mass graves containing political prisoners executed in the 1980s. Activists say this policy is an attempt by the government to erase any trace of the mass executions carried out by the Islamic Republic. These photos, which were published on Telegram on April 23, show about a dozen freshly dug graves, two of which contain bodies, in an overgrown patch in Khavaran cemetery, located to the east of Tehran.
The grassroots Iranian opposition group that posted an anti-regime billboard in Times Square is now turning to the American Jewish community for help. “The American Jewish community has had a proud history of supporting social justice and human rights causes,” said Ali Ebrahimzadeh, a Muslim-born opposition activist to the Iranian regime. “We are now asking you, our Jewish friends, to support the people of Iran who are facing a human rights calamity at the hands of the Islamic regime there.”
Iranian security forces opened fire on a vehicle on Monday, fatally shooting a five-year-old child in the southeastern province of Sistan and Balochestan, local activists reported on Tuesday. Both of the child’s parents were injured. “Security forces opened fire on a car, killing and injuring three people,” London-based Baloch Campaign, which monitors human rights violations in Sistan and Balochestan province, said on Tuesday. “The child’s father was reportedly shot in the leg and his mother in the abdomen.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is urging Iran to stop its imprisonment and harassment of Kurdish journalists amid what human rights groups have denounced as a crackdown on members of the minority group. In a statement late on May 12, the New York-based media-freedom watchdog cited news reports and sources familiar with the cases as saying that Iranian authorities had arrested at least eight Kurdish journalists since May 2020. Three of them — Navid Seyed-Mohammadi, Jafar Osafi, and Nasrullah Lashani — remain in detention.
Jamshid Sharmahd, a German-Iranian detainee, has been held for 267 days in a jail in Tehran. He was kidnapped in July 2020 and has almost spent a year in prison without receiving proper medical care or being accorded a court hearing. Jamshid comes from a family of dissidents that has been living in California for 20 years. They all were victims of a failed assassination attempt by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in 2009. His daughter, Gazelle, recounted to Asharq Al-Awsat how her father was kidnapped last year. Gazelle works in the health sector in Los Angeles and has lived with her family since the abduction.
Jailed women’s rights activist, Saba Kord Afshari went on hunger strike since May 8, to protest the regime’s increasing pressure on the families of political prisoners, including her mother, Raheleh Ahmadi, who is also in prison. She demands that her mother be released from Evin Prison. The imprisoned civil activist called her family members on Saturday to announce that she had started a hunger strike and informed prison officials of her decision. Saba Kord Afshari has several times suffered stomach ulcer bleeding. So, her hunger strike has caused serious concern for her family.
A 20-year-old Iranian man has reportedly been killed — perhaps beheaded — by family members in the country’s southwest because of his sexual orientation. Reports from Iran say Alireza Monfared was killed by his brother and cousins earlier this month after they discovered that he had been exempted from military service due to his homosexuality. Some reports suggested he had been beheaded.
His name was Alireza Fazeli Monfared and he was only 20 years old. Fazeli Monfared was homosexual and due to the difficulties he faced because of his sexual orientation, was about to flee his native Iran for Turkey. But he was reportedly killed by his family members before he could leave the southwestern province of Khuzestan after they accused him of dishonoring the family. Fazeli Monfared’s killing has put the plight of Iran’s LGBT community in the spotlight amid concerns that this will not be the last suspected case of so-called honor killings of homosexuals in the Islamic republic.
Multiple officials with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a designated terrorist organization, have said in recent days that the rockets and weapons that they use to attack Israel come from Iran. The remarks were revealed by various watchdogs who monitor foreign media for the purpose of tracking extremists, and come as Palestinian terrorists have fired well over a thousands rockets at Israel this week.
Mustafa Makki Karim, 24, fled Baghdad for the relative safety of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region last year following a spate of death threats by pro-Iran groups for his role in the protest movement that erupted against government corruption and incompetence in October 2019. During the unrest that followed, the young activist earned the moniker “Joker” for the clown mask he wore to hide his identity as he and his “Armored Division of Tahrir” defended their camp in Baghdad’s Victory Square.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is increasing the prominence of ideology in Iran’s institutions and throughout its population as part of his effort to continue the 1979 Islamic Revolution and address Iran’s internal and external challenges. This ideological project is unlikely to succeed to the extent the Supreme Leader and his supporters envision but will still have significant effects on US-Iran relations. The Iranian regime’s increasing focus on ideology over pragmatism will complicate US efforts to deter, contain, and negotiate with Tehran.
Today PEN America and the Center for Human Rights in Iran, along with a coalition of human rights organizations, sent a joint letter to President Biden urging his administration to ensure that human rights concerns are at the center of U.S. foreign policy towards Iran. “Efforts to seek improvements in Iran’s egregious human rights record should take place parallel to negotiations on security matters, recognizing fully that U.S. national security interests cannot be met if the human security of the Iranian people is left unaddressed,” the letter reads. “The U.S. should make clear that focused, persistent attention to human rights will be a key component of U.S. foreign policy toward Iran. Improvements in freedom of expression and other human rights are fundamental to strengthening the Iranian government’s accountability to its citizens and at the international level. As high-level talks are resurrected with Iran, a strong human rights pillar with concrete demands and a strategy to achieve them should be developed and advanced.”
The U.S. State Department has accused China of committing “genocide” against Muslim Uyghurs and other religious minorities in an annual report that also labeled Iran and Russia among the world’s worst offenders of religious freedom. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the release of the State Department’s annual International Religious Freedom Report on May 12 to name and shame the most egregious violators of religious freedom, which he defined as a universal human right.
The families of thousands of Iranians executed and buried in mass graves have written to the UN and world leaders urging them to prevent Tehran’s ongoing destruction of their last resting place. In 1988, Tehran executed thousands of political prisoners aligned with the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), a political group that had participated in the 1979 revolution but was later targeted by the regime. At the time, Amnesty International said the executions were “a premeditated and coordinated policy which must have been authorized at the highest level of government.”
Iran is using “conspiratorial methods” to cover up illegal activity in Europe aimed at expanding its weapons programme, a German intelligence report said. It is the latest in a series of warnings by German, Dutch and Swedish security services that Iran is looking to Europe to source technology for weapons of mass destruction. The report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Schleswig-Holstein, a German state, described a number of tactics it said were used by Iran and others to “disguise their illegal procurement activities” in Europe.
The intelligence agency for the city-state Berlin registered in its newly released report on Tuesday an increase in the number of Hamas, pro-Iranian regime and Muslim Brotherhood individuals. According to the 136-page German language document reviewed by The Jerusalem Post, the intelligence agency reported an increase of Hamas members from 70 in 2019 to 80 in 2020.
The UK government has declined to comment on a plea from one of its citizens detained in Iran to be given diplomatic protection. Anoosheh Ashoori was arrested in Tehran in August 2017. His family say he had travelled there to look after his mother who had recently undergone medical treatment. He was subsequently charged and convicted of cooperating with Israel (a charge he denies) and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.
Twitter has allowed the Twitter account of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyyeh to remain active, despite a policy of a permanent ban on former President Donald Trump’s account for “risk of further incitement of violence.” During the escalating crisis in Israel and the Gaza Strip, it was noted by journalist Jordan Schactel that the Hamas political leader celebrated the “bombing of Tel Aviv.” The Twitter account of Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, has also remained on the platform. Former FCC chairman Ajit Pai pointed some of Khamenei’s controversial tweets, including his calling of Israel “a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region” in May 2020.
A string of military figures on the list of Iranian presidential hopefuls is stirring unease over a possible further militarization of the Islamic Republic’s politics. Registration for the June 18 poll runs from Tuesday to Saturday, after which names will be handed to the conservative-dominated Guardian Council for vetting.
Iran’s former hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad registered Wednesday to run again for the Islamic Republic’s presidency, raising the possibility that the populist leader who rapidly advanced Tehran’s nuclear program to challenge the West could return to the country’s top civilian post. Ahmadinejad’s attempt to run again in 2017 disregarded the words of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had warned the firebrand, Holocaust-questioning politician his standing for office would be a “polarized situation” that would be “harmful for the county.”
The officer at the airport looked at me with menacing eyes. It dawned on me that I might not be allowed to embark on the plane. I was at Iran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, prepared to get on my flight. “What do you think you’re doing, leaving the country without a husband?” I told her I was single, held American citizenship and was going back to the U.S after three years abroad. She did not look satisfied with my explanation and appeared to want to pursue the matter further when her colleague took me aside.
Mohsen Rezaee, a high-ranking official of the Islamic Republic in Iran, has admitted that top-secret Iranian nuclear documents were stolen in a raid of a Tehran warehouse by Israeli operatives in 2018—a raid the regime had denied ever occurred. Rezaee is calling for a purge of the Iranian intelligence and counterintelligence community, which could result in Iranian intelligence operatives fleeing the country or dying in “accidents.”
طوفانی توییتری برای آزادی برادران افکاری به راه افتادهاست. کاربرانی که در این کارزار شرکت کردهاند میگویند به تهدید، شکنجه و هشت ماه نگهداری وحید و حبیب افکاری در سلول انفرادی اعتراض دارند. این دو از زمان اعدام برادر دیگرشان نوید افکاری، در سلول انفرادی نگهداری میشوند. به گفته یک منبع نزدیک به خانواده افکاری، چندی پیش، دو مقام بلندپایه، وحید افکاری را به قتل تهدید کرده بودند. نوید افکاری که در ارتباط با اعتراضهای مرداد ۹۷ در شیراز بازداشت شده بود تابستان پارسال به اتهام قتل اعدام شد، هرچند خود او تأکید میکرد که بی گناه است. مریم افشنگ گزارش میدهد.
انجمن قلم امریکا به همراه هشت نهاد دیگر شامل کمپین حقوق بشر در ایران، در نامهای خطاب به جو بایدن، رئیسجمهور آمریکا، خواستار تمرکز بر موضوع حقوق بشر به موازات سایر امور با ایران شدند. به گزارش وبسایت کمپین حقوق بشر در ایران، این نامه از دولت بایدن میخواهد، اطمینان دهد، توجه به وضع نگرانکننده حقوق بشر در مرکز سیاست خارجی ایالاتمتحده در قبال ایران است. این در حالی است که مذاکرات برای بازگشت به برجام در وین ادامه دارد و مذاکرهکنندگان ایران و آمریکا از پیشرفت در گفتوگوها خبر میدهند. همچنین گزارشهایی حاکی از توافق احتمالی برای آزادسازی بخشی از اموال بلوکه شده ایران و مبادله زندانیان با هدف بازگشت هرچه سریعتر به برجام منتشر شده است.