… After Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack. Iran ultimately blunted their assault, but the attack set the stage for the sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as “death commissions.” Some who appeared were asked to identify themselves.
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.
Alireza Monfared, a 20-year-old who was gay, was allegedly killed by family members, just days before he could leave Iran to seek asylum, according to multiple reports. News of his early May death made headlines in the U.S. this week thanks in part to LGBTQ news sites and actors such as Dan Levy and singer Demi Lovato sharing the story on social media. Some reports say Monfared was beheaded around Ahwaz, a southwestern city of Iran. Deputy police of the province confirmed that “bleeding from the neck area” was the cause of his death, Saednews reported Tuesday.
As Iran continues on its path towards splendid isolation, and through its actions becomes increasingly a pariah state, much of the world is unaware of the genocidal policies of the Ayatollahs towards their country’s minority groups. Against this background, the people of Ahwaz – capital of the Khūzestān Province, one of the most ethnically diverse of Iran’s 31 provinces, and in terms of natural resources such as oil, gas, and water, one of its richest – have suffered more than most. Subjected to a programme that amounts to one of ethnic cleansing, the inhabitants of the region, mostly Arabic speakers, have been banned from using their own language. The Ahwazi people are struggling to ensure the survival of their culture, and in 1999 the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA) was established in Europe to advocate for an independent Arab state in Khūzestān.
A jailed Iranian women’s right activist who has campaigned against the country’s strict Islamic dress code has reportedly gone on a hunger strike to protest against the imprisonment of her mother. The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which covers news in Iran, reported that 21-year-old Saba Kord Afshari had stopped eating since May 8. It said that Kord Afshari, who is serving a 7 1/2-year sentence in Tehran’s Qarchak prison for women, suffered stomach bleeding several times and contracted the coronavirus while in custody.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has spoken out against Iran’s use of “vague, trumped-up” charges to crack down on Kurdish journalists, and urged authorities to release three who remain in detention. Since May 2020, Tehran’s security forces have arrested dozens of activists and students in a crackdown on perceived pro-Kurdish movements in the country, according to reports cited by the CPJ. They have arrested at least eight Kurdish journalists, three of whom remain behind bars.
Iranian parliamentarian Mohsen Dehnavi has alleged that based on the Health Ministry’s database, some 200,000 doses of imported vaccines are unaccounted for. Dehnavi, who is a member of the parliament’s presiding board, added that his inquiry to the Iranian health minister regarding the missing vaccines remains unanswered. He promised that the parliament will investigate the matter. Kianoush Jahanpour, spokesperson for Iran’s Food and Drug Administration, which is in charge of the vaccination imports, responded. “No dose has been or will be unaccounted for,” Jahanpour tweeted. “The vaccine information is constantly traceable,” he noted, but added no particulars about how such details are accessed.
A revolutionary court in Iran has sentenced a Baha’i woman to eight years in prison on the charge of forming a group to empower women. According to the verdict issued by Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran, presided over by Judge Afshari, Atsa Ahmadai Rafsanjani has been sentenced to four years for ““formation of a group to act against national security through requesting an NGO license from the Interior Ministry”, 3 years in prison for “assembly and collusion to act against national security”, and to one year in prison on the charge of “propaganda against the state.”
As high school final exams approach in Iran, students nationwide have been protesting the Education Ministry’s decision to test students at physical locations for ninth and twelfth graders, despite the threat of further increasing the country’s uncontrolled COVID-19 outbreak. In mid-May 2021, students held rallies in more than 20 Iranian cities. Some were violently repressed by the police. Education Minister Mohsen Haji-Mirzaei defended the ministry’s decision to hold physical exams by stating that virtual exams allow for more cheating.
The Utah-based Civic Friendship organization deleted a notice on its website and on Twitter for an event with Iran’s former UN ambassador after The Jerusalem Post sent a series of press queries to the organizers and participants of the webinar. The former Iranian regime envoy, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who is currently an Oberlin College religious studies professor, has become a flashpoint for intense controversy across the US, because Amnesty International reported he committed crimes against humanity in Iran. As Iranian ambassador to the UN in 1988, Mahallati covered up the mass murder of thousands of innocent Iranian political prisoners, according to Amnesty.
As the US, Russia, and other parties pursued efforts over the weekend to end the fighting between Israel and Hamas, Iran has praised Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and vowed to continue its support for the Palestinian “resistance.” Iran, which has long been supplying the terrorist groups with weapons and money, said that it “stands with the Palestinians and supports their steadfastness and bravery.”
Tensions between Israel and Hamas have escalated to levels not seen since the 2014 Gaza War, and national security analyst Rebecca Grant joined Fox News Saturday to discuss Iran’s intentions and influence in the region. Since early last week, Hamas and Israel have exchanged rocket-fire, and air strikes, reigniting unrest in the Middle East. With sirens echoing across southern Israel and civilians finding safety in bomb shelters, many have questioned Iran’s influence in the growing conflict. “Iran is a huge factor,” Grant said. “I see Iran all over this from the call from the commander of their Quds Force, talking to Hamas. Of course, it’s Iran who has supplied a lot of the missiles and the missile technology for these ongoing strikes that we’re seeing.”
According to Western intelligence officials, assistance from the country has played a key role in helping the militant Palestinian group Hamas to develop a deadly weapons arsenal. Officials believe the technological assistance has resulted in a significant improvement in the terrorist organisation’s ability to strike targets deep inside Israel, and has contributed to the death of dozens of people. The weapons were thought to be manufactured in Gaza, based on an Iranian design. Hamas has historically relied on short-range Qassam rockets – which have a range of around 6 miles. However, in the latest attacks on Israel, Hamas has used medium-range rockets with a range of 25 miles, as well as the M-75 and J-80 rockets, with a far longer range – of between 50-60 miles.
Alireza Fazeli-Monfared’s future was brutally cut short last week when members of his family allegedly murdered him due to his sexual orientation, according to his partner and a LGBTQ rights group. The 20-year-old Iranian had hoped to escape the country, where he felt stifled by the Iranian regime’s restrictions on homosexuality, and had dreams of modeling or becoming a make-up artist, his partner Aghil Abiat told CNN. In long phone calls and video messages with Abiat — who is a refugee in Turkey after being outed in Iran — Fazeli-Monfared would describe the experiences he longed to have and the life he wanted to build.
Families of Iranian political prisoners executed by the regime in 1988 have gathered outside a Tehran cemetery to commemorate their lost loved ones and call for accountability over the killings. The cemetery in the neighborhood of Khavaran holds the unmarked mass graves of an unknown number of supporters of Iranian opposition groups. On Thursday, families of slain members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) carried pictures of their murdered loved ones, laid flowers at the unmarked graves and chanted slogans against Ebrahim Raisi, head of the country’s judiciary.
On Thursday (13 May), a group of Iranian activists gathered at a cemetery in Tehran to seek renewed attention to a more than thirty-year-old crime against humanity for which no one has been held accountable to date. The protest was led by the families of persons who were killed during the massacre of Iranian political prisoners in the summer of 1988. Its location was selected on the basis of recent reports that a pending development project will may destroy a section of Khavaran Cemetery that is believed to include a mass grave where many of the victims of that massacre were secretly buried.
Canada on Thursday condemned Tehran’s “unconscionable” conduct since Iranian forces shot down an airliner last year, killing 176 people, including dozens of Canadians, and vowed to keep pressing for answers as to what really happened. The comments by Foreign Minister Marc Garneau were among the strongest Ottawa has made about the January 2020 disaster. “The behavior of the Iranian government has been frankly unconscionable in this past 15 months and we are going to continue to pursue them so we have accountability,” Garneau told a committee of legislators examining what occurred.
Two Azerbaijani soldiers have been killed in a shootout on the border with Iran. Azerbaijani sources quote the State Border Service as saying that on May 15, at about 16:00, three people from Iran violated the state border of Azerbaijan at the border post of Goytepe near the village of Gendere. The Iranians did not obey the order of the border guards to stop, opened fire, left their cargo and tried to escape from the scene.
There is no doubt that Iran suffers greatly from institutionalized financial corruption, as evidenced by the fact that Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index ranks Iran. 149 out of 180 countries, but still officials can shock Iranians and the world at large with the related information. Former minister Mohammad Gharazi said last weekend that Tehran has had “$4 trillion in revenue” since 1979, but that 2-3 trillion was “destroyed by rent-seeking activities”. Just days before that, attorney general Ali Alghazi Mehr advised that a criminal case was being filed against the former president of the Central Bank Valiollah Seif for his role in a major embezzlement case involving $30.2 billion and 60 tons of gold.
A group of pro-Iran Twitter accounts flooded the platform with “massive surges of unmitigated antisemitism” and disinformation, enough to get it trending, as Israel stepped up military strikes against the Tehran-backed Hamas terrorists in Gaza responsible for launching hundreds of rockets at civilian targets this week, according to a nonprofit, politically neutral research institution. The Network Contagion Research Institute, or NCRI, has unveiled its findings, showing a coordinated effort to push hateful content that called for “Death to Israel” and claimed “Hitler was right.” “What you have are enemy regimes that are utilizing the means of open discourse, free speech, in order to undermine democracy, even as they’re funding terrorist organizations that are attacking democracy,” Joel Finkelstein, the NCRI’s director and co-founder, told Fox News Friday.
The United Nations must open an inquiry into the horrendous mass murder of political dissidents by Iran’s regime in 1988. It is long overdue. That is a call that dozens of former UN officials and international human rights experts made to the UN this month. I am proud to be one of the signatories. The open letter was signed by over 150 international legal and human rights experts, including former UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson. Former Deputy UN Secretary-General Mark Malloch-Brown also signed. Our letter to the UN calls for the “establishment of an international investigation” looking into the killings of at least 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, the majority of whom were supporters of the main opposition movement Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which has struggled for a democratic, free and secular Iranian government for the last four decades.
The eyes of the world have once again turned to Iran as the prospects of renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal appear to have improved with the election of U.S. President Joe Biden. In recent months, however, Iran has taken alarming new steps to reinforce a legal framework of persecution that threatens its most vulnerable populations. Its actions highlight the pressing need to include human rights in any bilateral and multilateral negotiations over the JCPOA. The United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany need to insist on human rights discussions with Iranian officials.
Iran’s next presidential election, scheduled for June 18, is fast approaching. And once again, Iranians in and out of their homeland are busy debating whether they should vote or not – whether voting would make any difference at all. In the Islamic Republic, which is categorically undemocratic in its very constitutional foundations, there is an understandable apathy and mistrust in the whole idea of voting. So what to do: Go and vote and thus implicitly legitimatise an undemocratic state or stay at home and expose its lack of legitimacy? That is the question. An overwhelming majority of Iranians are not entirely content with either option – and, more importantly, cannot stand the forces advertising them.
Death has become a major part of Iraq’s daily routine. Pro-Iran militias, death squads, hit lists and cold-blooded assassinations highlight how failed the state of Iraq is despite the international and local denial. When five Iraqis die, it is not news any more. When 50 get killed, it is not breaking news. When 100 lose their lives in a terrorist attack, Western media may generously talk about it for a couple of hours.
Finally, after much speculation, Khamenei favoured Ibrahim Raisi as his choice for the upcoming presidential election and put an end to all the ambiguities and rumours about the president he wishes to install. He had already prepared the grounds for this election on April 21. On the one hand, a letter was sent by 220 members of the parliament, affiliated with his faction, asking Ibrahim Raisi to run for the presidency . On the other hand, he had eliminated potential rivals such as Hassan Khomeini (grandson of Ruhollah Khomeini) by advising him not to think of running for the presidency.
On the presidential campaign trail last year, Joe Biden pledged to restore America’s participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal. To this end, indirect talks on reviving the agreement started last month in Vienna. These talks have been brokered by the EU but involve all the parties to the 2015 deal. There have been four rounds of talks already, but little progress has been made. One of the reasons for this is the unrealistically high expectations both sides had before re-entering talks.
Iran and al-Qaeda have collaborated covertly since the early 1990s in Sudan, and the relationship continued after al-Qaeda relocated to Afghanistan. The group was present on Iranian soil before, during, and after the 9/11 attacks. Since 2001, senior leaders on al-Qaeda’s management council have resided in Iran. Al-Qaeda uses Iran as a facilitation, finance, and transport hub using Muslim Brotherhood-led institutions, such as the Islamic Development Bank, to supply illicit funding. From this sanctuary, al-Qaeda ordered attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia in 2003. The US government has consistently assumed the Islamic regime would not allow al-Qaeda to plot against the US from within Iranian borders, but this assumption is belied by the evidence.
The narrow Strait of Hormuz is also well known as a high-tension flashpoint close to the Iranian border where large portions of the region’s commercial and military shipping traffic travel. Swarms of Iranian small boats harassed and tried to intimidate a group of U.S. Navy ships as it transited the Strait of Hormuz on May 10, prompting the U.S. warships to repeatedly fire warning shots in an effort to diffuse the situation. Several U.S. Navy Patrol boats, a Navy guided-missile cruiser and several U.S. Coast Guard ships were escorting a guided missile submarine, the USS Georgia, when they were approached at provocative high-speeds by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy boats with, as a Navy report describes it, “their weapons uncovered and manned.”
ایجاد گورهای جدید در آرامگاه خاوران که محل دفن گروهی از قربانیان اعدامهای جمعی جمهوری اسلامی است، با موجی از اعتراض بازماندگانی همراه شده است که معتقدند جمهوری اسلامی ایران میکوشد مدارک مربوط به گورهای جمعی را از بین ببرد. از زمان پیروزی انقلاب ۵۷ در ایران، مکان دفن بسیاری از اعدامشدگان یا افراد درگذشته در زندانهای جمهوری اسلامی به بازماندگان آنها اعلام نشده است و با وجود افشاگریهای صورت گرفته در خصوص اعدامهای گسترده و فراقانونی، جمهوری اسلامی ایران تاکنون از پاسخگویی در زمینه کشتار گسترده مخالفان حکومت در دهه ۶۰، خودداری کرده است.
بیش از ۱۵۰ تن از کارشناسان برجسته حقوق بشر و مقامات پیشین سازمان ملل متحد به همراه ۲۴ سازمان غیردولتی بینالمللی در نامه سرگشادهای به میشل باشله، کمیسر عالی حقوق بشر سازمان ملل، خواستار تشکیل یک کمیسیون بینالمللی برای تحقیق در باره کشتار هزاران زندانی سیاسی در تابستان ۱۳۶۷ شدند. در این نامه گفته شده کسانی که دستور این اعدامهای غیرقانونی را صادر و آن را اجارا کردهاند، از آن پس از مصونیتی سیستماتیک برخوردار شدهاند و از جمله سمتهای بسیار مهمی را در قدرت، از جمله در قوه قضاییه و دادگستری برعهده دارند. در سال ۱۳۶۷ با حکم آیتالله خمینی، هزاران زندانی سیاسی که قبلا محاکمه شده و در حال گذراندن دوران محکومیت خود بودند، با قرار گرفتن در مقابل هیئتی موسم به «هیئت مرگ»، در دادگاههای کوتاه و گاه چند دقیقهای به اعدام محکوم شدند.
۱۷۸ نفر از استادان دانشگاه صنعتی شریف در تهران با انتشار نامه سرگشادهای خواهان آزادی امیر حسین مرادی و علی یونسی، دو دانشجوی این دانشگاه شدهاند که بیش از یک سال است با اتهامات امنیتی در بازداشت به سر میبرند. امضاکنندگان این نامه از مقامهای حکومت خواستهاند درباره آقایان مرادی و یونسی “رافت اسلامی” نشان دهند. آنها گفتهاند: “یک فرزند نوجوان و جوان ممکن است سهوا یا عمدا مرتکب خطا شود اما آنچه مهم است مواجهه پدرانه و درسآموز با اوست. امیر حسین مرادی و علی یونسی در فروردین ۱۳۹۹ با خشونت بازداشت شدند و هنوز نه دادگاهی برایشان تشکیل شده و نه حتی به وکیل دسترسی داشتهاند.”