Qatar, Iran Sign Cooperation Deals During Raisi Visit
Iran and Qatar signed several bilateral deals on Monday during a visit by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Doha to attend the Gas Exporting Countries Forum.
Iran and Qatar signed several bilateral deals on Monday during a visit by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Doha to attend the Gas Exporting Countries Forum.
Raisi said that he hoped the trip would help improve ties with other Persian Gulf Arab states.
Raisi's visit, the first to Qatar by an Iranian president in 11 years, comes as the United States and Iran hold indirect talks aimed at salvaging a 2015 nuclear deal. Some Persian Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates deemed the agreement flawed for not addressing Iran's missile program and arming of regional proxies.
"We believe that the level of existing cooperation between the countries of the region is not commensurate with potential ties," Raisi said in joint remarks with Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.
Raisi who assumed office last August has made improving ties with regional countries a declared cornerstone of his foreign policy, but during his first six months he did very little to remove irritants that hinder closer ties with many countries.
"Iran seeks to enhance these relations as our goal is regional convergence," said the Iranian president, who will attend a gas exporters' summit in Doha on Tuesday.
Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen who have been fighting a Saudi-backed coalition for seven years have continued missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia, and in January began targeting the UAE.
Earlier, Qatar and Iran signed 14 memoranda of understanding in the fields of aviation, trade, shipping, media, cancellation of visa requirements, electricity, standards, education and culture.
"We have today expanded our cooperation in the fields of the economy, energy, infrastructure, culture and food security," Raisi said.
Qatar has good ties with Iran, with which it shares a giant gas field. Tehran supported Doha after Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies imposed a boycott on Qatar in mid-2017 in a dispute over its ties with Islamist groups and with non-Arab Turkey and Iran.
Qatar's emir said in the joint remarks that his US-allied country was ready to do what it can to help bring an agreeable solution between Iran and the major parties at talks in Vienna to salvage the nuclear deal, which Washington pulled out of in 2018.
Reports in January spoke of Qatar acting as a mediator to arrange direct talks between Tehran and Washington. But so far Iran has rejected negotiating directly with the US.
Raisi on Monday reiterated earlier statements by Iranian officials that US pressures and sanction have been defeated. President Joe Biden decided early in his presidency to return to the 2015 nuclear deal and began indirect talks with Tehran.
Iran's oil minister said on Monday that unilateral sanctions against members of the gas forum threaten global energy security and that Iran provided the best option for gas exports to east and west, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
Iran has faced gas shortages at home because of record high consumption, particularly for winter household heating, and has had to cut supplies to cement plants and other industries.
With reporting by Reuters
The American-Israeli software and hardware security company said in a comprehensive technical analysis published on February18 that the recent wave of attacks that caused major disruptions to public services are far from minor website defacements.
The report provided in-depth breakdowns for some of the attacks, including the targeted hack of the state broadcaster (IRIB) in late January, saying the attackers’ aim was also to disrupt the IRIB’s programs, with the damage to the TV and radio networks possibly more serious than officially reported.
Several television and radio channels of the state broadcaster were hacked on January 27 with photos of leaders of an opposition group briefly aired. The image of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, leaders of the Albania-based opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), were broadcast for around 10 seconds with audio footage from one of their speeches in the background.
After the picture of the MEK leaders, the video showed a photo of Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei with a red cross on it, as an off-camera voice said, “Death to Khamenei.” Khamenei was badly injured in 1981 in one of a series of bombings attributed to the MEK.
Check Point research team probed the cyberattack and was able to retrieve the files and forensic evidence from publicly available resources, finding malicious executables whose purpose was to air the protest message, as well as evidence that a wiper malware was used.
The security firm provided a technical analysis of the tools used in the attack, as well as the attackers’ tactics, identifying malware that takes screenshots of the victims’ screens, several custom-made backdoors, and related batch scripts and configuration files used to install and configure the malicious executables.
Check Point also gave a detailed report about other major cyber-attacks such as an attack that hit the Iranian national railway and cargo services in July 2021. The attack caused “unprecedented disruptions” to the country’s trains, a day before media outlets reported that the website of Iran’s Roads Ministry, in charge of transportation, was taken down in a ‘cyber disruption’, preventing access to their official portal and sub-services.
A message was also displayed on the train schedule boards referred perplexed passengers to the Supreme Leader’s office phone number.
A group called ‘Predatory Sparrow’ claimed responsibility for the attacks, whose tools and tactics were used in similar operations against private companies in Syria by an anti-regime group called Indra.
In August 2021, the hacktivist group Tapandegan (Palpitations), previously known for hacking and displaying protest messages on the electronic flight arrival and departure boards in Mashhad and Tabriz international airports in 2018, released security camera footage from Tehran's Evin Prison, where many political prisoners are held. Tapandegan said the images had been acquired by hackers called Edalat-e Ali (Ali's Justice) and were being circulated to draw attention to human rights violations, particularly against political prisoners.
In October 2021, all gas stations in Iran were paralyzed by an attack that disrupted the electronic payment process, leading to extremely long queues for two days that prevented customers from paying with the government-issued electronic cards used to purchase subsidized fuel. When the card was swiped for payment, the supreme leader’s office phone number appeared on the screen. Iranian officials claimed that foreign actors, such as Israel and the US, were behind the attack. However, Predatory Sparrow claimed responsibility for this attack as well.
On February 1, the web-based streaming platform of IRIB, Telewebion, was hijacked yet again to broadcast protest messages urging citizens to rebel and stating that “the regime’s foundations are rattling” in the middle of a live broadcast of the Iran-UAE soccer match.
Recently, on February 7, 2022, the Edalat-e Ali group released footage from closed-circuit cameras in another Iranian prison, Ghezel Hesar.
Check Point says it is still not clear how the attackers gained initial access to these networks that are “completely isolated, are equipped with acceptable security protocols and are not accessible via the Internet”.
It concluded that “the actor may have many capabilities that have yet to be explored. On the one hand, the attackers managed to pull off a complicated operation to bypass security systems and network segmentation, penetrate the broadcaster’s networks, produce and run the malicious tools that heavily rely on internal knowledge of the broadcasting software used by victims, all while staying under the radar during the reconnaissance and initial intrusion stages”.
Check Point also concluded that “the attackers’ tools are of relatively low quality and sophistication and are launched by clumsy and sometimes buggy 3-line batch scripts”, which supports their “theory that the attackers might have had help from insiders or indicate a yet unknown collaboration between different groups with different skills”.
The crash happened in a residential area in the center of Tabriz, a city of 1.6 million residents. The third person killed was a passerby in the area.
The accident was followed by a huge fire in central Tabriz, which was put out following the intervention of the firefighters.
According to the commander of the Tabriz air base, General Reza Yousefi, the jet had been used for training while it suffered a technical problem on its final flight. He said that due to the technical problem “pilots could not reach the runway”.
Yousefi claimed that the pilots could have used the ejection system, but they refused to do it and “sacrificed themselves” to guide the jet to the stadium and not crash into a populated area “to keep people safe”.
The jet, however, initially hit the ground of a school according to local reports before crashing into the stadium but the school was closed, and no one was injured or killed there.
Iran’s air force has an assortment of US-made military aircraft purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which are not considered in optimal condition as decades of Western sanctions have made it hard to maintain the aging fleet.