Qatari Emir Meets With Khamenei, No Mention Of Nuclear Issue

France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs told Iran International in a communiqué Thursday it had summoned the Iranian charge d'affaires in Paris after Iran detained two French nationals on charges that they fomented teachers’ demonstrations. The ministry said the ambassador in Tehran had requested consular access to the detainees.

The Iranian Intelligence Ministry claimed Wednesday that the two had met with members of the Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, which has organized nation-wide teachers’ protests since last year. Iran International Wednesday named those arrested as Cécile Kohler, head of the biggest federation of French teachers' unions, and her husband.

The couple arrived in Tehran's Imam Khomeini Airport April 29, stayed in Tehran for two days, and then went to Kashan and Esfahan. They were due to return home May 8, the day of their arrest. An intelligence ministry statement said Wednesday that the two went to Iranwith the aim of changing “popular” demand into “chaos, social disorder and destabilization of society.”

On Thursday, Iranian teachers took to streets for the third time in under two months despite the education ministry’s threat to fire them. According to videos posted to social media, teachers demanded better working conditions and the release of colleagues arrested in previous protests.

‘Reckless and cowardly’

The Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations said later in the day said that several people had been arrested after security forces used force to disperse the protesters in some cities, including Ahvaz, Khuzestan province, which Wednesday saw protests over increased food prices.

In a resolution published at the end of the Thursday’s rallies, protesting teachers condemned a "reckless and cowardly” attempt to attribute “decades” of their protests to foreign hands. In Tehran, police cordoned off streets leading to parliament, where teachers had gathered in previous protests. 

The protests and the arrest of French nationals occurred as Enrique Mora, the senior European Union official chairing talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), was in Tehran in an effort to restart the stalled negotiations. Republican Senator James Risch, a JCPOA opponent, said Wednesday that Iran’s detention of European nationals while Mora was in Tehran “should be the final nail in the coffin for any bad deal with Iran”.

While Iranian state media portrayed the visit as proof of Iran's expansion of ties with regional countries, a source briefed on the visit told Reuters on Sunday that the emir's trip was aimed to bring the parties to the Iran nuclear pact to "a new middle ground".

Almost a year of indirect talks between Tehran and Washington to save the pact has been on hold since March, chiefly over Tehran's insistence that the US remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its elite security force, from the US Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list.

Washington has made it clear that it has no such plans, while also not ruling it out.

Iran's hardline rulers believe that an uncompromising approach, spearheaded by the country's strongly anti-Western Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can force Washington to accept Tehran’s demands, Iranian officials told Reuters last month.

Under the 2015 pact, Iran curbed its sensitive uranium enrichment work, a possible pathway to nuclear arms, in return for the lifting of economic sanctions.

But in 2018, then-US President Donald Trump ditched the pact and reimposed sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to retaliate by gradually breaching the pact's nuclear curbs.

The largest protests appear to have occurred in Dezful and there are claims on social media that people had also taken to the streets in the provincial capital Ahvaz, Izeh, and at the port city of Mahshahr.

Khuzestan Province where the protests took place is where Iran's oil fields and production are concentrated.

There are few videos of the protests amid government’s disruption of Internet access, but some videos include the narrator's statement of the date, Wednesday, and place which confirm the social media reports about protests in Dezful. In these videos protesters chant against President Ebrahim Raisi, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the hike in prices.

Protesters also chanted slogans in support of the last Iranian royal family. “God bless your soul, Reza Shah,” they shouted for the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. “King of Iran, return to Iran,” was another call aimed at the core of the Islamic Republic.

Khuzestan has been the scene of widespread protests in the past few years. Protests over water shortage in July 2021lasted for over a week during which at least eight protesters were shot dead by security forces.

A conservative lawmaker from Khuzestan, Qasem Saedi, on Wednesday warned that rising prices could trigger unrest worse than nationwide protests that rocked Iran in 2018 and 2019.

The cash-strapped government of hardliner President Raisi announced last week that it would stop paying cheap dollar for flour imports which immediately affected the price of bread and pasta. On Thursday a hike in the prices of chicken, cooking oil, and dairy products by two to threefold was also announced. Meanwhile, the Iranian rial broke the politically sensitive 300,000 threshold to the US dollar on Wednesday. It rapidly climbed to 306,000 on Thursday. Forty-five years ago, before the 1979 revolution, 70 rials bought one US dollar.

The government says it will compensate for the rise in prices of basic foodstuffs by paying cash to 90 percent of the population for the time-being, but many believe this will cause further inflation, which already stands above 40 percent.

Minister of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare Hojjat Abdolmaleki on Thursday said payment of cash will stop within a couple of months, but ration cards will be issued for lower cost food. Rationing foodstuff has been unprecedented since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

Iran's authorities often shut down or drastically slow down the Internet to prevent protesters from communicating and spreading images and videos of the protests on social media. In November 2019, NetBlocks reported a major disruption of the Internet amid nationwide protests over an increase in fuel prices.

Wednesday evening Internet access of at least one mobile carrier was completely shut down and others were seriously slowed down at the national level.

Social media users had reported disruptions in their connections in the restive province since Thursday last week in areas affected by protests over bread prices.

The international Internet freedom watchdog NetBlocks confirmed Wednesday evening that real-time network data had shown a brief collapse in international connectivity on Internet provider Rightel, as well as a deterioration on other mobile and fixed-line providers.

According to official figures published in August 2021, 94 percent of Iranians have access to mobile Internet while only around 11 percent use broadband. Authorities often reduce connection quality and speed, mainly in mobile Internet, to prevent sharing of videos and photos of protests.

At the time it was revealed that since 2019 Israel had targeted at least 12 vessels headed to Syria that were mostly carrying Iranian oil.

"Following this, a security investigation was immediately opened to locate the source of the leak and whether it originated in the IDF," the Jerusalem Post quoted the Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson as saying on Wednesday.

The spokesperson added that "About a year ago, it was reported that information about a military operation in an enemy state had been leaked to foreign media before the operation was carried out."

The IDF stated that no indications of the source of the leak were found during the security investigation, adding that only about 450 of over 1,200 personnel, who were exposed to the secrets about the operations, had signed a confidentiality agreement.

Moreover, the Mossad said that an unknown amount of other people from other agencies and organizations had also been exposed to the information.

For over a decade Israel has carried out attacks on the Iranian atomic program including killing scientist and drone strikes. Israel has also acknowledged that it has conducted hundreds of attacks against forces under Iranian command in Syria to prevent the Islamic Republic from accumulating weapons and entrenching itself further in the war-torn country.

State Department spokesman Ned Price on Thursday dodged questions about the content of the meetings by European Union’s coordinator of the nuclear talks in the first day of his visit to Tehran, implying that the administration does not have any readout of the visit.

“I am confident that our team will be in touch with Enrique Mora and his team. Of course, he is still on the ground”, he said.

Answering a question about the last communication exchanged between Tehran and Washington, he said that if Iran and the US were able to have direct discussions "we weren’t reliant on a middleman... But regardless, we’re not going to detail a play-by-play".

Saying that the department does not have any updates on the talks to offer, Price emphasized that the administration is of the opinion that a mutual return to compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the JCPOA, “would manifestly be in our national security interest because it would once again put permanent and verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program, a program that has been in many ways unconstrained since 2018”.

Talks to revive Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers have stalled since March, chiefly over Tehran's insistence that Washington remove the FTO designation of the IRGC, which is the only example of a sovereign state’s armed forces to be included.