Blast At Iran's Sensitive Parchin Military Complex Kills One Engineer

The match planned to take place in Vancouver on June 5 was part of the Canadian men’s team’s preparation for World Cup in Qatar later this year.

Earlier in May as news emerged that Iranian football officials with ties to the country’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) were to accompany the team, many Canadian-Iranians launched campaigns to cancel the match.

At the forefront of the movement were families of victims who died when the IRGC shot down a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran in January 2020, killing all 176 onboard.

Hamed Esmaeilion, the chief spokesperson for the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, in an opinion piece for Canada’s Globe and Mail last week said that soccer in Iran is controlled by the IRGC, which is expected to send members to accompany the Iranian team and said it is shocking that Canada Soccer is inviting the Iranian national team.

Later, a photo emerged showing the Iranian team’s manager Hamid Estili with a man in Tehran in April who is wanted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation for involvement in an alleged kidnapping plot of a New York-based Iranian activist.

The decision by Canada Soccer will be seen as a victory by Iranian human rights activists who have become much more vocal and effective in Europe and North America in recent years.

In an article published on Wednesday, the daily said according to an intelligence official, Israel has informed American officials that it was behind the killing of Hassan Sayyad-Khodaei -- a member of IRGC’ Quds Force, responsible for operations outside Iran’s borders.

The intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis killed him as a warning to Iran to halt the operations of a covert group within the Quds Force known as Unit 840, tasked with abductions and assassinations of foreigners around the world, including Israeli civilians and officials.

According to the article, Khodaei was the deputy commander of Unit 840 and in charge of its operations in the Middle East and countries neighboring Iran. Over the past two years, he had also been involved in attempted terrorist attacks against Israelis, Europeans and American civilians and government officials in Columbia, Kenya, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, and Cyprus.

A European security official, told Iran International on Tuesday that Khodaei was responsible for a number of terrorist operations against Israelis in three continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa, including an attack in the Indian capital New Delhi on February 13, 2012.

Khodaei was killed outside his home on a residential street in Tehran on Sunday when two gunmen on motorcycles approached his car and fired five bullets at him. Iran blamed Israel and vowed revenge for the killing.

The agreements were signed in Tehran on Wednesday during a meeting attended by Novak and Iranian Oil Minister Javad Owji. 

"Iran and Russia are both under oppressive sanctions, which, God willing, can be neutralized by working together and developing relations in various fields," Owji was quoted as saying by the oil ministry’s news agency, Shana.

"Good agreements were reached in the fields of rail, road transport, shipping and aviation," he said, without expanding further, adding that both sides have "good capacities for cooperation in energy, banking, transportation, agriculture, nuclear energy, industry and trade".

"We plan to increase the level of Iran-Russia trade relations in these fields to $40 billion a year," the oil minister added. Current annual bilateral trade is around $4 billion.

According to Russia's Interfax news agency Novak and Owji discussed the potential for oil and gas swaps, as well as "increasing joint investments in oil and gas projects" with the Russian official emphasizing that "Energy is one of the most important sectors of our trade and economic cooperation."

"We agreed to switch over to the use of national currencies as much as possible," Novak added, noting that "A path is being pursued to increasing trade, economic, logistics, investment, financial and banking cooperation, despite the unprecedented pressure that Russia is currently experiencing from unfriendly countries."

While Tehran has been chafing under sanctions for years, especially after the US pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018, Western governments have imposed tough sanctions on Russia after it invaded Ukraine in February.

"I suppose I should abstain from having a final conclusion at this point since we haven't finished the process yet but let me say that we are at a very difficult juncture at the moment," Rafael Grossi who will report on the issue to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors on June 6 told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday.

During Grossi’s visit to Tehran on March 5, Iran and the IAEA agreed a three-month procedure for a series of exchanges for Tehran to clarify outstanding questions about the unexplained uranium particles found in old, undeclared sites.

Grossi complained earlier in May that Iran was not forthcoming over its past nuclear activities and the origin of traces of enriched uranium in places that had never been declared and said he was “extremely concerned” about Iran’s lack of cooperation.

Tehran's demands for the closure of the IAEA investigation into the issue has remained a source of tension and distrust between Tehran and the West.

Iran has always insisted that it has fully cooperated with the UN nuclear watchdog over the matter while Grossi has said that efforts to restore the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), may not be possible without resolving the issue of undeclared past activities.

The United States withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018 and imposed ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions on Iran.

Talks which began in Vienna in April 2021 to restore the 2015 nuclear deal have stalled since mid-March. Major issues reportedly include Washington’s refusal to delist Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC)which the Trump administration designated as a ‘foreign terrorist organization’. Iran also insists on avenging the US killing of IRGC’s Qods Force Commander Ghasem (Qasem) Soleimani who was killed in Baghdad in 2020 in a US targeted drone attack.

Some analysts have linked what the IAEA calls “undeclared nuclear material” to Tehran’s past cooperation over centrifuges with Pakistani scientist AQ Khan.

"I hope that the time ... between now and the issuance of my report [in June] will [be] put to good use to come [up] at least with a start of a credible answer to these things," Grossi told the forum in Davos.

The WSJ reported Wednesday that documents it has reviewed suggest that Iran had acquired some secret IAEA reports nearly two decades ago and provided them to top political, military, and nuclear officials between 2004 and 2006 in a bid to devise answers to IAEA’s questions over its allegedly secret nuclear activities prior to 2003.

Some such IAEA documents that were among over 100,000 documents stolen by the Mossad from a warehouse near Tehran were annotated in Persian by officials who apparently used them to come up with answers that would satisfy the IAEA about undeclared activities. The archives were disclosed in 2018 by then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The interplay between the Vienna talks and IAEA’s monitoring of Iran is a complex one. As a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT), Iran is subject to IAEA inspections and monitoring under its NPT ‘safeguards’ agreement.

The agency’s role was enhanced under the JCPOA which limited Iran’s nuclear program in scale and nature. Since 2019, a year after the United States left the JCPOA and began ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions, Iran has both expanded its nuclear program and limited IAEA access almost to the lower level required under safeguards.

Tehran Governor Mohsen Mansouri announced the measure following a decision by the Tehran Province Air Pollution Emergency Committee. The neighboring province of Alborz, the southern province of Khuzestan, East Azarbaijan province in the north west, and Esfahan province in central Iran also reported shut-downs due to air pollution including severe sandstorms.

The air quality index in many Iranian cities, including Tehran and Kermanshah, has reached a maximum level, making it hazardous for people to leave their homes. While Tehran’s air is among the world’s most polluted, many large Iranian cities face similar problems, especially when power stations use heavy diesel fuels as demand for electricity runs ahead of the supply of natural gas.

Dust storms, originating in both Iran and neighboring countries, have also increased markedly in recent years in several Iranian provinces, notably Khuzestan, Kermanshah, and Sistan-Baluchestan. While there have been efforts to reduce such storms through more effective management of water resources and planting drought-resistant trees in arid areas, these have so far proved inadequate.