Iran Hightlights Grossi Visit To Israel As Reason For Own Actions

Israel urged its citizens Monday to avoid Istanbul or to return home because of what it said was a threat of Iranian attempts to kill or abduct vacationing Israelis.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said a "huge effort" by Israel's security forces had saved "Israeli lives in recent weeks" and thanked the Turkish government for its contribution.

He did not give further details. An Israeli security official told Reuters Turkey had arrested several suspected "operatives" of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

"We are calling on Israelis not to fly to Istanbul - and if you don't have a vital reason, don't fly to Turkey. If you are already in Istanbul, return to Israel as soon as possible," Lapid said in a televised statement.

"These terrorist threats are aimed at vacationing Israelis. They are selecting, in a random but deliberate manner, Israeli citizens with a view to kidnapping or murdering them," he said.

"I want, from here, to relay a message to the Iranians as well. Whoever harms Israelis will not get away with it. Israel's long arm will get them, no matter where they are."

Tehran has vowed to retaliate against Israel, which it blames for the May 22 killing of Hassan Sayyad-Khodaei, an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps colonel who was shot dead at the wheel of his car by two people on a motorcycle.

Israel neither confirmed nor denied responsibility, its standard policy over accusations of assassinations. It accused Khodaei of having plotted attacks against its citizens worldwide.

With reporting by Reuters

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said at a weekly press conference on Monday that the grounded plane operating for the cargo division of Venezuelan national carrier Conviasa does not belong to Iran’s Mahan Airlines. The United States sanctioned the airline in 2008 for its links to Tehran’s extraterritorial intelligence and secret ops outfit, the Quds (Qods) Force. 

Khatibzadeh, however, confirmed that some of the crew on the plane – which was seized upon arrival in Buenos Aires on June 6 -- were Iranians, noting that "The plane has been sold to Venezuelan airlines for more than a year and its crew is not entirely Iranian."

Iran’s aviation chief Mohammad Mohammadi Bakhsh said on Sunday that the Iranian crew on the plane were instructors working as part of an aviation deal between Iran and Venezuela, and that the seized aircraft has not been on Mahan Air’s register. 

Argentine lower-house lawmaker and member of the country's Congressional Intelligence Commission Gerardo Milman, who has raised attention to the case in recent days, presented a complaint to a judge asking to fingerprint the crew and share the information with the Federal Intelligence Agency, saying that "Our information is that this is a plane that has come to conduct intelligence in Argentina." 

Among the Iranians on board, is Gholamreza Ghasemi, who is a member of the IRGC and a former board member of Fars Air Qeshm, the Iranian airline that is accused of transporting weapons for Hezbollah covering up as civilian jets. He is reportedly a relative of current Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, whose assignment by President Ebrahim Raisi triggered condemnation from Argentina given his suspected role in the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed 85 people and injured over 300.

The data and analytics firm Kpler was quoted by Prague-based, US-financed Persian language Radio Farda as saying that Iran’s illicit shipments of crude mainly to Asian markets dropped to around 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) in May.

The shipments were estimated to have been 908,000 bpd in March and 820,000 in April, as Iran claimed it is selling more than a million bpd in recent months.

When the United States imposed full oil export sanctions on Iran in May 2019, exports dropped from more than 2 million barrels a day in 2016-2017 to around 250,000. China was the main buyer of Iranian crude in this period.

Toward the end of 2020, as it became clear that then-President-elect Joe Biden was determined to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement (JCPOA) with Iran abandoned by his predecessor in 2018, Iranian crude exports began to increase. China might have calculated that the risk of US retaliation decreased with the prospects of talks to restore the nuclear deal.

Exports gradually increased in 2021 as the United States engaged in indirect nuclear talks in Vienna. It reached new highs in early 2022 before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sanctions on Moscow by many countries. Since then, Russia has apparently turned to China to sell its crude which happens to be Iran’s main oil customer.

In May, Reuters reported that about 20 tankers carrying around 40 million barrels of Iranian oil were waiting near Singapore to sell their cargos. As oil market monitoring firms have reported in the past Iranians oil is sold most probably to middlemen who then transfer the crude to Chinese ‘teapot’ small refineries.

Kpler told Radio Farda that the quantity of Iran’s unsold oil has not changed much, probably because shipments have declined.

Iran has denied that Russia is taking its market share, but $30 barrel reported discounts by Russia are apparently much more than Iran offers to customers willing to take a risk and buy its sanctioned crude.

The hardliner government of President Ebrahim Raisi prides itself for having “defeated US sanctions” and increased oil exports, as it tries to calm a volatile economic environment at home. The danger of three-digit inflation in Iran and the fall of its currency to a historic low over the weekend have led to angry protests on the streets.

The reported fall in exports in May can deal a new blow to Iran’s hard-pressed economy and further destabilize the political scene.

The year-long nuclear negotiations remain in deadlock, as Tehran demands its revolutionary Guard be removed from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).

The US has signaled that if talks make no progress and Iran continues to expand its nuclear program, it may decide to tighten the screws on Tehran, which may mean a more rigorous enforcement of existing sanctions.

First came the announcement that a relatively junior officer, Ali Kamani, died in a “car accident in line of duty” in Khomein, central Iran. From the text of the announcement, it seemed the Revolutionary Guard officer was more important than what his rank would suggest. In expressing condolences to various military officials, the text even mentioned Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Then within hours news came that another officer of the Aerospace Force, Mohammad Abdus, had also died, in Semnan, central Iran where a space launch center is located.

Abdus was also tagged as a “martyr” although no explanation was offered by media affiliated with the IRGC about how he had died.

So far, the IRGC or their media have not offered any further details about the death of the two officers from the same force in one day, although the deaths could have occurred earlier and only announced on Sunday.

In the latest updates on Monday, Iran's defense ministry emphasized that both officers died on dury in Iran, and IRGC sources deleted their earlier reports, deferring to the ministry.

It is possible that the two officers were killed in Israeli air and missile strikes in Syria recently, but a series of other killings and deaths among IRGC ranks in Iran leads to suspicion that they might have been targets of a secret series of operations.

The IRGC aerospace force is tasked with Iran’s missile development and space program. The country has made considerable progress in developing long-range ballistic missiles that can threaten the far fringes of the Middle East, including Israel. Regional countries have been concerned about the potential threat from a large number of these missiles.

Considering recent killings of other Revolutionary Guard officers in Iran, some Iranians on social media drew the conclusion that the deaths most likely are part of a highly professional anti-IRGC operation carried out with precision. Iranian intelligence organizations that usually boast of breaking up “terrorist operations” and discovering secret caches of weapons and explosives, have so far not pretended to have arrested anyone who might have been a recent string of killings and deaths.

The first high-profile killing took place in November 2020 when a chief architect of Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed near Tehran in an operation more fitting for a Hollywood thriller. He was shot by a remote-controlled heavy gun place in the back of a pickup truck while driving on a highway.

Eventually it was generally accepted that Israel was behind the highly complicated operation, and that is what most people believe now.

Just last week, there was the mysterious death of an aerospace scientist, Ayoob Entezari, who died shortly after dining with an unnamed man, as authorities scrambled to deny that his death was the result of poisoning.

Just days earlier, a commander in IRGC’s extraterritorial Quds Force’s secretive unit 840 died when he fell from the roof or balcony of his home in Karaj, west of Tehran.

He was a colleague of Colonel Ali Esmailzadeh who was assassinated outside his home in Tehran in broad daylight on May 22. A foreign security source told Iran International that he was in charge of operations against Israeli citizens and interests in various countries.

Whoever is behind these attacks not only weakens the Revolutionary Guard by eliminating key individuals but creates fear and panic among Islamic Republic officials and harms the image of Iranian military and intelligence establishment of being omnipotent.

The establishment has long tried to convince the people in Iran that it has total control over the country and can guarantee security.

According to information obtained by Radio Farda, these 26 people, all of whom are residents of the city of Shiraz in the southwestern province of Fars, are charged with "conspiracy to disrupt internal and external security."

The verdicts was issued on June 8 by a branch of the city’s Revolutionary Court, and pertains to the arrests of numerous Baha'is in Shiraz in 2016.

The 1979 constitution of the Islamic Republic recognizes only Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Baha'ism − established as a new religion in Iran in 1863 by Baha'ullah, who claimed to be a prophet following Jesus and Mohammad − has always been deemed heretical by the Shia establishment and subject to intermittent bouts of political persecution.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has on several occasions called the Baha'i faith a cult and in a religious fatwa in 2018 forbade contact, including business dealings, with followers of the faith.

Baha'is, who number around 300,000 in Iran, say their rights are systematically violated, that they are often harassed, forced to leave their homes and businesses, and are deprived of government job and university education. There are Baha’i communities in many countries worldwide but there is no reliable figure about the total number of followers.