Iran’s Supreme Leader's Aide Urges Closer Ties With Palestinian Militant Outfit

The US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom tweeted on Wednesday that “Amid a continued rise in arrests, sentences, and imprisonments, the US urges Iran to halt its ongoing oppression of the Baha'i community and honor its international obligations to respect the right of all Iranians to freedom of religion or belief.”

Earlier in the day, Democrat lawmaker Ted Deutch said he is “horrified that Iran arrested several members of the Baha'i faith, including religious leaders, on charges of spying for Israel without offering evidence of illegal activity.”

Noting that these “unjust detentions are part of Iran's state-sponsored persecution of religious minorities, including the Baha'i, Florida's representative urged “the House to swiftly pass my resolution, H.Res 744, which condemns Iran’s persecution of Baha’is and urges the President and Secretary of State to impose sanctions on Iranians directly responsible for serious human rights abuses, including abuses committed against Baha'is.”

Iran’s security forces this week arrested several members of the Baha’i religious community regarded by the clerical government as heretics, and raided more than 20 households. 

Security forces also laid siege to a village in northern Iran on August 2 and started demolishing houses and farms belonging to members of the persecuted Baha’i faith.

Iran’s intelligence ministry claimed that the arrested Baha’is were linked to the Baha’i center in Israel, where the religious group’s international headquarters are located, and had collected and transferred information there.

According to a National Security Council statement on Wednesday, Sullivan, who spoke with the Iranian-American journalist, said that US President Joe Biden will continue to receive updates on her situation, and added that the administration will continue to protect its citizens and dissidents from threats from the Islamic Republic.

The statement added that “the US Government will use all tools at its disposal to disrupt and deter threats from Iran, including those which target US citizens and dissidents living in the United States."

A man armed with a loaded AK-47, identified as Khalid Mehdiyev, spent two days last week outside the home of Alinejad, and at one point attempted to open the door. 

Alinejad, who was also the target of an international kidnapping plot orchestrated by Iran’s intelligence network last year, has promoted videos of women protesting Iran's compulsory Islamic dress code to her millions of social media followers. 

Several former and current US officials have decried the Islamic Republic’s harassment of the New York-based journalist and praised her steadfast fight. 

Senator Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) said on August 2, “We cannot sit idly by and continue to allow US persons to be victims of transnational repression. It's why we introduced the Masih Alinejad HUNT Act of 2021.”

In a new briefing entitled “They are shooting brazenly”: Iran’s militarized response to May 2022 protests released on Wednesday, the global rights watchdog reiterated the urgent need for the UN Human Rights Council to establish an independent investigative and accountability mechanism to hold Iranian authorities accountable for serious crimes under international law.

“The Iranian authorities’ unlawful use of force during the crackdown on the May 2022 protests reflects increasing militarization of the policing of protests in recent years, which has left hundreds of protesters and bystanders, including children, dead and thousands of others injured since December 2017,” Amnesty International said.

In May, southwestern parts of Iran witnessed two waves of protests. In the first half of May a government decision that resulted in a sudden rise of food prices led to largely peaceful demonstrations. Protesters chanted slogans against clerics including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi as the overnight price hike was due to the government’s decision to remove subsidies for food imports.

Iran has systematically used military force against peaceful protesters on several occasions since 2017. In November 2019 security forces armed with military weapons killed at least 1,500 people.

Amnesty International reiterated that with avenues for justice completely closed domestically, there is urgent need for the UN Human Rights Council to establish an independent investigative and accountability mechanism to collect, consolidate, preserve, and analyze evidence of the most serious crimes under international law committed in Iran to enable future prosecutions.

The organization’s new research documents how Iran’s security forces unlawfully fired live ammunition and birdshot in May 2022 to crush largely peaceful protests over soaring food prices and a deadly building collapse.

The organization has verified that Iran’s security forces killed four people in connection with the protests and documented a pattern of birdshot injuries amounting to torture amongst protesters and bystanders, including children.

The next round of multiple anti-government protests took place in several cities in late May after the deadly collapse of a newly built ten-story building in the southwestern city of Abadan which according to the authorities left at least 43 people dead.

The incident instantly became an example of government corruption and insider dealings by Islamic Republic officials and led to days of large anti-government protests in Khuzestan and elsewhere.

The government deployed thousands of anti-riot police to Abadan and other cities in the province and arrested an unknown number of people, stopping the protests. Some officials later admitted that "corruption" was the underlying reason for the tragedy of the building’s collapse.

The authorities also shutdown the Internet and disrupted mobile networks in the affected areas to prevent people from communicating with each other and posting videos and photos of the violence against protesters on social media.

“Rightful outrage among people in Iran about state corruption, inflation, unemployment, low or unpaid wages, food insecurity, as well as political repression is likely to lead to more protests, and Iran’s security forces will continue to feel emboldened to kill and injure protesters if they are not held accountable,” Amnesty said Tuesday.

According to information obtained by Iran International, Saeed Borji is working to develop nuclear detonators for the ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research -- or SPND. 

A protege of the once-top Iranian nuclear weapons scientist and a senior member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh -- who was assassinated in November 2020 – Borji runs a front company named Azar Afrouz Saeed Engineering Company, specializing in explosives. The company is a subsidiary of SPND. 

The explosives and metals expert for Shahid Karimi Group, also a subsidiary of SPND, has been associated with "possible military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program," according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and has assisted SPND’s efforts to procure equipment used for containing explosions.

Borji, who has a PhD in chemical engineering from Malek Ashtar University of Technology, has previously worked in Parchin military complex with Russian-born former Soviet scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko – with an extensive expertise in the development of nuclear detonators – and Vladimir Padalko on projects about explosive chambers for nuclear weapons. 

The Abadeh site is an important site for conducting large-scale high explosive tests for developing nuclear weapons under the Amad Plan, which was Iran’s project during the early 2000s to build five nuclear weapons and later was reoriented to a smaller, better camouflaged nuclear weapons program. Abadeh was first identified as a weapons site in October 2019 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The site was built in the mid-1990s by companies controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

The Abadeh site also called Marivan site in the southwestern Fars province, is one of the places that the IAEA found traces of undeclared uranium and demanded explanation from the Islamic Republic. Iran said the origin of the particles is "unknown" and insisted the site was used for "the exploitation of fireclay through a contract with a foreign company decades ago."

Borji was sanction by the United States on March 22, 2019 as a Specially Designated National (SDN) by the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) pursuant to Executive Order 13382, which targets proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery system. 

Late in July, two Telegram channels with links to IRGC suggested that Iran may build nuclear warheads “in the shortest possible time” if attacked by the US or Israel, which has repeatedly threatened in recent months to use all means at its disposal to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threat, and has said its armed forces are preparing for action if necessary.

“The nuclear facilities of Fordow have been built deep under mountains of Iran and are protected against trench-busting bombs and even nuclear explosion… all infrastructures required for nuclear breakout have been prepared in it,” the video by Bisimchi Media (Radioman Media) Telegram channel said while adding that the facilities at Natanz may be highly vulnerable to a possible attack by Western powers and Israel but Fordow will immediately assume war footing and begin the nuclear breakout project within a short time if Natanz comes under missile attack.

EMAD, another form of an earlier weapons program, AMAD, refers to Iran’s purported secret nuclear effort, which started in 1989 under the leadership of Fakhrizadeh and according to the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA, stopped in 2003. According to a IAEA director general’s report in 2015, Iran specifically denied the existence of the AMAD Plan and the ‘Orchid Office’ as elements of such a program.

Iran has now enough uranium enriched to 60 percent purity and if further enriched to 90 percent, the fissile material will be sufficient for a nuclear bomb within a few weeks.

Earlier this week, an Iranian spokesman said that Raisi (Raeesi) is preparing to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York for the first time. Last year after he toook office he did not travel to New York and send a video address to the General Assembly.

Senators Tom Cotton, March Rubio, Joni Ernst and Ted Cruz are among the eight Senators who told Biden, “Raisi’s involvement in mass murder and the Iranian regime’s campaign to assassinate U.S. officials on American soil make allowing Raisi and his henchmen to enter our country an inexcusable threat to national security.”

Raisi is accused of being a member of a death commission that ordered the summary execution of thousands of political prisoner sin Iran in 1988.

Moreover, US law enforcement arrested a man armed with an AK-47 assault rifle in Brooklyn last week near the house of a well-known Iranian journalist and women’s rights defender Masih Alinejad, believed to be a target of the Iranian regime. Last year, the US uncovered a plot by Iranian intelligence to kidnap the activist.

The Senators in their letter cited precedence of US denying visas to Iranian and other leaders and diplomats for visiting the UN, urging President Biden to also deny entry to Raisi and his aides.