Iran International
The Iranian government is promising perks including loans and free Internet to those participating in the Arbaeen pilgrimage to Karbala, Iraq, later this month.
Government spokesman Ali Bahadori-Jahromi said Tuesday that in the latest cabinet meeting President Ebrahim Raisi ordered all government organizations to provide maximum facilitation for the annual pilgrimage to Karbala where the main events of the annual ceremonies take place.
According to Bahadori-Jahromi, the government has improved the country’s infrastructures to facilitate pilgrimage to the religious city of Karbala including ten different airports for flights to Iraq as well as six dedicated border checkpoints, and the railway network. The first rail line from Tehran to Karbala has now been launched, he added.
The Civil Aviation Organisation has said but it has prepared 1,000 special flights to Iraq For the ceremonies.
Iran will probably end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars to sponsor a large pilgrimage because both domestically and in the region the clerical regime needs to show its ideology is influential.
In 2019, The New York Times quoted an influencial Iranian media boss, Hossein Sulaimani, as saying, “Arbaeen is a display of power for Iran and a showcase of unity among Shiites in the region."
The government will also be stationing a hot air balloon in the Iraqi border area to provide free mobile Internet access as well as free Wi-Fi to pilgrims and will also grant 50 million rial loans (around $160) to heads of households going on family pilgrimage and 30 million ($100) to individual pilgrims, he said, adding that the loan can be secured by online application and there will be no need for guarantees if the applicant has a cash subsidy account.
Around 5 million Iranian pilgrims are expected to travel to Iraq during the Arbaeen ceremonies which fall on September 18 this year. If such a large number end up going, the loan alone can cost the government upwards of $500 million amid an estimated 50-percent budget deficit.
Iranian authorities deploy all religious entities and media to encourage pilgrimage to Karbala. Government organisations and the state affiliated charities as well as municipalities and city councils often allocate considerable budgets to organize the Arbaeen Walk. Some officials and clerics say the Arbaeen gathering is one of the manifestations of the Shia “soft power’.
Many government organizations, municipalities, and city councils have separately allocated special budgets for the Arbaeen ceremonies in Iraq. The City Council of Mashhad, for instance, has approved a budget of 150 billion rials ($5 million) for services in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf and will dispatch 525 city cleaners and 354 bus drivers there.
“Arbaeen was a grassroots religious occasion…but the Islamic Republic turned it into a state ceremony. holding state religious events and using public money for that purpose. It means the government is putting its hand in people’s pockets without asking for permission,” Reza Veisi, Iran International analyst tweeted Monday.
The Arbaeen ceremony which marks the end of the 40-day mourning period following Ashura -- the religious ritual for the commemoration of the third Shia Muslim Imam, Hussain ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, killed in 680 AD – is the world's largest annual gathering.
Millions of Shia Muslims gather every year to mark Arbaeen in Karbala, Iraq, where the Imam is buried. Many walk long distances, even hundreds of kilometres, to the shrine of the Imam.
There are no reliable methods for tallying the number of visitors to Iraqi holy Shia sites during Arbaeen. In 2019, before the pandemic, an estimated 15 million people from various countries attended the ceremonies.
In an open letter, signed by the sister of French citizen Benjamin Briere, the wife of Austrian Kamran Ghaderi, the wife of Swedish-Iranian doctor on death row Ahmadreza Djalali and the daughter of German citizen Jamshid Sharmahd and addressed to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, they said their loved ones “wonder whether EU officials have forgotten them and how much longer they will have to endure this ordeal.”
“We, the families of French, Swedish, German, and Austrian citizens, who have been illegally detained by the Iranian regime, are outraged that the European Union seems to be ignoring these crimes,” they added.
The families also listed legal and other mistreatments their loved one have had to endure. “These European citizens have been subjected to torture, grossly unfair trials based on fabricated charges, without access to legal counsel or proper medical care. All of them are held hostage by a dictatorial regime that does not even abide by the minimum standard of international legal and human rights.”
Briere has been detained since May 2020 and sentenced to eight years in jail on spying charges while Ghaderi has been held for almost seven years since January 2016. Djalali has been in jail for six years and is awaiting execution in Iran on charges of spying for Israel leading to the killing of nuclear scientists.
Amnesty International has accused the Islamic Republic of taking Djalali "hostage" and using him as “a pawn in a cruel political game." Sharmahd was kidnapped in Dubai and transferred to Iran in late July 2020 as Iran accused him of bombing a mosque in Shiraz 2008 that killed 14 people and wounded more than 200 others.
Iran has been accused of wrongfully detaining at least a dozen foreign and dual nationals on trumped up charges, effectively as hostages to extract concessions from Western governments. Most of them are held on disputed spying charges.
According to the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), there are currently some 20 dual nationals and foreign nationals with US or European passports detained in Iran.
Borrell said on Monday he was “less confident” about efforts to restore the landmark nuclear deal, which was abandoned by former US president Donald Trump in 2018.
Earlier in the month, Iran reiterated its call for the release of its former officials imprisoned in Europe while Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an academic previously jailed in Iran for over two years, said Tehran is on the hunt for both Swedes and Belgians to exchange with them.
Foreign ministry’s spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said on Saturday that Assadollah Assadi, serving a 20-year sentence in Belgium over a terror attack in Paris, and former jailor Hamid Nouri, sentenced to life in prison in Sweden for his role in 1988 prison purges, should be released as their trials were illegal.
Assadi, 50, a former attaché at the Iranian embassy in Austria, was convicted of plotting to bomb a gathering of the exiled opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK) near Paris on June 30, 2018. Iran says Nouri’s detention is driven by “false allegations” made by the MEK.
As minister of state for the Middle East, Africa and North America until February, Cleverly has direct experience of dealing with Iran. Three months after President Ebrahim Raisi took office, Cleverly met November 2021 in London with Ali Bagheri Kani, a deputy Iranian foreign minister and lead nuclear negotiator.“The new government coming in did give us an opportunity to reset,” Cleverly told Sky News later, in March 2022.
While Cleverly said immediately after the meeting he had urged Iran to return to the 2015 nuclear deal, his meeting with Bagheri-Kani seems to have centered on detained dual British-Iranian nationals Nazanin Zeghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori. Families of the detainees and many analysts refused to believe claims by both Tehran and London that the detentions were not formally linked to Britain’s failure to honor a £400 million ($460 million) debt owed Iran for failure to deliver weapons in the 1970s that Tehran had paid for up front.
On the release of Zeghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori in March 2022, Cleverly, still a minister of state but no longer covering the Middle East, said talks had been “incredibly difficult” and that London had taken “every precaution” that the £400 million would be used for ‘humanitarian’ purposes.
"There was a legal decision which went against the UK, and we abide by that legal decision, but there were practical difficulties,” Cleverly said. “You can't just write a cheque because of all those sanctions, because of all those counter-terrorism and counter-money laundering laws.”
He floated the idea that the talks over the debt repayment and prisoner release could set a wider precedent: “I would hope that Iran sees that a shift in their behavior can bring about positive changes, but ultimately, they are the ones responsible for this. And if they were to change their behavior, then the international posture towards them could be reviewed.”
Cleverly also insisted that Britain was working hard to secure the release of a third detainee in Iran, Morad Tahbaz, who holds US as well as British and Iranian nationality.
While some commentators have suggested Liz Truss may take a harder line towards Iran than her predecessor Boris Johnson, Truss’ long record of pragmatism suggests she may try to maintain a common approach with the Biden administration, France, and Germany. Cleverly, a strong Truss supporter who first joined the cabinet in only 2019 and currently education secretary, seems a ready ally in such an approach.