Azerbaijan Evacuating Embassy In Iran Following Armed Attack
After a gunman assaulted Azerbaijan’s embassy in Iran’s capital Tehran, Baku says it is evacuating staff and family members from the country.
After a gunman assaulted Azerbaijan’s embassy in Iran’s capital Tehran, Baku says it is evacuating staff and family members from the country.
On Sunday, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry labeled the attack, in which a security guard was shot dead and two others were wounded, as an "act of terrorism," adding that the embassy will be evacuated immediately.
A video has been released on social media, showing a truck outside the embassy loading furniture at night. It is not yet clear whether the embassy will continue to function.
Police in Tehran says it arrested the attacker at the scene and authorities condemned Friday's incident, claiming that the gunman appeared to have had a personal, not a political, motive. But Azerbaijan summoned the Iranian ambassador and media in Baku seemed eager to portray the incident as a terror attack, claiming the assailant was a member of the Revolutionary Guard.
Azerbaijani media outlet Trend News Agency reported on Friday that “the perpetrator of the incident, identified as Iranian citizen Yasin Hosseinzadeh, and there are suspicions that he is related to Iran's special services, especially the IRGC.” It added that Iranian security forces guarding the embassy did not try to stop the attack.
Earlier, the Azerbaijani foreign ministry said the shooting was the result of Tehran failing to heed its calls for better security. CCTV footage of the incident showed the attacker forcing his way into the embassy building and shooting at two men before a third embassy employee grappled him away.
According to an article in Trend, the incident at the embassy occurred as “part of Iran's policy of hostility towards Azerbaijan.” A deputy of the country’s parliament said, "Iranian televisions and radios continuously promote hostility towards Azerbaijan. This once again shows that the Iranian state has a hand in the terrorist incident at the embassy, because it is known that Iran has always been a nest of terrorism and is one of the main countries that support terrorism. The terrorist incident against our embassy proved this once again."
Iran’s state media broadcast confessions by a grey-haired man identified as the assailant, who claimed he attacked the embassy believing that his wife was held inside the building. The embassy staff had given him a written statement attesting that she was not there, but the man said he was sure his wife was in the building and attacked the embassy to prove that.
Apparently his wife, who was an Azerbaijani citizen, left him ten months ago and he believed she found refuge inside the mission.
The Islamic Republic’s state broadcaster also talked to the seven-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter of the family, who purportedly were in the car outside the embassy. The girl said she had told her father that their mother was not in the embassy, adding that she was in contact with her mother in Azerbaijan and spoke to her on the phone about 10 days earlier.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi called for "a comprehensive investigation" of the incident and sent his condolences to Azerbaijan and the family of the dead man, identified as First Lieutenant Orkhan Rizvan oglu Teymurov. During a phone call with his Azeri counterpart late Saturday, Raisi said Tehran and Baku have inseparable historical relations and will not allow those relations to be affected by the two countries' ill-wishers.
Member of the Iranian parliament’s presidium Ali Nikzad has promised that necessary investigations will be done regarding the attack. The Iranian foreign minister also held a phone call with his Azeri counterpart, calling for the return of the country’s ambassador to Iran.
The incident came amid increased tensions between the neighboring countries triggered by territorial conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia and Yerevan as well as over Baku's decision this month to appoint its first ever ambassador to Israel. Iran is dangerously implicated in regional tensions centered on Azerbaijan-Armenia that are exacerbated by fall-out from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In November, at a Baku conference ‘Along the Middle Corridor,’ Azeri President Ilham Aliyev launched a broadside against Iran, his toughest so far since relations soured over Iran’s role in the 2020 Azerbaijan-Armenia war, when adjacent Iranian military exercises followed the Azerbaijanis capturing areas around the disputed Nagorno-Karabagh enclave and along the Iran border. Tehran-Baku tensions have simmered since the 2020 war, when Iran moderated its past support for mainly Christian Armenia due partly to domestic pressures from both ethnic Azeri and Shia clerics supporting fellow Muslims.
“We worked with three presidents of Iran, [Mohammad] Khatami, [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, and [Hassan] Rouhani,” Aliyev said. “For all these years there was no situation similar to the current one. Never has Iran had two military exercises near our borders within a few months. There have never been such hateful and threatening statements against Azerbaijan,” he said, referring to warnings from President Ebrahim Raisi and other leaders against any border changes or threats to Iran’s transit route to Armenia, which is vulnerable since 2020 changes. Iran carried out more military drills along the border October, when Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian also visited Yerevan.
“We avoided participation in Fajr Film Festival in the past few years but this year we are [even] ashamed our names [mentioned] in the festival. We would stop the film’s screening if we had any option to do so,” Baran Kowsari, Mani Haghighi, Hanieh Tavassoli, Ali Mosaffa, Fereshteh Hosseini, Nahal Dashti, and Amir-Hossein Fathi said in a statement published on Instagram.
Alluding to the name of the film they all played in, 'Why aren’t you crying?', Hanieh Tavassoli said on social media that in the past few months she has “been crying a lot” and that she did not have the mental strength to take part in the festival. “The film’s participation at any event is not and will not be my choice or decision.”
The film’s producer, Reza Mohaghegh, who has submitted the film to the festival, apparently without the consent of others, is the son-in-law of a high-ranking Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) official.
Director Kiumars Pourahmad whose ‘Case Is Open’ has also been submitted to the festival by its producer in an Instagram post said he withdraws from the festival.
Presumably referring to the IRGC’s extensive involvement in the film industry, Pourahmad protested that in the past few years the festival has turned from “Iran's film festival” into “a certain entity’s festival”.
Mohammad-Ali Talebi, Slovakia-based writer and film director told Iran International that IRGC-affiliated film companies such as Ofogh and Owj are spending huge sums to make films and driving most independent filmmakers out of the industry. Those who are withdrawing from the festival have taken a remarkable step because this means that they will no more have a chance of working in Iran, he said.
During this time, he explained, the festival meant nothing to him and even less so “in this bloody and grim year”. “What’s the point of celebrating, what’s the point of a festival, with all the sorrow [for the deaths of hundreds of protesters] that sits in our hearts?” he wrote.
The Fajr Film Festival has existed since 1982, highlighting Iranian cinema for 10 days, during a period known as the Ten Days of Dawn (Fajr). The first day of the Ten Days of Dawn marks the anniversary of the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran from Paris and its last day, the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The film festival and its sister theater festival have been losing their past aura and popularity over the years. Filmmakers and actors have been periodically boycotting the event, including in 2019, in protest to state violence against protesters.
Meanwhile, the head of the state broadcaster (IRIB), Payman Jebelli in a letter to President Ebrahim Raisi has demanded that Filimo, an online subscription video on-demand service similar to Netflix, be blocked on the internet.
Jebelli has cited the screening of Collapse series because one of its main actors, Hamid Farrokhnezhad, has recently left Iran, joined the opposition, and backed a revolution and the return of the former crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, to Iran.
Hamid Farrokhnejad, in a post on his Instagram compared Ali Khamenei with other dictators such as Francisco Franco, Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini, saying he is “mentally ill” just like his “colleagues”. “Over time, all dictators have the illusion of imagining themselves as God, and they think they are absolutely right and eternal…but they are all mentally ill,” he said.
Following multiple reports by eyewitnesses after midnight, January 29, that an ammunition factory in Esfahan was hit by explosions and fire, Iran's defense ministry announced that small drones attacked the complex, and called the attack “unsuccessful.” It claimed all the drones were shot down, without saying if the attack came from inside the country or from outside.
Small drones have a very short flying time and if these were used against the ammunition factory, they must have been launched from a close distance. That does not necessarily eliminate the possibility of a foreign country being behind the attack, but it would certainly prove some people in Iran carried it out.
"The explosion took place in one of the munitions manufacturing centers of the Defense Ministry and, according to an announcement by the deputy Esfahan governor for security, there were no casualties," IRIB reported.
However, eyewitnesses report and videos show the actual explosions at the factory. Some Twitter users say that the Esfahan factory was manufacturing warheads for the Shahed kamikaze drone that Iran is supplying Russia for attacks in Ukraine.
The official, Mohammad Reza Jannesar, later told state television: "The damages are being investigated as well as the causes and elements that caused this explosion and .. will be announced later."
According to some reports air defenses of Iran's traditional army and the IRGC have been put on high alert.
There were also reports on social media of explosions and smoke in northwest of the capital Tehran. These reports have not been verified.
Also, a large blaze engulfed an industrial area near the city of Tabriz, northwest Iran. The government said the fire started at a refinery producing motor oil, but the cause of the devastating blaze remains unclear.
A social media post by a group of protesters in the southwestern Khuzestan province reports an explosion in Dezful. Another report says there were air raid sirens in Hamedan’s Nozheh airbase, but these remained unverified, similar to reports from Tehran and elesewhere.
Updated at 08:00 GMT on January 29