IRGC Boasts Of Victory For Iran International's Relocation From UK

Iran has been a major backer of President Bashar al-Assad during Syria's nearly 12-year conflict. Its support for Damascus and the Lebanese group Hezbollah has drawn regular Israeli air strikes meant to curb Tehran's extraterritorial military power.

A source close to the Syrian government with knowledge of Sunday's strike and its target said it hit a gathering of Syrian and Iranian technical experts in drone manufacturing, though he said no top-level Iranian was killed.

"The strike hit the center where they were meeting as well as an apartment in a residential building. One Syrian engineer and one Iranian official - not high-ranking - were killed," the source told Reuters.

This rocket strike, along with others that Israel says target infrastructure of Syria's military and its allies, reflect an escalation of what has been a low-intensity conflict aimed at slowing down Iran's growing entrenchment in Syria, according to Israeli military experts.

Syrian state media said at the time that Israel had carried out air strikes shortly after midnight on Sunday against several areas of the Syrian capital, causing five deaths and 15 injuries including civilians.

An Israeli military official declined to confirm or deny that Israel was behind the attack but said some of the casualties were caused by errant Syrian anti-aircraft fire.

The United States and Israel have been increasingly concerned about Iran’s drone manufacturing, and the possibility it would pass on those capabilities to regional proxies such as the heavily armed Hezbollah.

A second source, who spoke to Syrian security personnel briefed on the matter, said Iranians were attending the meeting of technical experts in a Iranian military installation in the basement of a residential building inside a security compound.

He said one of those killed was a Syrian army civil engineer who worked at Syria's Scientific Studies and Research Centre, which Western countries say is a military institution that has produced missiles and chemical weapons. Damascus denies this.

A regional security source said one Revolutionary Guards engineer involved in Iran’s missile program was seriously injured and transferred to a hospital in Tehran, while two other mid-ranking Guards members at the meeting were unharmed.

Another source, a regional intelligence official familiar with the strike, said the target was part of a covert guided missile production program run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

A fifth, regional source with knowledge of the strike and its target, said officials from Iran and Hezbollah had been targeted. The Lebanese group has sent fighters to help Assad drive back rebels who once nearly encircled Damascus.

REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS LOGISTICS CENTRE HIT?

The targeted building was located in the Damascus neighborhood of Kafr Sousa, a heavily policed area where residents say several Iranian security agencies are located, along with an Iranian cultural centre.

Two Western intelligence sources said at the time the target was a logistics center run by the Revolutionary Guards.

Hezbollah's top commander Imad Moughniyeh was killed in 2008 in a bombing in the same neighborhood. Israel denied Hezbollah accusations that it was behind the assassination.

Although officials rarely acknowledge responsibility for specific operations, Israel has been carrying out air strikes on suspected Iranian-sponsored weapons transfers and personnel deployments in Syria for almost a decade.

Israel has also in recent months intensified strikes on Syrian airports and air bases to disrupt Iran's increasing use of aerial supply lines to deliver arms to allies in Syria and Lebanon, including Hezbollah.

Exclusive report by Laila Bassam and Suleiman Al-Khalidi of Reuters

A video shared on twitter shows people in Alladdin cell phone center have gathered calling on shop owners to stop doing business.

In Tehran’s Sattar Khan and Nazi Abad neighborhoods the guilds have also closed their stores, social media posts showed.

There are also some reports of gatherings near Tehran Grand Bazaar at the heart of the capital’s commerce district. Some say the government shut down the Internet in area, as often happens during protests.

Some videos on twitter show people chanting anti-regime slogans in Tehran subway stations.

Another video on Twitter showed most businesses closed in the city of Arak in central Iran.

Underground activist groups that have organized popular protests since September had issued a call for demonstrations on Wednesday at bazaars around the country.

The rial, which fell to a low of 500,000 against the US dollar on Monday stayed around the same level.

Officials announced that citizens will not be allowed to buy their annual share of foreign currency from official exchange bureaus, which previously was $2,000 per person, per year. They also said the government will stop providing dollars to banks and official dealers for that purpose.

Meat and other prices shot up, as a general mood of panic emerged over rising inflation in the coming days.

The decision was in protest over Iran sentencing a German national to death, a statement from the foreign office said.

Germany also summoned Iran's charge d'affaires over the issue, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in a statement, adding: "He was informed that we do not accept the massive violation of the rights of a German citizen."

"We call on Iran to revoke Jamshid Sharmahd's death sentence and provide him with a fair appeal process based on the rule of law," she added.

Sharmahd, a German-Iranian national, was sentenced to death on charges of "corruption on earth", the judiciary's Mizan news agency reported on Tuesday.

The verdict can be appealed.

Iran accuses Sharmahd, who also has US residency, of heading a pro-monarchist group accused of a deadly 2008 bombing and planning other attacks in the country.

On Tuesday, Baerbock called the sentencing "absolutely unacceptable". She said Sharmahd had been denied a fair trial and that the ministry had been refused consular access.

Tensions between Iran and the West have intensified in recent months, pushing already-stalled efforts to revive talks on Tehran's nuclear program further into the background.

Germany has been a vocal backer of EU sanctions against Iran over its crackdown on protesters in the country. The bloc plans to widen the measures to include Iranian actors involved in the Russian war in Ukraine.

Report by Reuters

The network has been able to find the location of more than 40 unofficial torture centers and undeclared secret prisons in Iran, which are located in government-controlled facilities such as the basement of mosques.

To find the exact location of the secret detention centers, CNN interviewed eyewitnesses and detainees of the recent protests and matched this information with satellite images.

According to the report, eight, six, and five secret torture centers have been identified in Tehran, Sanandaj in the west, and Zahedan in the southeast, respectively.

In other cities such as Karaj, Mashhad, Tabriz, Kermanshah, Amol, Saqqez, etc., dozens of secret prisons have been identified based on the information provided by eyewitnesses.

Based on the CNN report, these secret prisons were places for torturing protesters to force them to confess so that the courts could issue heavy sentences such as death penalty for them.

Keyvan Samadi and Mohsen Sohrabi are two protesters interviewed by the CNN who had been imprisoned in these secret detention centers.

Injecting a substance to keep the prisoner alive, "kissing the neck and body" by the torturer, sexual torture with a baton are the things that Samadi and Sohrabi mentioned in an interview with the CNN.

Israel’s Channel 12reported on Tuesday that Netanyahu met five times in recent weeks with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Mossad head David Barnea, Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva and other military figures to examine Israel’s readiness for a possible attack on Iranian nuclear targets.

Netanyahu also reiterated his previous calls on Tuesday that the international community must act to stop Iran’s escalation.

“The only thing that has ever stopped rogue nations from developing nuclear weapons is a credible military threat or a credible military action,” he told a national security conference. “A necessary condition and often a sufficient condition is credible military action. The longer you wait, the harder that becomes. We’ve waited very long.”

Successive governments have warned that Israel will not tolerate a nuclear armed Iran and in recent weeks closer military cooperation and diplomatic coordination have been noticeable with the United States.

US officials have been increasingly signaling that President Joe Biden will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, after JCPOA talks hit a dead-end in September. "If they start getting too close, too close for comfort, then of course we will not be prepared to sit idly by," US Special Representative for Iran Robert Malley told National Public Radio in November.

If Tehran has indeed produced a limited quantity of uranium at 84-percent purity, it can signal a possible intentional escalation to put pressure on the West for concessions in nuclear talks. Tehran has been using this tactic since 2019, and specially since 2021 when the Biden administration signaled its readiness to hold talks.

The Times of Israel wrote about Netanyahu’s meetings with military and intelligence officials that “The report, which was not attributed to any source, included few other details about the discussions, and may itself be designed to telegraph the seriousness of Israeli threats to resort to military action in order to shut down Iran’s suspected drive toward a nuclear weapon.”

However, the Channel 12 report said Netanyahu’s meetings resulted in a decision that Israel will act alone if others do not step in. This decision was shared with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

If Israel’s intention is to increase pressure on the Islamic Republic, beleaguered by political and economic crisis, the timing might have been right. This week a serious financial chaos has gripped the country as its battered currency is falling to unprecedented levels against major currencies and panic has gripped the markets about uncontrollable inflation in the weeks to come. This in turn can ignite more popular protests and unrest.

Iran, having missed a chance last August to come to an agreement with the Biden administration over reviving the 2015 JCPOA deal, now finds itself under siege and has to decide to escalate its nuclear confrontation further or make the necessary concessions.

But since the breakdown in the nuclear talks, Washington has been playing hard to get, saying that it is not focused on resuming nuclear negotiations and demanding that Iran should stop military cooperation with Russia and repression at home.

To what extent the new demands are serious pre-conditions, or a negotiating tactic, is not clear, but after the Iranian regime killed hundreds during protests and supplies drones to Russia, it would be politically costly for Biden to simply revive the 2015 nuclear deal and lift sanctions.