Australian-Iranian Activist Reveals Regime Intimidation

Speaking on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS program, Blinken announced that “We’re now in a place where we’re not talking about a nuclear agreement. We are very clearly making it known to them that they need to take actions to de-escalate, not escalate, the tensions that exist in our relationship across a whole variety of fronts.”

Iranian officials and government media have yet to react to Blinken’s statement. Official and semi-official government media were silent on Monday but a ‘reformist’ website in Tehran, not directly controlled by the government, published the news about his remarks with a clear distortion.

Speaking about long negotiations in 2021 and 2022 that came to a deadlock last September, Blinken told CNN that “An agreement was on the table. Iran either couldn’t or wouldn’t say yes.” However, Etemad Online translated the sentence to, “Iran has not made a decision yet.”

Blinken did not explain what de-escalation means from the Biden administration viewpoint. Clearly, high levels of uranium enrichment and stockpiling fissile material for nuclear bombs is the most provocative policy Tehran currently pursues. But is the administration also telling the Islamic Republic they have to also de-escalate in their provocations in the region, such as attacks on US forces and open incitement of terror attacks on Israel?

There is also the issue of Iran supplying kamikaze drones to Russia that the administration has said is one of its pre-conditions for resumption of full nuclear talks. So far, Iran has shown no inclination to de-escalate in any of these areas.

Blinken also did not say what the United States is promising Iran in return for de-escalatory steps. Certainly, Tehran would demand the lifting of at least some sanctions. Already, the Biden administration has not been rigorously enforcing existing oil export sanctions that has allowed Iran to increase its exports to as high as 1.5 million barrels a day. Before former President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement, Iran was shipping around two million barrels. One can argue that Iran has almost overcome the oil sanctions, although US banking sanctions are still deterring most banks in other countries from doing business with Iran.

But if we assume that de-escalation applies only to less enrichment or a cap of 60-percent uranium purity in exchange for lifting some critical sanctions, then that was Iran’s plan all along. In December 2020, the Iranian parliament passed legislation to enrich at higher levels to force the US to lift sanctions. In fact, the bill was called the ‘Strategic Action to Eliminate Sanctions and Defend Iranian Nation's Interests.’

That negotiating tactic was initiated a month earlier in November by parliament, when Joe Biden won the presidential election and Tehran was certain that his administration was determined to reverse Trump’s decision and revive the JCPOA.

Now, the administration just hopes for de-escalation while it knows that Iran will use every means of pressure to project power.

“We are continuing to work out, to develop, to flesh out every possible option for dealing with the problem if it asserts itself,” Blinken said.

Earlier this month Iran tried to seize to commercial vessels in the Persian Gulf and the US Navy intervened to prevent it. Immediately plans were put in motion to reinforce the US naval presence in the region, dispatching more warplanes and warships.

Iran will not confront the United States where a clear deterrent signal has been issued. It most probably will hit back elsewhere or use new tactics.

In a letter sent out from Tehran’s Evin prison, she noted that the compulsory hijab is a ploy devised by the religious and anti-women government to exert "control over women" and "remove" them from the public life. 

Her remarks came in reaction to the return of the notorious hijab or ‘morality’ police, which had vanished from the streets following nationwide protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of hijab patrols last September. 

Mohammadi stated that the world now witnesses the power of women's resistance, which has elevated them in Iranian society to a position never seen since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. “

“Iranian women have achieved power and a historical position in their struggle to create revolutionary and peaceful changes,” Mohammadi said.

The fight against compulsory hijab is “a matter of freedom and liberation from tyranny, an issue of justice against oppression, a means to achieve peace, democracy, and human rights, and breaking free from violence and discrimination."

Highlighting the regime’s "inability" to confront Iranian women who are fighting for their basic rights, she said, "The terrified regime is engaged in a fierce struggle to prevent its collapse, but it is clear that it has no hope of succeeding."

A lawyer often defending dissidents, Mohammadi has been imprisoned several times over the past two decades for her work fighting for human rights. She is the vice-president of the Defenders of Human Rights Association, the Chair of the executive board of the Peace Council of Iran, and a member of "Step-by-Step Abolition of Execution" campaign.

She was freed from Evin Prison in September 2020 after serving more than five years on trumped up charges, without due process of law. She was arrested again on November 16, 2021, released for a short time and one year later was detained again. Currently, she is serving a total sentence of 9 years and 8 months, along with 154 lashes and additional penalties in Evin Prison. She has also been denied access to medical care amid deteriorating health and was deprived for long periods of any contact with her husband and children who live abroad.

The return of morality police patrols’ has immediately led to online uproar as well as a few bouts of street protests, the biggest of which broke out in the northern city of Rasht.

As the anniversary of the Mahsa Movement in September approaches, the regime is worried about the possibility of unrest in universities spilling over to the streets.

“The enemy has not given up. They’ve said that universities are the first place where new riots should begin,” the official in charge of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representatives in universities across the country, Mostafa Rostami, said at a gathering. 

People on social media have reacted to the resurgence of hijab patrols, saying if Iranians do not pour into the streets on Amini's death anniversary, the regime will further tighten the noose. 

Iran’s former president Mohammad Khatami also warned that the return of morality police may lead to the regime's overthrow by itself and social collapse. “It seems that the danger of self-overthrow, which has been talked about many times, stands out more than ever with the return of morality police."

Top officials of the regime refuse to take responsibility due to “concern over the upcoming elections," according to Tehran's leading reformist daily, Etemad. President Ebrahim Raisi's aides have advised him against implementing any plan that could provoke people until after the next presidential election in 2025 to secure his re-election. 

According to German media outlet Presseportal, Hossein-Ali Nayeri was admitted to a private neurosurgical clinic -- the International Neuroscience Institute (INI) -- headed by Madjid Samii, a prominent Iranian-born neurosurgeon.

Nayeri, a cleric, judge and chief adviser to Iran’s judiciary, was one of the main figures in the "death committee" responsible for the mass execution of political prisoners in Iran in 1988. President Ebrahim Raisi was also a key member of this committee. 

On July 7, Volker Beck, the president of the German-Israeli Society, notified Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor, the Foreign Office, and the Federal Interior Ministry about Nayeri’s stay, urging them to initiate criminal prosecution measures against him.

While people are murdered and tortured to death in Iranian prisons, those responsible for the human rights violations travel to Germany with impunity, he said, stating, “This must come to an end.” He also referred to another Iranian judge -- Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi – who was treated in the same clinic in Hanover in 2018. 

In July 2022, Nayeri defended the massacre in an interview with the Islamic Republic Documents Center, a government entity that collects the history of the 1979 revolution and more than four decades of rule by the Islamic Republic in Iran.

He tried to justify and explain away the killing of thousands of political prisoners, saying, “The country was in a critical state. If Khomeini [the Islamic Republic's first leader] did not stand firm... perhaps the regime would have not been able to survive.”

Fada-Hossein Maleki, a member of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said Sunday that a taskforce within the Supreme National Security Council is mulling over new measures to secure Iran’s share of water from Hirmand river, including closing the Taliban embassy and reducing political, commercial, and economic interactions through various means. 

“We have many tools at our disposal that we can utilize for these purposes,” he noted.

Calling for stricter measures, Maleki said that considering the current position that the Taliban holds, Iran should not excessively appease them. “We have given them whatever they wanted, even compromising the relations between our Persian and Pashto speaking friends, who say demands by the Taliban are being accommodated one after another by Iran,” he said. 

“We are witnessing a distressing situation in the Sistan and Baluchestan region, where villages are gradually becoming deserted,” he stressed, adding that the people of the province are facing imminent dangers and the first concrete step to address their grievances is to solve the water issue.

Flowing 700 miles, Hirmand -- which is called Helmand on the Afghan side -- enters Iran's Hamoun wetlands in the Sistan-Baluchestan province after originating in the Hindu Kush Mountains near Kabul. Lake Hamoun used to be one of the world's largest wetlands, straddling 4,000 square kilometers between Iran and Afghanistan.

The river, which both Afghanistan and Iran depend on for agriculture and drinking water, has been the biggest source of tension for years.

Iran has accused Afghanistan of restricting the flow of water from the river by building dams over it, a charge that Afghan authorities deny.

This comes as in the past few weeks, numerous reports have been published about water shortages in different regions of Iran, especially the Sistan and Baluchestan province.

“Today, attackers ambushed a police car and opened fire at the vehicle,” IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency reported, adding that a judicial order has been issued to arrest the perpetrators. 

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, but the region is a scene of numerous clashes between regime forces and armed groups that the regime describes as bandits and terrorists. 

In recent months, the situation in Sistan-Baluchistan has dramatically worsened. The overall atmosphere in provincial cities have become very tense, especially on Fridays, when residents come out to protest against the regime. Clashes also break out when smugglers try to traffic fuel or other contraband to or from neighboring Pakistan.

There have been reports of numerous attacks on military and government forces in the province in the past and since nationwide protests broke out in September 2022. The provincial capital Zahedan was the scene of a government massacre when around 90 citizens were gunned down during a protests September 30.

Several Baluch groups from the area are fighting an insurgency against the Islamic Republic. The most prominent is Jaish al-Adl, which has often targeted Iran's military, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

Earlier in July, an attack on a police station in the Sunni-majority city of Zahedan claimed the life of two policemen.