US vows to help Israel repel Iran but warns against escalation

According to these reports, Niknejad and his wife were detained at Berlin airport upon their return from a one-month leave, three weeks after the closure of Islamic centers affiliated with the Islamic Republic across Germany, and were subsequently deported back to Iran.

An Iran International source told our correspondent, Ahmad Samadi, that Niknejad became involved in a confrontation with airport police after realizing he was not permitted to enter Germany.

Previously, in November 2022, Soleiman Mousavifar, the deputy head of the Islamic Center of Hamburg, was expelled for supporting Hezbollah.

Germany shut down the Khamenei-controlled Islamic Center of Hamburg and Blue Mosque in July for its role in serving as a hub of terrorist ideology, antisemitism and anti-democratic threats to the Federal Republic’s constitution order, according to the interior ministry.

When asked the closure, a German interior ministry (BMI) spokesman, Lars Harmsen, told Iran International on Thursday that “In addition to the Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg, the BMI has also banned sub-organisations and confiscated their assets. These were the following: the Islamische Akademie Deutschland, the Verein der Förderer einer iranischen-islamischen Moschee in Hamburg, the Zentrum der Islamischen Kultur in Frankfurt (Main), the Islamische Vereinigung Bayern in Munich, and the Islamisches Zentrum Berlin.”

When asked by Iran International if the confiscated assets from Iran’s regime, the Islamic Center of Hamburg and Blue Mosque and other entities, will be used to provide compensation to the Iranian victims of terrorism in Germany, the spokesman said, "Concrete plans for a future usage of the Blue Mosque and other confiscated assets can only be made by the BMI once the ban is final. Therefore, the outcome of the administrative procedure remains to be seen.”

When questioned about future closures of other Iranian regime-linked and controlled centers, mosques and associations the BMI spokesman said, “In principle, the BMI does not comment on possible further bans, regardless of whether there is reason to consider them in individual cases or not…”

Meanwhile, Iranian-German dissidents are urging the German authorities to shutter additional organizations and mosques linked to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Dr. Kazem Moussavi, the spokesman for the Green Party of Iran in exile in Germany, told Iran International “The closure of the Islamic Center of Hamburg was long overdue and necessary. The closure came too late and is insufficient. Germany’s appeasement policies toward Iran’s regime continues. “

He urged that Germany to shut down the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Berlin and the regime-linked Al-Mustafa Institute in Berlin , as well as the pro-Khamenei Islamic Community of Shiite Communities. Moussavi termed the Iranian regime embassy and other Tehran-linked entities a “security risk” for Germany.

According to Moussavi, the Al-Mustafa Institute’s director was a long-time religious teacher from the banned IAD (Islamic Academy in Germany). The Al-Mustafa Institute in Berlin is part of the Al-Mustafa International University in Iran, where foreign recruits are being ideologically trained.

“The Al-Mustafa International University is the main institution for exporting the regime's ideology to the Islamic world, the West and Germany. It has over a hundred branches worldwide with more than 40,000 students,” said Moussavi.”

He added that the organization of Islamic Community of Shiite communities has more than 150 mosques and the director of the now-defunct Islamic Center of Hamburg is the chairman of the spiritual council of the Islamic Community of Shiite Communities.

Moussavi noted that the largely pro-Iran regime German Körber Foundation is Hamburg protects and supports Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Tehran diplomat who currently is employed by Princeton university. Körber’s cooperation with him legitimizes his past activities, Mousavi argued.

The Iranian-German dissident, Mina Ahadi, who is leading the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists (AAIRIA) campaign in Germany to compel Körber to pull the plug on its relations with Mousavian and Iran’s government, told Iran International Germany should close the Iranian regime’s “embassy and consulate and the Islamic Community of Shiite Communities.”

She added that Germany needs to sanction the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Ahadi said there “must put more pressure” on the Körber Foundation.

“Körber must see that when it works together with the Islamic regime, they are making a fascist and anti-women government stronger,” she said.

Ahadi was pleased with the interior minister's decision to shutter the Islamic Center of Hamburg. She worked to secure the center's closure.

In 2023, German Iranians demanded that the German state government of Hesse shut down the pro-Iran regime Center for Islamic Culture in Frankfurt that honored IRGC's Qasem Soleimani.

Iran International reported, in May, on the growing pressure on Körber Foundation to sever ties with Mousavian and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In June, Iranian-Germans protested in front of Körber’s building in Hamburg.

Iranian activists in Germany say that Mousavian is "an extension of the antisemitic regime, acting as its loyal lobbyist in the US through the support of the Körber Foundation in Germany.”

When asked about the scandal-plagued Körber Foundation, the German interior ministry spokesman told Iran International "As a matter of principle, we do not comment on matters of public foundations. The Körber Foundation is not an object of observation of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution." Germany's domestic intelligence agency is called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Multiple Iran International press queries sent to the Körber Foundation and its parent company, Körber AG, were not returned. Körber was founded by the former Nazi, Kurt Adolf Körber (1909-1992), who exploited concentration camp victims to advance the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler’s war goals.

Retaliation is further fueled by the fact that, less than 24 hours before Haniyeh's assassination, Israel announced—and Hezbollah confirmed—the killing of Hezbollah's senior military commander, Fuad Shukr, in an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb.

According to AFP, Iran and its allied armed groups are preparing coordinated actions intended to “deter Israel while avoiding full-scale war.”

On Wednesday, Iranian officials convened in Tehran with representatives from the "Axis of Resistance" — a collection of proxy forces financed and armed by Iran - to deliberate on retaliation.

A source close to the Lebanese group disclosed to AFP that two scenarios were discussed: a simultaneous response from Iran and militia groups, or a staggered reaction from each party. This source, who had been briefed on the meeting, requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the information.

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has threatened "harsh punishment" for Haniyeh's killing, which the group attributes to Israel, and has vowed revenge.

A leader of the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, a coalition of pro-Iran groups, informed AFP that "Iran will lead the initial response with the participation of Iraqi, Yemeni, and Syrian factions, targeting military objectives. This will be followed by a second wave of attacks from Hezbollah."

The source further indicated that Hezbollah might target civilians to avenge the deaths of three women and two children in the strike that killed Shukr in Beirut.

CNN, citing US officials, reported that the response might include attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed proxy militias in the region. For months, these militias launched numerous attacks on US forces in the Middle East. Still, these largely subsided after the US retaliated to a drone attack that killed three US service members in Jordan in January. Officials suggest that Iran could instruct these groups to resume firing on US forces.

Israeli media outlet Ynet reported that Israelis are anticipating attacks as early as Saturday, following Haniyeh's funeral in Qatar on Friday. They are on high alert and preparing for a "broad attack" by Tehran and its proxies.

"The assumption is that a significant response could come from multiple fronts in the coming days, potentially coordinated by Iran with all its proxies: Hezbollah, the Houthis, and militias in Syria and Iraq," Ynet wrote on Thursday.

Cyber security company XPOZ, through the use of a large-scale analysis of factual evidence and data that’s collected on social networks, came to the conclusion that Iran was behind the campus protests at McGill university in Montreal.

Analysts working for the American cyber company, which monitors social media, use AI technology to unmask the networks and campaigns behind “inauthentic” users interacting on a large scale. 

They dug deeper into inauthentic accounts, which could be defined as either bots or fake users managed by a foreign power, operating in a highly coordinated matter on social platforms. They said the coordination aspect is key because that’s how social media algorithms work to push a certain narrative. The analysts also used technology to investigate the content such users post.

What they found was that there was a high-percentage of inauthentic accounts primarily written in Farsi, coming from Iranians inside Iran linked to the regime and IRGC, fueling the campus protests at McGill. Analysts told Iran International they are confident based on analysis of which group inauthentic users belong to and the type of narrative they are producing over time within those groups.

XPOZ analysts, came up with their results after one month by identifying the language used in the posts, where it was coming from, and how much of it was coordinated among inauthentic accounts linking back to Iran.

Iran International is not identifying the XPOZ analysts by name for security reasons.

“The primary takeaway is that there is a massive activity, funded, coordinated and organized by a foreign government that is influencing Canadians in Canada and driving incitement to violence and real-world activity,” said one of the XPOZ analysts.

Their analysis of the alleged coordinated activity at McGill reveals 60 percent of Pro-Palestine campus protestors were not authentic online users. The data indicates the presence of coordinated Farsi-speaking accounts, suggesting a targeted campaign. By comparison, 75% of commentators critical of the encampment were authentic.

The data drew on nearly 150,000 posts on X, over 500,000 likes and more than 65,000 comments. The analysts emphasized that their data does not identify whether the Pro-Palestine protesters are aware or unaware of Iran’s alleged role and may be acting in good faith.

The analysts revealed to Iran International that the network driving the McGill protests had been promoting narratives supporting the IRGC and the government of Iran while proliferating rhetoric against Israel and US.

“When you look at something that is happening in Montreal, Canada, you expect most of the users to be writing in English or French. Or you would expect most of them to be primarily engaging in other posts in English or French. It’s natural to see other languages but up to a certain point. What we saw here were users that were primarily writing in Farsi or that their followers were writing in Farsi.”

They added the users were not Iranians living in Canada and not regular citizens in Iran but rather tied to the Islamic Republic.

“In addition to their history of what they were writing and what they were engaging with, we also see that they're highly intertwined with one another in the sense that they're following one another,” which the analysts said indicated coordination. 

“They share a very abnormally high proportion of followers amongst one another,” said another XPOZ analyst.

Foreign interference and national security

XPOZ analysts said their data demonstrate that Canada is subject to the use of deceptive mass influence campaigns coordinated by foreign governments, like Iran, to target Canadian society through proxies to deepen divides and threaten national security.

In June, Canada named Iran as one of the top four countries, along with China, Russia and North Korea, that engage in extensive campaigns to compromise government and private sector computer systems.

"Foreign interference, enabled by sophisticated cyber tools, poses one of the most serious threats to Canada’s national security, economic prosperity and sovereignty, as well as our way of life," the statement read.

In its annual report released in May, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) highlighted the cyber-attacks by the Islamic Republic that target Canada.

A foreign interference report also in May concluded that Iran, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, are key threats against Canada.

Iran International’s exclusive report comes on the heels of US intelligence report that Iran is funding and emboldening anti-Israel protests in the US to sow discord.

US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on July 9 that Iran harnessed social media to warp domestic debates and create more division. She issued an official statement warning that the Islamic Republic of Iran was boosting anti-Israel protests online.

Neil Oberman, a Canadian lawyer who recently represented students who filed an injunction against the McGill encampment, said the XPOZ data suggesting Iran’s role in the protests proves “foreign interference.”

“In Canada we do not tolerate and should not tolerate foreign countries interfering, meddling, creating disruption for the purposes of basically trying to influence young students who are the future of our country, from not being able to study, not being able to interact, and more importantly, not being able to be safe on their own campus,” he said.

Sources with XPOZ released the data to Oberman, who became the face of injunctions against the encampments in Canada.

Oberman said the students he represented were subject to aggression and hate on campus. The court had rejected his application, but he believes the outcome would have been different if he had the XPOZ documentation.

“Do I think for a moment that the courts would have known that evidence existed to establish that a foreign country with very evil intentions was attempting to influence good Canadians and Quebeckers so that they could fight with each other to have an encampment, I think the outcome might have been different, and I would even beg to say maybe McGill might have acted differently,” he added. 

In July, McGill's campus security dismantled the school's encampment.

Oberman said he’s bound by lawyer-client privileges and can’t discuss litigation but hinted that he will be using the evidence for a future legal proceeding.

“Evidence that does exist will be used. The form of its usage would probably be in the form of a legal proceeding.”

For Oberman, this is not an issue of antisemitism or the Jewish and Iranian communities but rather about Canada and the safety of all Canadians.

Critics say these flaws allowed an intricate intelligence network of infiltrators in the highest levels of Iranian security agencies to provide vital information to Israel to make a complex operation of this scale possible.

Israel has not taken responsibility for Haniyeh’s assassination but Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who holds Israel responsible for the killing has vowed to avenge it.

The conservative Jomhouri Eslami (Islamic Republic) newspaper on Thursday criticized the authorities for not heeding the many warnings about Israeli infiltration after other Israeli assassinations such as the killing of Iran's top nuclear man and Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) member Mohsen Fakhrizadehnear in Tehran in November 2020.

“The fact that the Zionist regime can lead its rocket through the window of Ismail Haniyeh’s bedroom in a highly guarded area of Tehran and martyr him only means that this criminal regime has infiltrators among us,” Jomhouri Eslami wrote.

“More important than taking revenge is blocking the enemy's paths of penetration through the air and on the ground and identifying and punishing their agents,” the newspaper said.

Jomhouri Eslami also reminded the authorities of the historical case of Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Syrian military and government in the 1960s and called for a “fundamental clean up in intelligence and security agencies”.

Mansour Haqiqatpour, a former spokesman of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee also criticized the security and intelligence agencies in an interview with Rouydad 24 news website on Wednesday.

“Decisions must be made about some of our political, military, and security authorities some of whom must be sacked because of this incident,” Haqiqatpour, an IRGC general who served as Qasem Soleimani regional deputy in the Qods Force for over a decade, told Rouydad 24.

Jalal Sadatian, Iran’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom, also warned about the possibility of infiltration. “We have been bitten by [snakes crawling out of this] hole many times as in the assassination of nuclear scientists and other figures," he told the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) Wednesday.

Israel has been blamed for the assassination of at least five Iranian nuclear scientists in and around Tehran since 2010 as well as several sabotage attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities.

In an interview with Israel's Channel 12 TV in June 2021, former Mossad chief Yosef ‘Yossi’ Cohen suggested that Israel was behind both the Fakhrizadeh killing and the April 11 2021 attack on the Natanz enrichment plant.

“The most smashing response to Israel [for Haniyeh’s assassination] is identification and neutralization of the agents that have infiltrated the system to the bone,” prominent reformist politician Mohsen Mirdamadi who also suggestively used the hashtag “Eli Cohen” tweeted Thursday. “Infiltrators are those whose Death to Israel cries reach as far as Tel Aviv,” he added.

In 2021, in an interview with reformist Jamaran news website, former intelligence minister Ali Younesi said all Iranian officials are at risk of being killed by Mossad. Younesi who served under reformist President Mohammad Khatami from December 2000 to August 2005 pointed out that rivalries between the Intelligence Ministry, the Intelligence Organization of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and other security agencies had weakened them.

"Parallel organizations are busy fighting insiders rather than monitoring and confronting infiltrators," Younesi argued.

A video of the interview has been widely circulating on Persian-language social media and news websites since the announcement of Haniyeh’s assassination.

Videos of past interviews with Iran's former populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2021 have also been widely circulating on social media in which he warned about a “corrupt gang at the high level” of Iran's intelligence agencies.

Ahmadinejad claimed in one of the interviews that a top official of the intelligence ministry during his second term of presidency who was responsible for the Israel Desk, was executed for spying for Israel.

“Whoever claims that Israeli infiltration is limited to that one person in the intelligence ministry wants to conceal the existence of Israel’s infiltration network in Iran,” Ahmadinejad said.

At Pezeshkian’s endorsement ceremony Sunday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the selection of the cabinet is the “joint work of the administration and the parliament” and stressed that the cabinet should be formed as soon as possible.

Khamenei’s emphasis on the need to speed up the formation of the new government means two things, the ultra-hardliner lawmaker Ahmad Rastineh said Sunday: Pezeshkian should present his proposed cabinet to the parliament quickly, and while “cooperating” with the new president, the Parliament should approve those ministerial appointments that confirm with Khamenei's criteria, as quickly as possible.

Referring to reformists’ possible influence in Pezeshkian’s cabinet, Rastineh declared that the President should not consider himself aligned with a “certain political current”.

The so-called ‘Principlist’ majority of the 12th Parliament is divided into two major factions, hardliners who support the Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and ultra-hardliners who fielded Saeed Jalili in the elections.

The two groups have diverged in the past few years and the umbrella term ‘Principlist’ which once defined all conservatives as opposed to ‘reformists’ no longer defines a united front.

The conflict between Ghalibaf and Jalili's supporters on social media during the parliamentary elections earlier this year significantly escalated when Jalili refused to allow Ghalibaf, who had a better chance against Pezeshkian, to represent the 'revolutionary front' in the presidential runoff elections in July.

Pezeshkian may manage to get some support from Ghalibaf’s faction which considers Jalili a much bigger threat than the reform-oriented Pezeshkian. After Ghalibaf lost in the first round of the presidential vote, many of his supporters openly supported Pezeshkian in the runoff election to prevent Jalili's victory.

It remains to be seen how likely Ghalibaf is to cooperate with Pezeshkian and steer his faction to protect him and his cabinet from Jalili’s ‘revolutionaries’.

“Mr. Ghalibaf ought to do everything in his power as the head of the legislature to prevent the radicals in the parliament from blocking the government’s path with their insistence on radical behaviors,” Gholam-Ali Jafarzadeh-Imanabadi, a former ‘Principlist’ lawmaker, said Sunday.

Jafarzadeh-Imanabadi argued that it is time for Ghalibaf to repay the favor to the parliament’s independent faction, of which Pezeshkian was a leading figure. Without their support, Ghalibaf would not have been re-elected as speaker of the 12th Parliament in March.

There are also two smaller groups of ‘Principlists’ in the parliament consisting of moderate conservatives and conservatives. These groups consist of the supporters of former President Hassan Rouhani, former Speaker Ali Larijani, the Islamic Coalition Party, and the Association of Combatant Clerics led by presidential candidate Mostafa Pourmohammadi.

These two groups have been eliminated from centers of power by hardliners and ultra-hardliners in the past few years and many among them cast their votes for Pezeshkian in the runoff elections. Ghalibaf can also get their support in helping Pezeshkian cabinet.

‘Principlist’ lawmakers make up more than two-thirds of the Parliament’s 290 lawmakers.

There are less than 100 ‘reformists’ and independents, mainly from smaller constituencies, whom Pezeshkian can also count on to support his proposed ministers.

Of Ebrahim Raisi’s nineteen ministers, only one was rejected by a sympathetic parliament in 2021. In contrast, hardliner and conservative lawmakers refused to endorse several of the ministers proposed by Hassan Rouhani during his two presidential terms in 2013 and 2017. However, reformist Mohammad Khatami managed to secure a vote of confidence for all his ministers from a conservative-majority parliament during his first term in 1997.