The United States has accused Russia of providing advanced military assistance to Iran, including air defence systems, as it warned of deepening defence ties between Moscow and Tehran, with Russia using Iranian drones to hit targets in Ukraine.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby cited US intelligence assessments for the allegations, saying Russia was offering Iran “an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their relationship into a full-fledged defense partnership”.
Washington has previously condemned security cooperation between Iran and Russia but on Friday described an extensive relationship involving equipment such as helicopters and fighter jets as well as drones, with the latter items resulting in new US sanctions.
Kirby said Russia and Iran were considering setting up a drone assembly line in Russia for the Ukraine conflict, while Russia was training Iranian pilots on the Sukhoi Su-35 fighter, with Iran potentially receiving deliveries of the plane within the year.
“These fighter planes will significantly strengthen Iran’s air force relative to its regional neighbours,” Kirby said.
Western powers have accused Iran of supplying drones to Russia for its war against Ukraine, as Moscow batters the country’s energy infrastructure in search of an advantage in the bloody conflict.
Kirby said the US would sanction three Russian-based entities active in “the acquisition and use of Iranian drones”.
The sanctions apply to the Russian Aerospace Forces, the 924th State Centre for Unmanned Aviation and the Command of the Military Transport Aviation.
“The United States will continue to use every tool at our disposal to disrupt these transfers and impose consequences on those engaged in this activity,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement on the sanctions.
Last month, Tehran admitted it had sent drones to Russia but insisted they were supplied before Moscow’s Ukraine invasion.
‘Sordid deals’
The US also believes Iran is considering the sale of “hundreds of ballistic missiles” to Russia, Kirby said.
The United Kingdom’s foreign secretary James Cleverly took aim at the “sordid deals” between Moscow and Tehran, saying in a statement that Iran had sent drones to Russia in exchange for “military and technical support” from Moscow.
This “will increase the risk it poses to our partners in the Middle East and to international security,” Cleverly said, promising that “the UK will continue to expose this desperate alliance and hold both countries to account”.
For its part, Moscow has accused the West of supplying weapons to Ukraine that are ending up in the hands of bad actors, not only in Europe but also in Africa and the Middle East.
Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, referred to the recent comments by Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari who said weapons and fighters from Ukraine were making their way to the Lake Chad region and helping violent groups.
Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey said the UK’s ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, did not directly address Nebenzya’s claims, which were made ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on Friday, but stated that Ukraine had a right to defend itself from Russia.
“She went on to say that the United Kingdom believes that buying weapons from Iran is in violation of international agreements and beyond the drones, she alleged that Russia is now trying to get ballistic missiles from Iran and also trying to make deals with countries like North Korea,” Saloomey said, speaking from the UN headquarters in New York.
‘Disappointing’ Merkel statement
Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin said that any country that launches a nuclear attack on Moscow would be “wiped out” and that Russian weapons could forcefully respond.
He also expressed his disappointment at former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent statements on Ukraine and on the Minsk agreements.
The parties to the Minsk agreements, which led to a ceasefire deal between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, had betrayed Russia by supplying Ukraine with weapons, Putin said.
In an interview published in Germany’s Zeit magazine on Wednesday, Merkel said the Minsk agreements had been an attempt to “give Ukraine time” to build up its defences.
Russia interpreted Merkel’s statements to mean that the Minsk peace plan was only concluded to give Ukraine time to arm itself and prepare for war with Russia.
“Honestly, this was absolutely unexpected for me. It’s disappointing. I frankly did not expect to hear something like this from the former German chancellor,” Putin told journalists in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
“I have always assumed that the leadership of the federal republic of Germany would behave sincerely towards us,” Putin said.
“But it still seemed to me that the leadership of Germany was always sincere in its efforts to find a solution based on the principles that we agreed on and that were reached, among other things, in the framework of the Minsk process.”
On March 22 of 2021, several of the world’s most dangerous men descended on Beirut’s historic seaside Summerland Hotel — not to swim in the Mediterranean or explore the sumptuous resort’s “Le Beach Pop Up,” but to talk Turkey.
The meeting was a secret one, between a delegation of senior Iranian military and government officials and a business group from Turkey led by a confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Both sides were keen to deepen their partnership smuggling Iranian oil to buyers in China and Russia to raise funds for Tehran’s terror proxies, according to Western diplomats.
A little more than a year after the meeting, all of the key attendees would find their names on U.S. sanctions lists, with one important exception: Turkish businessman Sıtkı Ayan, a friend of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — the two men attended the same high school — and the man at the center of it all.
The collaboration between a member of the Turkish president’s inner circle and Iran’s power elite is detailed in hundreds of pages of documents, including business contracts and bank transfers, reviewed by POLITICO, many of which have also been posted on WikiIran, an opposition website.
The U.S. sanctioned Ayan and his company late Thursday following the publication of this article, reversing months of inaction in the face of reams of evidence detailing the Turk’s dealings with the Iranians, including signed contracts and bank transfers. The U.S.’s reluctance to sanction Ayan, diplomats say, was driven by his close association with Erdoğan, a key American ally in the Middle East and beyond.
“Ayan’s companies have established international sales contracts for Iranian oil with foreign purchasers, arranged shipments of oil, and helped launder the proceeds, obscuring the oil’s Iranian origin and the [Quds Force’s] interest in the sales,” the U.S. Treasury, which oversees the implementation of American sanctions, said in a statement.
Neither Ayan’s nor Erdoğan’s offices responded to multiple requests for comment.
The case offers a window into the complicated dynamic between Iran, Turkey and the unique and influential role Erdoğan plays in the region as he oscillates from self-interested powerbroker to would-be mediator between the West, Russia and the Middle East, creating dependencies that often leave the United States and other allies with little choice but to let him have his way.
At a time when there’s a war in Ukraine and instability in the broader Middle East, Turkey’s relationship with Iran is also a reminder that the Turkish leader isn’t shy about using his leverage when and where he sees fit.
The Beirut gathering attracted a rogue’s gallery of Iranian officials — including Rostam Ghasemi, a former oil minister and senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and Behnam Shahriyari, a gun runner for the Quds Force, the guards’ affiliate that trains and finances Iran’s terror proxies in the Middle East.
Yet the key figure was Ayan, a bespectacled Turkish businessman. The Iranians were keen to deepen their burgeoning cooperation with Ayan, the chairman of Istanbul-based ASB Group, a globe-spanning energy conglomerate that buys, sells and transports oil, gas, electricity and much more.
With the help of ASB, Tehran’s regime has circumvented U.S. sanctions to funnel about $1 billion to its terror proxies since 2020, according to Western diplomats and documents detailing his company’s dealings reviewed by POLITICO. The primary beneficiary of the oil sales is the Quds Force, which uses the money to pay mercenaries and fund groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by both the U.S. and EU, the diplomats said.
“Sitki Ayan serves currently as the head of Quds Force’s largest financial network in Turkey and possibly the entire world,” one of the officials said.
Shared background
What makes Ayan’s entanglement with the Quds Force even more surprising, however, is his close relationship to Erdoğan.
Erdoğan and Ayan hail from the same background. They both attended Istanbul’s İmam Hatip religious high school and developed a relationship that would prove beneficial for both men as they navigated their careers in politics and business, respectively. It was Ayan, for example, who helped his old friend conceal his ownership of the “Agdash,” a $25 million oil tanker Erdoğan and his family received as a gift from a wealthy benefactor in 2008, according to confidential Maltese financial records uncovered by European Investigative Collaborations, a reporting consortium, in 2017.
In 2014, Ayan’s name made headlines across Turkey after the release of secretly recorded calls, purportedly between the Turkish president and his son Bilal Erdoğan, including one in which the elder Erdoğan said they should demand more money from a “Mr. Sıtkı” than the $10 million they’d been offered. The Turkish leader dismissed the call as an “immoral montage,” implying it was fake, but the recording helped trigger a wave of protests, scrutiny of his ties to Ayan and even calls for his resignation.
At the time, Ayan was still hopeful that a €1 billion contract he’d signed with Iran in 2010 to build a 660-kilometer-long pipeline to transport Iranian gas across Turkey to Europe would come to fruition (It was ultimately thwarted by U.S. sanctions).
While it’s not clear whether Erdoğan was aware of the extent of his friend Ayan’s engagement with the Iranians, Western diplomats say it’s difficult to believe he could not have been, considering the nature of his business dealings and the involvement of high ranking Iranians.
Given the two men’s history — Ayan is also close to the president’s brother, Mustafa Erdoğan — Western diplomats say they do not believe that Ayan would be pursuing his ongoing business with Iran without the tacit knowledge and approval from Erdoğan.
A lawyer for ASB and Ayan declined to comment. The Turkish government did not reply to requests for comment.
Unlikely bedfellows
At first glance, the regional rivalry and religious feuds between Turkey and Iran would make them unlikely bedfellows, especially considering Turkey’s alliance with the U.S. as a member of NATO. The two are also on opposite sides of a number of armed conflicts in the region from Libya to the South Caucasus. Yet as neighbors with deep historic and ethnic ties, the two countries also have many shared interests, from combating Kurdish separatism to keeping Saudi Arabia in check.
Turkey and Iran are also economically intertwined. Turkey is one of Iran’s largest trading partners, for example, and relies on Iranian energy imports. Turkey is also the top tourist destination for Iranians, many of whom also own property in the country.
Highlighting the importance of those ties, Erdoğan traveled to Tehran in July to meet with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. The two countries planned to quadruple their bilateral trade to $30 billion, Erdoğan said, adding that the goal could be achieved “with the resolute march of the two countries.” (The Turkish leader also underscored the need to combat “terrorist organizations,” but referred only to Kurdish separatists and the Gülen movement.)
The fluid relationship between Iran and Turkey aligns with a broader dynamic in the region, which is more akin to medieval Europe with shifting alliances, says Behnam Ben Taleblu, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As Washington devotes less attention to the Middle East and big countries such as Saudi Arabia increasingly assert themselves, opportunism has increasingly become the norm.
“The folly here is to see the relationship between Turkey and Iran as one of permanence,” Taleblu said. “It’s a story of change. Sometimes they have shared interests and sometimes they’re on other sides.”
Indeed, Turkey has helped its neighbor circumvent the sanctions pressures it has faced in the past, acting effectively as “a valve to help the Islamic Republic breathe,” Taleblu said.
‘Maximum pressure’
Though Ayan’s engagement with Iran stretches back more than a decade, his recent cooperation with the IRGC and Quds was triggered by then U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to withdraw the United States from a nuclear accord with Tehran, which afforded the regime relief from most international sanctions as long as it allowed the United Nations to monitor its nuclear activities.
Washington’s move meant that Iran again faced the brunt of U.S. sanctions, and its already-flagging economy came under even more pressure. The regime faced particular difficulty in accessing the foreign currency it needed to fund foreign operations.
On its face, the solution sounded simple: Allocate them oil instead. Oil can be sold for hard cash and Iran has plenty of it. The difficulty was setting up a system that could circumvent Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime.
To work around that challenge, Ghasemi, the former oil minister, set up an operation dubbed Pour Ja’afari tasked with selling oil for Quds Force and the IRGC to China, which was in theory happy to buy Iranian oil at a discount.
Getting it there was going to be a problem, however. American sanctions don’t just make it difficult for Iran to find anyone to ship the oil; the reluctance of foreign banks to get anywhere near Iranian transactions, much less those involving illicit oil, meant that the deals would have to go deep underground.
The oil would have to be blended to disguise its provenance; documents forged; and, most important, a mechanism developed to get revenue from the sales to the intended recipient.
That’s where ASB came in. With operations in more than a dozen countries, Ayan’s conglomerate offered the perfect cover.
Destinations: China and Russia
It’s not clear why Ayan agreed to collaborate with Ghasemi and Quds, but according to a “strictly confidential” memo of understanding signed by both Ayan and Ghasemi on November 19, 2020, and seen by POLITICO, he did. (Ghasemi died on Thursday after a “long struggle with illness,” according to Iranian media reports.)
“The parties have agreed to cooperate for the purpose of establishing a shipping operation to transport RG’s crude oil from the ports of North Dubai to China,” reads the document, which uses each man’s initials after first reference. “North Dubai” is code for Iran, said a Western official who has reviewed the documents and determined them to be authentic.
Under the agreement ASB subsidiaries Baslam Nakliyat and Baslam Petrol, which ship oil around the world, were tasked with leasing tankers to send the oil to China.
“Baslam Petrol and/or Baslam Nakliyat shall endeavor to arrange two suitable VLCC tankers to transport various types of crude oil from any port of North Dubai to the nominated discharge port(s) in China,” the agreement says under the heading “Option 1” (“VLCC” stands for very large crude-oil carriers, i.e. tankers that can carry more than 2 million barrels of oil.).
Ghasemi also had discretion to exercise “Option 2,” which required ASB to hire two tankers to ship the oil to Malaysia, where it would be transferred to different tankers, presumably to better disguise the oil’s origin, before final delivery to China.
The Chinese buyer of the oil was a company controlled by the country’s military called Haokun Energy, according to the documents. In late 2020, ASB and Haokun signed agreement for the delivery of Iranian oil worth about $2 billion a year. Of that, about $500 million was earmarked for Quds Force, the diplomats said.
To mask the true nature of the deals, ASB helped route them through a complicated network of international front companies and banks from India to Russia and UAE. It sometimes used its own bank in Istanbul, Vakıf Katılım Bankası, which transferred at least $80 million to accounts controlled by Shahriyari, the Quds Force commander, according to the Western diplomats and bank records viewed by POLITICO. There is no indication that Vakıf knew the money was going to the Quds Force. A representative for Vakıf Katılım Bankası did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Many of the transfers were denominated in dollars or euros, meaning that they were settled by European banks, such as Frankfurt-based Commerzbank, or J.P. Morgan in the U.S. There’s no evidence that the Western banks involved were aware of the Iranian connection to the deals, which would constitute a violation of U.S. sanctions.
In addition to its business with China, Tehran set up a second pillar for its illicit oil trade with Russian partners who act as brokers for the Iranian crude. Here too, Ayan’s ASB served as the legitimate face of the operation, using its subsidiaries and banks to help unload Iran’s oil and filter back the profits to Quds Force and the IRGC through a network of front companies.
While broadly similar to the Chinese network, the Russia channel, led by a separate Tehran-based office called Resistance Economy, also relied on barter for payment. Staples such as wheat, sugar and sunflower seed oil, are exempt from U.S. sanctions. That made it easier for Russian buyers to camouflage their oil payments, which generally account for half the total bill, as humanitarian aid or other goods that don’t run afoul of the sanctions regime.
The arrangement means Iranian outfits like Quds Force get the foreign currency they need, while also giving the regime better access to foodstuffs and other goods that are in short supply.
Ultimately the cash ended up in accounts in Turkey or UAE, where it could be withdrawn by Quds Force operatives and distributed to the likes of Hezbollah or Yemen’s Ansarallah.
Doubling down
By the time Ayan met with Ghasemi and Shahriyari in Beirut in March 2021, the partnership had been so successful that Tehran wanted to double down.
Just a day after the gathering in Beirut, the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and ConceptoScreen, a Lebanon-based company controlled by Hezbollah, signed a new deal with Haokun to send oil to China, according to the documents viewed by POLITICO.
The early success of the arrangement, however, appears to have bred complacency. In an early March 2021 amendment to a previous contract signed between the three, the references to oil from “North Dubai” were replaced with “Iranian light crude oil.”
Several months later, on August 25, Ayan signed a “Sale and Purchase Services Provider Agreement” with Azim Monzavi, Ghasemi’s successor as head of the Pour Ja’afari operation. The contract, signed by both Monzavi and Ayan, makes clear the Turkish company’s obligation to sell Iranian oil “in its own name” in return for a “service fee.”
The force majeure clause (commonly included in contracts to account for events beyond a party’s control, such as a hurricane, that would prevent them from fulfilling their obligation) concludes: “It is fully understood that sanction is not included.”
The arrangement held for less than a year.
On May 25, the U.S. Treasury slapped sanctions on several individuals involved in what it called an “international oil smuggling and money laundering network,” including Monzavi (Ghasemi was already on the sanctions list). A number of the companies in the scheme were also designated, including China’s Haokun and ConceptoScreen of Lebanon as well as several actors and companies working through Russia.
“We will not hesitate to target those who provide a critical lifeline of financial support and access to the international financial system for the Quds Force or Hezbollah,” said Brian E. Nelson, under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence. “The United States will continue to strictly enforce sanctions on Iran’s illicit oil trade. Anyone purchasing oil from Iran faces the prospect of U.S. sanctions.”
Despite several further rounds of sanctions since May against others involved in Iran’s underground oil business, the one name conspicuously not on the list — until this article was published — was Sıtkı Ayan.
Turkish leverage
The reality is, the U.S. needs Turkish support on multiple fronts, especially in the Black Sea amid the war in Ukraine. Turkey is also blocking the NATO membership applications of Sweden and Finland, demanding concessions from both countries, including the lifting of a Finnish arms embargo against Ankara. What’s more, when provoked, Erdoğan has shown his willingness to strike back, by sending refugees across the border into Greece, for example.
Even so, Washington appears to have determined that Ayan had no intention of halting his dealings, despite the recent crackdown on his business partners.
In late August, he struck a deal on behalf of NIOC, the Iranian oil company, to sell up to four million barrels of crude per month to China’s Qingdao Deming Petrochemical Co. Ltd.
The contract, arranged by middlemen registered in the Marshall Islands, is stamped “Strictly Private & Confidential” in red letters. While it is vague on the provenance of the oil (“Omani light or Abu-Dhabi light or Fujairah light”), the seller betrays its true origin: “NIOC designated company.”
Resistance Economy, the Quds Force smuggling operation focused on Russian brokers, also remained active.
Complicating matters further for the U.S., the Iranians have proved nimble in handling complications in Ayan’s network.
After Greek authorities detained one of the Russian-owned tankers Resistance Economy relies on for its oil trade in April at the request of the U.S., for example, Quds Force responded by sending commandos to hijack two Greek tankers in the Gulf in May and then sailing them to Iran.
In November, Greece agreed release the Russian tanker, known as Lana and flying an Iranian flag, along with the Iranian crude onboard in order to free its own ships. Last Friday, the Lana sailed into the Syrian port of Banias and unloaded its payload of more than 700,000 barrels of Iranian crude.
The episode may help explain why Ayan continued his business with Quds Force amid the intensifying U.S. pressure.
“It’s lucrative and almost risk-free,” one of the diplomats said before Treasury sanctioned Ayan and ASB.
Almost.
UPDATED: This article was updated after the U.S. sanctioned Ayan and his company late Thursday following its publication.
After months of protests, an Iranian official says the country has abolished its morality police, although the status is not yet certain. The force has been the focus of protests since the in-custody death of a young woman named Mahsa Amini earlier this year. CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams joins “CBS News Mornings” with more.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that the Biden administration supports the zero-COVID protesters in China, explaining that he will address the topic when he visits the country early next year.
“Of course, we do,” Blinken told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” when asked about the US support for the protesters demonstrating against the Chinese government’s stringent Covid-19 restrictions. “We support the right for people everywhere, whether it’s in China, whether it’s Iran, whether it’s any place else, to protest peacefully, to make known their views, to vent their frustrations.”
Blinken said he would bring up the protests with Chinese officials in person next month.
“We will say what we always say and what President (Joe) Biden has said to (Chinese leader) Xi Jinping, which is that human rights and basic civil liberties go to the heart of who we are as Americans. And no American government, no American president is going to be silent on that,” Blinken said.
The demonstrations in China were triggered by a deadly fire on November 24 in Urumqi, the capital of the far western region of Xinjiang. The blaze killed at least 10 people and injured nine in an apartment building – leading to public fury after videos of the incident appeared to show lockdown measures had delayed firefighters from reaching the victims.
The city had been under lockdown for more than 100 days, with residents unable to leave the region and many forced to stay home.
As the protest numbers have swelled, many are also demanding greater political freedoms – and some have even called for Xi’s removal.
Protests on such a large scale are highly unusual in China. While demonstrations over local grievances occur periodically, the protests are the most widespread since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement of 1989.
The Chinese government has cracked down swiftly, deploying police at key protest sites, calling protesters to warn them and tightening online censorship.
Blinken said Sunday that the US would take the same approach when the rights of protesters are repressed anywhere else: “We speak out against it, we stand up against it, and we take action against it.”
Demonstrations have rocked Iran for several months, sparking a deadly clampdown from authorities. The nationwide uprising was first ignited by the death of Mahsa (also known as Zhina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in mid-September after being detained by the country’s morality police. Since then, protesters across Iran have coalesced around a range of grievances with the Iranian government.
Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said Thursday that Iran’s parliament and judiciary are reviewing the country’s mandatory hijab law, according to pro-reform outlet Entekhab.
Montazeri was also quoted as saying that Iran’s feared morality police had been “abolished,” but Iranian state media strongly pushed back on those comments, saying the interior ministry oversees the force, not the judiciary.
In an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Blinken wouldn’t say if the US believes that a move to abolish the morality police would end the protests in the country.
“That’s up to the Iranian people. This is about that. It’s not about us. And what we’ve seen since the killing of Mahsa Amini has been the extraordinary courage of Iranian young people, especially women, who’ve been leading these protests, standing up for the right to be able to say what they want to say, wear what they want to wear,” Blinken said.
In his interview with Tapper, Blinken pointed to US sanctions on those responsible for the crackdown on protesters in Iran, but he did not mention any cost that has been imposed on China for its crackdown on protests.
Blinken said that “fundamentally” the protests in China and Iran were not about the US.
“This is about people in both countries trying to express their views, trying to have their aspirations met, and the response that the governments are taking to that,” he said.
Iran has scrapped its morality police after more than two months of protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest for allegedly violating the country’s strict female dress code, local media said Sunday.
Women-led protests, labeled “riots” by the authorities, have swept Iran since the 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin died on Sept. 16, three days after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran.
Demonstrators have burned their mandatory hijab head coverings and shouted anti-government slogans, and a growing number of women have refused to wear the hijab, particularly in parts of Tehran.
“Morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary and have been abolished,” Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.
His comment came at a religious conference where he responded to a question on “why the morality police were being shut down,” the report said.
The move represents a rare concession to the protest movement, and authorities have also acknowledged the demoralizing effect of an economic crisis spurred by U.S. sanctions.
A police motorcycle burns during a protest in Tehran on Sept. 19, 2022.
WANA NEWS AGENCY via REUTERS
“The best way to confront the riots is to … pay attention to people’s real demands,” said the parliament presidium council spokesman Seyyed Nezamoldin Mousavi, referencing “livelihoods and the economy” in the Islamic republic.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew Iran’s U.S.-backed monarchy, authorities have monitored adherence to the strict dress code for women as well as men.
But under hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the morality police — known formally as the Gasht-e Ershad or “Guidance Patrol” — was established to “spread the culture of modesty and hijab.”
The units were set up by Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, which is today headed by President Ebrahim Raisi.
They began their patrols in 2006 to enforce the dress code which also requires women to wear long clothes and forbids shorts, ripped jeans and other clothes deemed immodest.
The announcement of the units’ abolition came a day after Montazeri said “both parliament and the judiciary are working” on the issue of whether the law requiring women to cover their heads needs to be changed.
Raisi said in televised comments Saturday that Iran’s republican and Islamic foundations were constitutionally entrenched “but there are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible.”
The hijab became mandatory in 1983. Morality police officers initially issued warnings before starting to crack down and arrest women 15 years ago.
The squads were usually made up of men in green uniforms and women clad in black chadors, garments that cover their heads and upper bodies.
The role of the units evolved, but has always been controversial.
Clothing norms gradually changed, especially under former moderate president Hassan Rouhani, when it became common to see women in tight jeans and with loose, colourful headscarves.
But in July this year his successor, the ultra-conservative Raisi, called for the mobilization of “all state institutions to enforce the headscarf law.”
Raisi at the time charged that “the enemies of Iran and Islam have targeted the cultural and religious values of society by spreading corruption.”
Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia also employed morality police to enforce female dress codes and other rules of behavior. Since 2016 the force there has been sidelined in a push by the Sunni Muslim kingdom to shake off its austere image.
In September, the Union of Islamic Iran People Party, the country’s main reformist party, called for the hijab law to be rescinded.
The party, created by relatives of former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, demands authorities “prepare the legal elements paving the way for the cancelation of the mandatory hijab law.”
On Saturday it also called for the Islamic republic to publicly shut down the morality police and “allow peaceful demonstrations.”
Iran accuses its enemy the U.S. and its allies, including Britain and Israel, and Kurdish groups based outside the country, of fomenting the street protests.
More than 300 people have been killed in the unrest, including dozens of security force members, an Iranian general said on Monday.
Oslo-based non-government organization Iran Human Rights last week said at least 448 people had been “killed by security forces in the ongoing nationwide protests.”
Thousands have been arrested, including prominent Iranian actors and footballers.
Among them was the actor Hengameh Ghaziani, detained last month. She had published on Instagram a video of herself removing her head covering. She was later freed on bail, Iranian news agencies reported.
After eleven weeks of protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in Tehran, Iranian officials said it will abolish its morality police and will consider relaxing its strict hijab law, but some say these sweeping statements are a strategy to quell uprisings; in response, protesters in Iran called for a three-day strike this week.
Despite these statements, activists are skeptical that any change will arise, saying these promising words are just an attempt to curb protests. Some are even calling it “disinformation” to say that the morality police will be abolished.
On Sunday, journalist and activist Masih Alinejad tweeted: “It’s disinformation that Islamic Republic of Iran has abolished it’s morality police. It’s a tactic to stop the uprising. Protesters are not facing guns and bullets to abolish morality police or forced hijab.They want to end Islamic regime.”
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“Morality police hasn’t been abolished in Iran. This is a lie to deceive protester and to divide them just before nationwide calls for protests in the next coming days,” journalist and TV show host Sima Sabet tweeted.
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CAIRO — Iran on Saturday began construction on a new nuclear power plant in the country’s southwest, Iranian state TV announced, amid tensions with the U.S. over sweeping sanctions imposed after Washington pulled out of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear deal with world powers.
The announcement comes as Iran has been rocked by nationwide protests challenging the theocratic government that began after the death of a young woman in police custody over an allegedly violation of the Islamic dress code. In a possibly related move, Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency late Saturday quoted a top prosecutor as saying officials had “closed” the morality police force responsible for enforcing the dress code. It gave no details.
The new 300-megawatt plant, known as Karoon, will take eight years to build and cost around $2 billion, the country’s state television and radio agency reported. The plant will be located in Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, near its western border with Iraq, it said.
The construction site’s inauguration ceremony was attended by Mohammed Eslami, head of Iran’s civilian Atomic Energy Organization, who first unveiled construction plans for Karoon in April.
Iran has one nuclear power plant at its southern port of Bushehr that went online in 2011 with help from Russia, but also several underground nuclear facilities.
The announcement of Karoon’s construction came less than two weeks after Iran said it had begun producing enriched uranium at 60% purity at the country’s underground Fordo nuclear facility. The move is seen as a significant addition to the country’s nuclear program.
Enrichment to 60% purity is one short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Non-proliferation experts have warned in recent months that Iran now has enough 60%-enriched uranium to reprocess into fuel for at least one nuclear bomb.
The move was condemned by Germany, France and Britain, the three Western European nations that remain in the Iran nuclear deal. Recent attempts to revive Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal, which eased sanctions on Iran in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program, have stalled.
Since September, Iran has been roiled by nationwide protests that have come to mark one of the greatest challenges to its theocracy since the chaotic years after its 1979 Islamic Revolution. The protests were sparked when Mahsa Amini, 22, died in custody Sept. 16, three days after her arrest by the morality police for violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women. Iran’s government insists Amini was not mistreated, but her family says her body showed bruises and other signs of beating after she was detained.
In a statement issued by the state-run IRNA news agency Saturday, the country’s national security council announced that some 200 people have been killed during the protests, the body’s first official word on the casualties. Last week, Iranian Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh tallied the death toll at more than 300.
The contradictory tolls are lower than the toll reported by Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S.-based organization that has been closely monitoring the protest since the outbreak. In its most recent update, the group says that 469 people have been killed and 18,210 others detained in the protests and the violent security force crackdown that followed.
Iranian state media also announced Saturday that the family home of Elnaz Rekabi, an Iranian female rock climber who competed abroad with her hair untied, had been demolished. Iran’s official judiciary news agency, Mizan, said the destruction of her brother’s home was due to its ”unauthorized construction and use of land” and that demolition took place months before Rekabi competed. Antigovernment activists say it was a targeted demolition.
Rekabi became a symbol of the anti-government movement in October after competing in a rock climbing competition in South Korea without wearing a mandatory headscarf required of female athletes from the Islamic Republic. In an Instagram post the following day, Rekabi described her not wearing a hijab as “unintentional,” however it remains unclear whether she wrote the post or what condition she was in at the time.
Since September, there has been a reported decline in the number of morality police officers across Iranian cities. The group was established in 2005 with the task of arresting people who violate the country’s Islamic dress code.
In a report published late Saturday by ISNA, Iran’s prosecutor general, Mohamed Jafar Montazeri, said the morality police had been ‘‘closed.’’ He provided no further details about the state of the force, or if its closure was widespread and permanent.
”The judiciary continues to monitor behavioral actions at the community level,‘’ Montazeri added.
Separately, the U.S. Navy said Saturday it intercepted a fishing vessel in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday attempting to smuggle 50 tons of ammunition and a key component for missiles from Iran to Yemen.
Experts have accused the Iranian government of continually conducting Illicit weapons smuggling operations to supply Yemen’s Houthi rebels. The shipments have included rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and missiles. Last month, the U.S. seized 70 tons of a missile fuel component hidden among fertilizer bags aboard a ship bound for Yemen from Iran.
“This significant interdiction (on Thursday) clearly shows that Iran’s unlawful transfer of lethal aid and destabilizing behavior continues,” said Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of the Bahrain-based U.S. 5th Fleet, in a statement.
There was no immediate comment from Iran on the seizure.
Iran has been the Houthis’ major backer since the rebel force swept down from Yemen’s northern mountains in 2014 and seized the capital, Sanaa, forcing the internationally recognized government into exile. In the following year, a Saudi-led coalition armed with U.S. weaponry and intelligence intervened to try to restore the internationally recognized government to power. Since 2014, the United Nations has enforced an arms embargo prohibiting weapons transfers to the Houthis.
The United States unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — in 2018, under then-President Donald Trump. It reimposed sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to start backing away from the deal’s terms. Iran has long denied ever seeking nuclear weapons, insisting its nuclear program is peaceful.
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This story was first published on December 3, 2022. It was updated on December 4, 2022 to correct the attribution of a quote from Iran’s top prosecutor. It was the semi-official ISNA news agency, not the IRNA news agency, that reported the comments on the Iranian morality police.
A former Iran national team football player has criticized authorities for their “silence” over the death of a man who celebrated the country’s World Cup defeat to the United States earlier this week.
Mehran Samak, 27, died in Bandar Anzali city, northern Iran, during public celebrations by anti-government protesters following Tuesday’s match – in which the US beat Iran 1-0 to advance to the knockout stages of the competition.
The Norway-based watchdog group Iran Human Rights has alleged, citing “several independent sources,” that he was shot in the head by security personnel.
Police, however, have denied he was killed by authorities and have announced the arrests of several suspects in connection with his death, according to Iranian state media.
In a video that circulated on social media on Saturday, Mohammad Ahmadzadeh, who played for Iran from 1988 to 1990 and coached Malavan F.C. from 2018 to 2020, challenged Bandar Anzali’s member of parliament Ahmad Donyamali and called for accountability from city officials.
“Hello to all my fellow people of Anzali who are bereaved because we have lost yet another youth, Mehran Samak,” he said. “We’ve lost this dear one and all the people of Anzali are bereaved.”
“I don’t know what their crime was. I want to ask the authorities of the city – what was their crime? Is it a crime, punishable by death, to honk your horn or to be happy for whatever reason? I want to ask Mr. Donyamali, who considers himself a representative of this city – why are you silent? Aren’t you a rep of this city? What reaction have you shown to the events so far?”
The state-aligned Iran Students’ News Agency reported Thursday that the Bandar Anzali prosecutor had opened a case into the “suspicious” killing.
Several videos were posted on social media Tuesday night showing people in cities across Iran, including in the capital Tehran, celebrating inside their homes following the match.
“I am happy, this is the government losing to the people,” one witness to celebrations in a city in the Kurdish region told CNN on Wednesday. CNN is not naming the witness for security concerns.
Activist outlet 1500tasvir also posted videos showing security forces, reportedly on Tuesday night, opening fire at people in Behbahan and beating up a woman in Qazvin. Both cities are south of Bandar Anzali where Samak is said to have been shot.
CNN cannot independently confirm the information as Iran’s government is not allowing foreign media into the country, and has not been transparent in its reporting on protests and protest casualties.
Demonstrations have rocked Iran for several months, sparking a deadly clampdown from authorities.
The nationwide uprising was first ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in mid-September after being detained by the country’s morality police. Since then, protesters across Iran have coalesced around a range of grievances with the regime.
Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.
Jerusalem and Doha CNN
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When special direct flights were announced from Tel Aviv to Doha for the FIFA World Cup, the scene at Ben Gurion airport was festive – the company chartering the flight brought out a cake festooned with Qatari and Israeli flags.
But Israeli reporters sent to cover the tournament say they’re experiencing a less than welcoming atmosphere.
Moav Vardi, chief international correspondent for the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation “KAN,” told CNN he was expecting some hostility from Palestinian and Arab fans – but not the level he has experienced in Qatar.
Most Arab fans he tries to interview, Vardi says, will just turn away when they discover he is Israeli even if they had been having a friendly conversation beforehand. But a small and vocal minority is engaging in “violent verbal assaults,” Vardi said.
Vardi said the impression he has gotten is that the “hatred and resentment” is not just about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Rather “it’s about the very existence of Israel.”
While he says he hasn’t felt physically threatened, KAN has removed its logo from his microphone, after he was recognized from encounters in Doha that had gone viral on social media.
Former Israeli football star, and now a commentator Eil Ohana posted a video showing a Qatari police officer driving him in a golf cart. After initially getting a shocked reaction from telling the policeman he is Israeli, he says instead that he was joking and that he is actually from Portugal. The police officer says he would have stopped the cart and kicked him off if the commentator was Israeli. When the commentator asked the driver why, he replied, “I’m Palestinian” and goes on to explain that Arabs cannot fly to Israel.
Videos have gone viral in Israel and the Arab world showing football fans yelling at Israeli reporters, refusing to speak to them because of where they are from. Other videos show people hoisting Palestinian flags in the background of Israeli reporters’ live shots, taunting the reporters.
While country flags are generally allowed at matches, clothing or banners with political statements – like LGBTQ rights or those supporting Iranian protesters – have at times led to fans being kicked out of stadiums. But some Arab attendees say the Palestinian cause, which Qatar officially supports, seems to be an exception – in one early match fans held up a giant Palestinian flag with the message “Free Palestine.”
According to sources briefed on the matter, 8,000 Palestinians and 3,800 Israelis applied for World Cup tickets, although thousands more may have entered Qatar on secondary passports.
Israel and Qatar have no diplomatic relations – but under the FIFA rules, Israelis must be allowed to attend the tournament and a small, temporary Israeli consular team is in Doha to assist citizens, who have been advised by the Israeli foreign ministry to keep a low profile.
Omar Barakat, the Palestinian national football team coach, told Reuters in Doha that he was encouraged to take Palestinian flags into matches. He said that he was only allowed by security to take an oversized flag into a stadium on revealing it to be a Palestinian flag. “It’s a political statement, and we’re proud of it,” he said.
On Wednesday, a football fan wearing a Tunisia shirt invaded the pitch with a Palestinian flag during a match between France and Tunisia. When he was apprehended by security personnel, crowds in the stand could be heard chanting “Palestine! Palestine!”
For Farah Hamam, a Palestinian-Jordanian football fan, some Arab fans’ refusal to engage with Israeli journalists reflects the Arab world’s frustration with “the continued atrocities taking place” against the Palestinian people. That was the “real sentiment” toward Israel “despite normalization efforts of Arab governments,” she told CNN.
“For perhaps the first time in history, Arabs around the world are unapologetically showing their lack of patience with Israel,” she said.
Israel in recent years normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, a move that was seen as a major diplomatic feat for the nation and a way out of its regional isolation.
Talal Hizami, a Saudi football fan at the World Cup, linked Arab attitudes toward Israelis in Doha to a pushback against Israel’s recognition by those states. “It’s a rejection of the normalization of Israel in the Middle East…. many Arab citizens see this as a betrayal,” he told CNN.
He said Israeli journalists may have mistakenly assumed that the normalization trend toward Israel in the Arab world “is a reflection of what the people of those nations feel towards them when in reality, many are extremely angered by it.”
Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC), the tournament organizers, didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment on the treatment of Israeli reporters or the display of political symbols at the World Cup.
Reacting to how he says he was treated by Arabs in Doha, Raz Shechnick, a reporter for the Israeli Yediot Ahronoth newspaper, posted a long Twitter thread in Hebrew about his experience, saying “I was always a centrist, liberal and open [with] a will to make peace above all. I always thought the problem was governments, the rulers, ours too. But, in Qatar I came to realize how hatred is present with people on the street. How much they want to wipe us off the face of the earth. To what extent everything related to Israel arouses intense hatred in them.”
Roy Jankelowitz, a correspondent for the IsraelSport website, said he has not had as many problems in Doha but that he does not “go around walking with a microphone in Hebrew.”
“As an Israeli, I understand that there may be a problem over here for people to accept that Israelis are here because of the fact that they do not know much about Israel. All they see is what the media, the local Arab media reports to them about Israel,” he told CNN. “All they see is, when they see something in Hebrew they think it is something bad.”
Jankelowitz said he’s taken the Israeli Foreign Ministry advice to all Israeli attendees to keep a low profile and does not necessarily tell fans he is from Israel unless he feels it is safe to do so.
“You have to understand that you’re in an Arab country and not everybody likes you,” he said.
But not all Arabs in Doha agree that the football tournament is an appropriate place to show support for Palestinians. Munser Al Shibly a fan from Libya at the World Cup, told CNN it was “nice” to see fans support Palestinians but added that football should be “separate from politics… even if it’s the Palestinian cause.”
Vardi, the Israeli KAN reporter, said despite some hostility, he’s also had some fascinating interactions – like after being recognized while watching a match and being told to “go away” by one fan, a different fan from Saudi Arabia sitting near him turned and said, “Oh Israel? Why don’t you get rid of Iran for us please.”
With additional reporting by Nadeen Ebrahim, Celine Alkhaldi, Zeena Saifi and Mariam Dirar Alqasem.
Iranian security forces kill anti-government protester celebrating World Cup defeat, rights group says
A man is reported to have been killed by security forces in northern Iran during public celebrations by anti-government protesters following the national football team’s defeat against the United States on Tuesday.
Background: Several videos were posted on social media Tuesday night showing people in cities across Iran, including in the capital Tehran, celebrating inside their homes and residential buildings after the US defeated Iran 1-0 in the World Cup. Demonstrations have rocked Iran for more than two months, sparking a deadly clampdown by authorities.
Why it matters: Football has become the latest arena for pro- and anti-regime Iranians to express their views. A source told CNN earlier that the families of Iran’s team had been threatened with imprisonment and torture if players failed to “behave” after they refrained from singing the country’s national anthem in an earlier game. Some Iranian activists had accused the players of whitewashing the government’s crimes.
US tells Turkey it opposes new military operation in Syria
United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told his Turkish counterpart Wednesday that his country strongly opposes a new military operation in Syria and that he was concerned about Turkish airstrikes that threatened US personnel in the region.
Background: On Tuesday, the Pentagon said the US has reduced the number of patrols with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against ISIS in Syria as the SDF has said an invasion by Turkey seems “imminent.” It said the US has not redeployed forces in the region and has “no diminished capability” in the region.
Why it matters: Turkey has been warning for months about a potential incursion into Syria targeting Kurdish groups it opposes there. Both Russia and the US have stakes in the country. Last week, a Turkish airstrike against a base in northern Syria used by the US-led coalition to defeat ISIS threatened the safety of US personnel working in the area. The US has approximately 900 troops in Syria.
ISIS acknowledges the death of its leader, announces his successor
ISIS affiliate al-Furqan media published an audio message by the jihadist group’s spokesman announcing the death of its leader, who was appointed in March. It didn’t make clear who killed the group commander or where. ISIS announced his successor, who goes by the name Abu al-Husain al-Husaini al-Quraishi. Little is known about him, but the group described him as an “old fighter” without providing further details. Syria’s army took credit for his killing, Reuters cited state media as saying.
Background: The deceased leader was appointed by ISIS in March 2022 after US President Joe Biden announced the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in a military operation in the northwest of Syria.
Why it matters: Analysts have said that ISIS is in disarray. If the Syrian regime’s claims are true, the killing would a rare occasion where a top ISIS leader has been killed in a non-US-led operation.
Qatar’s Energy Minister Saad Al Kaabi told CNN’s Becky Anderson on Wednesday the country will not let politics affect business after it signed a deal to provide Germany with 2 million tons of LNG annually, starting in 2026.
This comes amid heightened tensions with Germany, which ramped up its criticism of Qatar ahead of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, questioning its human rights record and later opposing the Gulf country’s ban on the rainbow-colored armband.
Watch the interview here:
After Tunisia beat France in a stunning 1-0 victory on Wednesday, Morocco on Thursday beat Canada 2-1, becoming the only Arab nation to reach the knockout rounds. Saudi Arabia, which galvanized Arab audiences with its early win against Argentina, was knocked out of the tournament after losing against Mexico on Wednesday.
Canadian pop star Justin Bieber launched clean water company Generosity at Qatar’s World Cup, to provide premium alkaline water in refillable fountains across the globe.
The pitch invader who waved a rainbow flag on the field during Portugal’s World Cup match with Uruguay on Monday said FIFA president Gianni Infantino came to the Qatari police station to free him in order to “avoid more controversy.”
Thursday’s Group E FIFA World Cup match between Costa Rica and Germany saw an all-women refereeing team for the first time in men’s World Cup history. Stephanie Frappart, from France, led the refereeing team, making her the first woman to referee a men’s World Cup match.
A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
CNN
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An unexpected result of the US Men’s National Team reaching the knockout round of 16 at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar is that the US Women’s National Team will get its largest collective payday, equally splitting $13 million in winnings with the men.
It’s a big deal for American women who have long sought pay equity, and it amplifies the extreme sliding scale of women’s rights around the globe.
Consider that this payday for US women was won when the US men’s team defeated Iran,a country where authorities arebrutally tamping down protests by women who want basic humanrights.
The US Women’s National Team excels at soccerand fought hard for years for equal pay.
The earnings they’ll split with theAmerican men could grow if the men continue toadvance in the World Cup.
FIFA pays bigger awards to the men’s tournament, which draws in more revenue to the international soccer governing body, than to the women’s. The agreement between the US men and women is unique.
“To everyone it should indicate how big the disparity is that FIFA has made between their value of women’s soccer and men’s soccer, and this is the only way that equity could be achieved, if all parties agreed – and they did,” said Briana Scurry, a former US goalkeeper, appearing on CNN Wednesday.
Not only did the US Men’s National Team advance to earn the payday, but they also agreed to this unprecedented pot-splitting with the top American women earlier this year.
“These are Title IX males,” said Christine Brennan, the sports columnist and CNN analyst, referring to the US men’s team during an appearance on “CNN Tonight” on Tuesday. She was referring to the landmark 1972 law that prohibitsdiscrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activitiesreceiving federal funds. It has revolutionized women’s sports in the US and, Brennan argued, influenced male athletes too.
“They weren’t raised like their dads or their grandfathers. And they have a much different outlook, not only about women’s equality in terms of pay, but these are the same men who’ve been talking about standing with the Iranian protesters,” Brennan said.
She praised theUS Soccer Federationand the Men’s National Team, who have distinguished themselves not only by advancing, but “even more so in terms of our culture and the stands they have taken.”
Iranian women, as you’ll know from following coverage of protests in that country and at the World Cup, are fighting for basic rights.
CNN reported on celebrations in Iran at the national team’s loss to the US. From that report:
“I am happy, this is the government losing to the people,” one witness to celebrations in a city in the Kurdish region, who CNN is not naming for security concerns, told CNN on Wednesday.
The Norway-based Iranian rights group Hengaw posted several videos of similar scenes. “People in Paveh are celebrating Iran’s national team lose over America in World Cup in Qatar, they are chanting ‘Down with Jash (traitors),” Hengaw said in a post.
Meanwhile, back in Doha, Qatar, another landmark moment for women in the world’s most popular sport will come Thursday, when the first all-women refereeing team in men’s World Cup history debuts in a pivotal match between Germany and Costa Rica.
Stéphanie Frappart, the French lead official, has already overseen matches at the top levels of European club soccer, so, “I know how to deal with it,” she said in a statement released by FIFA. This match, with a potential audience of billions, will show a woman in charge.
If the US men and women are on the road to some sort of parity – the men still make much, much more from their clubs – there are some women in the Middle East who are just gaining access to the pitch.
Saudi Arabia’s men’s team put in a solid show at this World Cup with their defeat of storied Argentina in the opening round. But the Saudis failed to advance past the group stage after losing to Mexico Wednesday.
As Saudi Arabia weighs a joint bid to co-host the 2030 men’s World Cup, the kingdom is alsoin the beginning stages of building a national women’s team. It’ll surely be many years before the Saudi women can be competitive on the world stage, but simply being able to play is certainly progress.
CNN’s Becky Anderson, who is reporting from Doha during this World Cup, talked to the German women’s teamlegend Monika Staab, who is coaching the nascent Saudi women’s team. She said the kingdom is developing its women through three development academies and wants to host an international tournament in 2026.
Staab said the all-women referee team in Thursday’s match in Qatarwill be a powerful symbol for Muslim women watching.
“The women can do like the men,” Staab said on CNN International Wednesday night. “I think that is a big sign for the whole world. We in Saudi Arabia, we play football. That has a great impact on every Muslim girl who wants to play,” Staab said.
In the US, women’s soccer has at times been a bigger draw than the men’s game.
About 14 million American viewers watched the women’s World Cupfinal, featuring the winningUS team, in 2019. That was more than watched the men’s World Cupfinal between France and Croatia in 2018, but far below the 20 million who watched the US take on England in the group stage last Saturday acrossFox and Telemundo.
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
Ukraine is bracing for three or four “massive” missile strikes from Russia, a top defense official in Kyiv said, while the Ukrainian president’s office suggested Moscow may wait for more frigid weather in order to “deal the most sensitive blow.”
Even as he gave the warning about imminent attacks, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, said Kyiv’s forces are able to shoot down up to 90 percent of Russian missiles, thanks to supplies of Western air-defense weapons. Danilov made the comments in an online interview on Friday.
Ukraine is still recovering from the latest Russian missile attack on the nation’s energy infrastructure on November 23, which plunged a significant part of the country, including Kyiv, into darkness.
Despite efforts to restore power supplies, Ukraine’s biggest private electricity producer, DTEK, warned on Saturday about emergency power cuts in the capital as well as such major cities such as Odesa and Dnipro.
Danilov also said that the amount of Russian missile weapons is rapidly decreasing, and Moscow is forced to “look for additional supplies around the world.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, believes that Russia is changing the tactics of its missile strikes on Ukraine.
Russian forces “are waiting for an increase in frosts … so that the temperature at night drops to 8-10 degrees below zero, and at this moment they want to deal the most sensitive blow to Ukraine,” Podolyak said in an online interview Friday night.
Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said that Russia may be trying to generate another wave of refugees with the aim “to pressure Western officials to offer pre-emptive concessions because the Russian military has been unable to achieve strategic success.”
John Dickerson reports on Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes being convicted of seditious conspiracy, the dangerous tornado threat for the South, and the U.S. win against Iran in the World Cup.
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The United States has defeated Iran in one of the most anticipated games of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, advancing to the knockout stage of the tournament.
Christian Pulisic scored the United States men’s national team’s first and only goal of the match in the 38th minute. He collided with Iran’s goaltender in the process and had to leave the field of play for several minutes while recovering. Pulisic was able to return and finish out the half, but was replaced at halftime.
U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter said Pulisic was taken to the hospital after the game “I think as a precaution.” Tuesday night, the USMNT said that Pulisic had suffered a “pelvic contusion and his status is day-to-day.”
With the U.S. fending off late challenge after challenge, a series of injuries and replacements led to an extra nine minutes of stoppage time at the end of the second half, but the USMNT was able to hold out and maintain their 1-0 lead over Iran.
For the U.S. men’s national team, winning the game was the only way to advance to the knockout stage of the international tournament. They will now take on the Netherlands on Saturday in an elimination game.
The team celebrated the victory on Twitter shortly after the game ended, thanking fans for their support in one tweet and sharing another showing the on-field excitement.
“At home and in Qatar, you were with us all 99+ minutes tonight. We felt the love. We felt the unwavering support. Thank you,” the team wrote.
President Joe Biden also commented on the win after delivering remarks on his economic plan in Bay City, Michigan. Mr. Biden had finished speaking, but returned to the podium to announce the final score, which was followed by loud cheers from those in attendance.
“When I spoke to the coach and the players, I said, ‘You can do this!’ They went, ‘ahhh.’ They did it! God love ’em,” he said. “Anyway, just thought you might wanna hear.”
The team has now scored two goals in the tournament, having tied against Wales 1-1 and played to a 0-0 draw with England in earlier matches.
In the simultaneous England-Wales game Tuesday, the English team won 3-0, coming out on top of Group B.
This is the first time the U.S. and Iranian teams have played each other in over 20 years. In 1998, Iran beat the U.S. 2-1 in their first-ever win in the World Cup.
Soccer Football – FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 – Group B – Iran vs United States – Al Thumama Stadium, Doha, Qatar – November 29, 2022 – Iran’s Ali Gholizadeh in action with Antonee Robinson of the U.S.
MATTHEW CHILDS / REUTERS
The game also came at a time of high tension between the two nations: On Monday, a press conference with USA coach Gregg Berhalter and captain Tyler Adams disintegrated into chaos when the two traded barbs with Iranian state media journalists. Adams, who is Black, was criticized for mispronouncing Iran, and one reporter asked him if he feels “OK to be representing the U.S.” when “there is so much discrimination happening against Black people in America.”
Adams responded by saying that the country is “continuing to make progress every single day.”
Throughout the tournament, Iran had faced criticism for the government’s handling of anti-regime protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s “morality police.” The protests, largely led by women and girls, have been the most serious unrest the country’s Islamic cleric rulers have faced since they came to power in 1979, and people across the world have criticized the lethal response.
An Iranian general estimated that around 300 people have been killed so far. The non-governmental organization Iran Human Rights put the number closer to 450 people.
At the World Cup, which was already under scrutiny because of its placement in Qatar, some members of the Iranian team declined to sing the country’s anthem before their game against England.
Earlier in the tournament, the United States Soccer Federation shared an edited version of the Iranian flag on social media. The version of the flag shared removed the emblem of the Islamic Republic from the green, white and red flag, to show “support for the women in Iran fighting for basic human rights.”
Iranian state media called for the USMNT to be removed from the World Cup. The social media posts have since been deleted, and the team’s website and new posts now show the correct flag.
On Monday, a protestor wearing a shirt that read “RESPECT FOR IRANIAN WOMEN” interrupted a game between Portugal and Uruguay. The man, who was not affiliated with any of the teams, was escorted off the field, but it hasn’t been confirmed if he was arrested or charged.
It’s showdown day at the World Cup for Team USA. The United States must win a match against Iran on Tuesday to advance in the tournament.
If they don’t win, the U.S. men’s national team will head home.
Tensions are high, and the tone for the game was set by a fiery news conference Monday where several Iranian state media journalists took aim at the team’s coach and 23-year-old captain Tyler Adams – with questions about immigration, inflation and racism.
A TV reporter called out Adams for mispronouncing Iran, and asked Adams, a Black man, if he is “OK to be representing the U.S.” while there is “so much discrimination happening against Black people in America.”
“My apologies on the mispronunciation of your country,” Adams responded. “That being said, there’s discrimination everywhere you go.”
“In the U.S., we’re, we’re continuing to make progress every single day,” he added.
Adams also said his team is focused on the match against Iran – the first time the countries have faced each other at the World Cup in over two decades.
Back in 1998, Iran’s team handed the U.S. team white roses as a sign of friendship despite political friction. In that game, Iran defeated the U.S. 2-1.
But this year’s tournament takes place as anti-regime protests rock Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” in September. Women and girls have led the widespread unrest, which is the most serious challenge to Iran’s Islamic cleric rulers since they came to power in 1979.
“We empathize 100%, and we do support women’s rights,” said Team USA player Walker Zimmerman.
Before Iran’s first match at the World Cup, some Iranian players refused to sing the anthem of the Islamic Republic – a sign that they don’t support the Iranian regime.
Journalist Grant Wahl said Iran’s players are feeling pressure.
“The Iranian team is not playing as well as they did in World Cup qualifying, and I think part of that is they’re under a lot of stress,” he said.
USA’s midfielder Tyler Adams (R) and coach Gregg Berhalter give a press conference at the Qatar National Convention Center in Doha on November 28, 2022, on the eve of the Qatar 2022 World Cup football match between Iran and USA.
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
The U.S. men’s soccer team faces its make-or-break World Cup match Tuesday night against Iran. If it wins, it advances to the next stage – and if it loses, it’s heading home.
But despite needing to focus on the most important game this team of players has ever faced, the lead-up has been fraught with political drama. On Monday, Team USA’s players sat through a surreal and politically-charged press conference, during which they were bombarded with questions and criticism of their country.
In response to months of violent crackdowns on anti-government protests in Iran, the U.S. Soccer Federation over the weekend briefly made an alteration in its social media posts, showing the Iranian flag without its emblem of the Islamic Republic. The change, the federation said, was made for 24 hours to show support for women protesting for their rights in Iran.
Iran’s flag was changed to its current version in 1980, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution ushered in a theocracy led by conservative Muslim clerics. The U.S. and Iran have been ideological foes with severed diplomatic ties since then.
While many Iranians and activists supportive of the protesters welcomed the U.S. Soccer Federation’s move, saying they associate the Islamic Republic’s emblem with oppression and torture, Iran’s state media slammed it, accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy and grilling the team’s players with political questions during the Monday press event.
A reporter from Iran’s state-controlled Press TV criticized U.S. team captain Tyler Adams for mispronouncing Iran, and asked him how he felt about representing a country that the reporter described as being rife with racial discrimination. Adams is mixed race.
“Are you okay to be representing your country that has so much discrimination against Black people in its own borders?” the Press TV reporter asked.
“My apologies on the mispronunciation of your country,” Adams responded. “That being said, there’s discrimination everywhere you go … in the U.S. we’re continuing to make progress every single day … as long as you make progress that’s the most important thing.”
USA leave a team huddle led by Tyler Adams of USA during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Group B match between England and USA at Al Bayt Stadium on November 25, 2022 in Al Khor, Qatar.
Simon M Bruty | Anychance | Getty Images
Another Iranian state media reporter asked U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter: “What percentage of the world’s population will be happy if Iran wins this match [versus the U.S. team]?”
Berhalter replied, “For us it’s a soccer game against a good team — it’s not much more than that.”
The coach and players seemed intent on avoiding getting into political topics and keeping the discussion on the game, but their efforts were repeatedly ignored.
Iranian coach Carlos Queiroz similarly has tried to keep his comments soccer-focused, despite pointed questions from reporters from various nations, including one on whether the flag drama would serve as motivation for his team.
“If after 42 years in this game as a coach, I still believe I can win games with those mental games, I think I’ve learned nothing about the game,” Queiroz, a Portuguese national, said. “This is not the case.”
The political questions continued, however, even going as far as geopolitics and the U.S. military.
One of the Iranian reporters asked Berhalter: “Sport is something that should bring nations closer together and you are a sportsperson. Why is it that you should not ask your government to take away its military fleet from the Persian Gulf?”
The U.S. team coach replied: “I agree, sport is something that should bring countries together… you get to compete as brothers.”
Ahmad Nourollahi of Iran in action during the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Group B match between England and IR Iran at Khalifa International Stadium on November 21, 2022 in Doha, Qatar.
Richard Sellers | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images
Berhalter was also asked about the U.S.’s strict laws on visas for Iranian nationals, to which he replied: “I don’t know enough about politics, I’m a soccer coach. I’m not well versed on international politics so I can’t comment on that.”
The U.S. team’s coach also apologized for the Iranian flag change, saying that he and his players had no role in the decision and knew nothing about it.
“Sometimes things are out of our control,” Berhalter said. “We’re not focused on those outside things and all we can do is apologize on behalf of the players and the staff, but it’s not something that we were a part of.”
“We had no idea what U.S. Soccer put out. The staff, the players, we had no idea. For us our focus is on this match … Of course our thoughts are with the Iranian people, the whole country, and everyone,” he added.
Protesters gather to demonstrate against the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran on September 23, 2022 in Berlin, Germany.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty Images
U.S. defender Tim Ream said during the conference, “We support women’s rights, and what we’re doing as a team is supporting that while also trying to prepare for the biggest game that this squad has had to date.”
Protests have taken place all over Iran since mid-September, triggered by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody. Amini, a Kurdish Iranian woman, was arrested for allegedly breaking Iran’s strict rules on wearing the hijab, the Islamic head covering for women.
A picture obtained by AFP outside Iran on September 21, 2022, shows Iranian demonstrators burning a rubbish bin in the capital Tehran during a protest for Mahsa Amini, days after she died in police custody. –
– | Afp | Getty Images
Many Iran analysts are calling the uprising the biggest challenge to the Islamic Republic in decades. Ahead of its first World Cup match on Nov. 21, which was against England, the Iranian team refused to sing their national anthem, standing in stoic silence instead. The team did sing the anthem for their second match on Nov. 25, but reports have emerged that they were forced to do so under threat.
The coaches of both teams made references to the last time the U.S. and Iran competed on a World Cup stage, which was in 1998 in France. Iran beat the U.S. 2-1 in a tough game that was dubbed at the time “the mother of all football matches.” The coaches each complimented the other team’s performance.
Iran’s team coach, Queiroz, also said positive things about the U.S. squad’s performance so far in Qatar, where it tied with both Wales and England. He said that the American team had made a “jump from soccer to football.”
“We play a very, very good team, very well organized with the same dream and same goal in mind,” Queiroz said.
Iran players line up for the national anthem prior to the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Group B match between England and IR Iran at Khalifa International Stadium on November 21, 2022 in Doha, Qatar.
Julian Finney | Getty Images
“I hope tomorrow my boys will be able to put together their heads, their souls, their skills and the will to win. I hope that they will get the result that gives us a passport for the second round.”
Berhalter similarly praised the Iranian team’s 1998 performance. “Iran wanted to win the game with everything — they played really committed, really focused from the first whistle. For us to win the game tomorrow that’s going to have to be the mindset of our group … We don’t want to make the mistakes of the past.”
As for Tuesday’s match, Berhalter said: “We win or we’re out of the World Cup. Anytime you’re in a World Cup and you get to go into the last group game in control of your own destiny, that’s a pretty good thing.”
By the time he wrapped his press conference in Qatar on Monday, United States men’s national team coach Gregg Berhalter cut the figure of an embattled head of state, not someone trying to stave off elimination from the World Cup. On the eve of a win-or-go-home match, Berhalter and team captain Tyler Adams were grilled by Iranian journalists about US policy on immigration and the country’s military presence in the Persian Gulf. One reporter took Adams to task with a question about discrimination in America, while Berhalter was asked whether inflation might be hindering the team’s support back home.
Berhalter and Adams fielded some questions about the USMNT’s next opponent, but tactical analysis tends to get overshadowed when that opponent is Iran. In a World Cup where it has proven nearly impossible to stick to sports, Tuesday’s match between the United States and Iran is the most politically charged contest yet, the ultimate tempest in an unusually fraught tournament. Given the long-standing hostilities between the two countries, the match was always bound to invite geopolitical story lines, but now it is set against the backdrop of monthslong demonstrations in Iran triggered by the arrest and death of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini. The Iranian government’s violent crackdown on its own people has cast a shadow over its national team’s World Cup campaign, creating a red-hot atmosphere in Qatar for both players and fans. The United States Soccer Federation waded into the political upheaval this week when it posted a now deleted graphic on social media of the Iranian flag that did not include the emblem of the Islamic Republic, a gesture meant to show solidarity with the protesters. Iran’s own soccer federation responded by calling for the US to be expelled from the World Cup.
That set the stage for Monday’s strange press conference, where Iranian journalists repeatedly confronted Berhalter and Adams, both of whom tried gamely to steer the questions back to the game itself. “We support Iran’s people and Iran’s team,” Adams said. “But that being said, we’re laser-focused on this match, as they are as well.”
Adams was promptly scolded by a reporter from Press TV, an Iranian government-affiliated outlet, who pointed out that the 23-year-old midfielder was “pronouncing our country’s name wrong.”
“Our country is named eee-ron, not I-ran,” the reporter said, before asking Adams, who is Black, whether he is “okay to be representing a country that has so much discrimination against Black people in his own borders.”
Adams apologized for the mispronunciation. “There’s discrimination everywhere you go,” Adams said. “One thing that I’ve learned, especially from living abroad in the past years, and having to fit in in different cultures is that in the US, we’re continuing to make progress every single day.” Adams said his experience, growing up African American in a white family, made it easier for him to assimilate in different cultures and touted the importance of education in gaining a better understanding of others.
“You just educated me now on the pronunciation of your country,” he continued. “So yeah, it’s a process, I think as long as you see progress, that’s the most important thing.”
Berhalter, meanwhile, stressed that neither he nor his players were aware of the US Soccer Federation’s social media post. “All we can do, on our behalf, is apologize on behalf of the players and the staff,” he said.
The Iranian national team hasn’t avoided the fray either, of course. Since September, the country has been roiled by protests inspired by Amini, a 22-year-old who died in Iranian police custody after being arrested for violating the country’s law that requires head coverings for women. The Iranian government has been under international pressure for its brutal response to demonstrators; the United Nations estimates more than 14,000 have been detained for protesting, hundreds have been killed, and more are at risk of being tortured. Before their opening World Cup match against England last week, Iran’s players staged a silent protest by not singing the country’s national anthem. After reportedly receiving “fierce criticism from government officials,” the players participated in the singing of the anthem before their win on Friday against Wales, but the victory was marred by clashes outside the stadium between pro-government Iranian fans and those supporting the protests. One of Iran’s players dedicated his goal against Wales to the “suffering” people of Iran. Last Friday, the Iranian government arrested an outspoken Iranian Kurdish soccer player, who had not made the national team, on charges of “incitement against the regime.”
Even without all the political strife, Tuesday’s match would hardly be short on drama. The final group stage game for both teams, it also offers plenty of enthralling sporting subplots. With a win, the US will advance to the knockout rounds after failing to qualify for the World Cup four years ago. Iran is likewise guaranteed to go through with a victory, but a draw could also be sufficient. The United States will also be searching for its first win against Iran in what will be the third overall meeting between the two countries.
Their first match came at the 1998 World Cup in France, where a 2–1 victory for the Iranians caused the US to crash out of the tournament. That game was just 17 years removed from the Iranian hostage crisis. “The Iranian regime hated America. That’s why that game was such a big game on the world stage, and had so much importance. Equally as much as the football piece was the political piece,” saidSteve Sampson, who was US national team coach at the time.
The 1998 match was also preceded by friction between the two camps. Iran’s political leadership had apparently instructed the national team to not shake hands with the US players prior to the match, as is customary at a World Cup, but tournament organizers held firm. “They said if you don’t want to participate in the rules in a tournament, you’re free to go home,” recalledHank Steinbrecher, then the secretary general of US Soccer.
Adams and his teammates are surely less concerned about that history than the immediate implications of Tuesday’s match. None of the players were alive when the US and Iran severed diplomatic ties in 1980, and few have memories of the 1998 match. “I wasn’t born yet,” Adams said at Monday’s press conference, “so, don’t remember it.”
BAGHDAD — The niece of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni is calling on people to pressure their governments to cut ties with Tehran over it’s violent suppression of anti-government protests.
In a video posted online by her France-based brother, Farideh Moradkhani, urged “conscientious people of the world” to support Iranian protesters. The video was shared online this week after Moradkhani’s reported arrest on Nov. 23, according to U.S.-based rights monitor HRANA.
Moradkhani is a long-time activist who’s late father was an opposition figure married to Khamenei’s sister is the closest member of the supreme leader’s family to be arrested. The branch of the family have opposted Khamenei for decades and Moradkhani has been imprisoned on previous occasions for her activism.
“I ask the conscientious people of the world to stand by us and ask their governments not to react with empty words and slogans but with real action and stop any dealings with this regime,” she said in her video statement.
The protests, now in their third month, have faced a brutal crackdown by Iranian security forces using live ammunition, rubber bullets and tear gas to suppress demonstrations. At least 451 people have been killed, including 63 minors, according to HRANA. Another 18,173 have been detained, the rights monitor reports.
Despite the crackdown, demonstrations are ongoing and scattered across cities.
The unrest was sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody in Tehran for violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code. It has quickly morphed into the most serious challenge to Iran’s establishment since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iran also said it would not cooperate with any U.N. fact-finding mission to investigate the deadly crackdown on protests, Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said on Monday. The U.N. Human Rights Council voted to set up the mission last week.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will not engage in any cooperation, whatsoever, with the political committee called the ‘fact-finding committee’” Kanaani said.
Iran’s Supreme Leader has praised the country’s Basij paramilitary force for its role in the deadly crackdown on anti-regime protesters.
Meeting with Basij personnel in Tehran Saturday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the popular protest movement as “rioters” and “thugs” backed by foreign forces and praised “innocent” Basij fighters for protecting the nation.
The Basij is a wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard deployed to the streets as protests have swelled since September.
The protest movement was initially sparked by the death of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police.
Amnesty International says the Basij have been ordered to “mercilessly confront” protesters.
“When facing the enemy on the field of battle the Basij has always shown itself to be courageous, not afraid of the enemy,” the Supreme Leader said Saturday.
“You saw in the most recent events, our innocent and oppressed Basijis became the targets of oppression so that they wouldn’t allow the nation to become the targets of rioters and thugs and those on the [enemy] payroll, whether wittingly or unwittingly. They gave of themselves to free others,” Khamenei said.
Khamenei’s words come a day after United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Chief Volker Turk warned Iran is in a “full-fledged human rights crisis” due to the clampdown on anti-regime dissidents.
Turk called for “independent, impartial and transparent investigative processes” into violations of human rights in Iran during a special session of the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday.
He told the 47-member states council in Geneva that security forces have reportedly responded to protests by using lethal force against unarmed demonstrators and bystanders who posed “no threat.”
More than 14,000 people, including children, have been arrested in connection with the protests, according to Turk. He said that at least 21 of them currently face the death penalty and six have already received death sentences.
Among those arrested are two well-known Iranian actors, Hengameh Ghaziani and Katayoun Riahi, who were taken into custody on separate occasions for publicly backing the nationwide protests, according to the semi-official Tasnim News Agency.
The Islamic Republic has been gripped by a wave of anti-government protests sparked by the death of Amini allegedly for not wearing her hijab properly.
Authorities have since unleashed a deadly crackdown on demonstrators, with reports of forced detentions and physical abuse being used to target the country’s Kurdish minority group. In a recent CNN investigation, covert testimony revealed sexual violence against protesters, including boys, in Iran’s detention centers since the start of the unrest.
The unprecedented national uprising has taken hold of more than 150 cities and 140 universities in all 31 provinces of Iran, according to Turk.
The violent response of Iran’s security forces toward protesters has shaken diplomatic ties between Tehran and Western leaders.
The White House on Wednesday imposed its latest round of sanctions on three officials in Iran’s Kurdish region, after US Secretary Antony Blinken said he was “greatly concerned that Iranian authorities are reportedly escalating violence against protesters.”
During an interview with Indian broadcaster NDTV on Thursday, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani said foreign powers were intervening in Iranian internal affairs and creating “fallacious narratives.”
Fans at the World Cup said the stadium barred them from entering with shirts and flags protesting the regime in Iran. Inside, security officials were also seen confronting a woman over her jersey, which read Mahsa Amini, whose death in Iranian custody sparked the unrest. Roxana Saberi has the story.
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