IDF Denies Iran’s Reports About Israeli Security Forces Failure

Among those sanctioned are former Army Chief of Staff George Casey and former President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Almost all the people named were officials who served during Trump's administration, which imposed sanctions on Iranian officials, politicians and companies and withdrew the United States from Iran's nuclear agreement with world powers.

In a statement carried by local media, the Iranian Foreign Ministry accused the sanctioned Americans - who also included several business figures and politicians - of supporting "terrorist groups and terrorist acts" against Iran, and Israel's "repressive acts" in the region and against Palestinians.

Eleven months of indirect talks between Iran and the United States in Vienna on salvaging the 2015 deal have stalled as both sides say political decisions are required by Tehran and Washington to settle the remaining issues.

Gen. Austin Scott Miller, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and several former ambassadors are among the officials targeted by the new Iranian sanctions.

In a similar move announced in January, Iran imposed sanctions on 51 Americans, many of them from the U.S. military, over the 2020 killing of General Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike in Iraq.

Last year, it imposed sanctions on Trump and several senior US officials.

Sharq newspaper and others reported Saturday that the Ramadan dinner, or Iftar, scheduled for Friday was cancelled after “99 percent” of artists, actors and film industry personalities declined invitations using various excuses, such as the Covid pandemic, travel or other reasons.

The government’s official news website IRNA strongly denied the reports as “complete fabrication”, insisting that the Iftar was cancelled due to high air pollution in Tehran. IRNA added that the dinner was supposed to be served in an open courtyard of the presidential complex but due to pollution it was decided to hold indoors, but the space was too small for accommodating 170 guests.

Sharq, however, emphasized that the real reason for the cancellation was the refusal of most invitees to attend.

The Iftar invitation by the president for artists and cinema figures has become an annual tradition in recent years. In 2018, many declined the invitation by then-president Hassan Rouhani, saying that he had not fulfilled his election promises.

Raisi’s leadership is being sharply criticized in the media, as Iran’s economic conditions deteriorate, and food prices continue to rise. Reports say that many working class people cannot afford even bread and buy it with a promise to bakeries to pay later.

HRANA reported that those sentenced were arrested in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari province in 2015 during protests against plans to transfer water from their town, and were holding a symbolic mourning ceremony for the drying up of a spring.

After a complaint by Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the engineering and construction arm of the Revolutionary Guard, the protestors were sentenced to up to seven years in prison and 74 lashes on charges of disturbing public order and destroying public property. They denied the charges.

Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari, a traditionally water-rich region in the Zagros mountains, has seen its water resources decline due to both drought and projects to irrigate arid regions. Protests in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari broke out again last year in response to demonstrations in Esfahan over the drying up of the Zayandeh Roud river, which rises in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari.

Drought and desertification across the Middle East in recent years has fed tensions between and within states over water. The government’s encouragement of water-intensive industries in Yazd, east of Esfahan, diverting water, has also contributed to farmers in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari facing shortages.

Speaking to Iran International TV on Friday, Narges Mohammadi said Western sanctions have failed to weaken Iran's oppressive regime but led to a "disastrous weakening of the Iranian middle class as the driving force of democracy".

The sanctions failed, she argued, because they were not "targeted" and Western politicians did not have adequate knowledge of the Islamic Republic system.

"It appears that the West lacks a proper understanding of the hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic and that it is a dictatorial government with systemic financial corruption that can use various tools [of repression]," she told Iran International.

There has been huge social media controversy over Mohammadi's views over sanctions after a Washington Post opinion article Wednesday referring to interviews with her in which she said sanctions weaken Iran’s civil society.

Critics attacked Mohammadi accusing her of defending the lifting of US sanctions, and her approach benefits the regime and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) which is also under US sanctions.

The controversy gained more attention among Iranians because the Washington Post article coincided with Iran’s demand from the Biden administration to remove the IRGC from its foreign terrorist list as a condition for the revival of the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Mohammadi told Iran International that in the interview with the Washington Post she had said that she considers the IRGC as an oppressive force and a violator of human rights and that it must be targeted by the international community by various means including sanctions but not all her comments had been included in the article.

Mohammadi also explained that she believes the international community has the duty to target "any person or group" in the Islamic Republic that violates human rights to support the Iranian people and civil society and one of the ways to target the violators is using sanctions.

Mohammadi added that the IRGC's "political, terroristic, and economic investments and activities", both inside and outside the country, result in oppression of the Iranian civil society and therefore it must be placed on the list of "targeted" international sanctions along with other entities of the Islamic Republic that violate human rights such as its Judiciary and Police.

Some harshly attacked her integrity and questioned her honesty as a regime critic, while others said she should have been more careful during the interview with the author of the Washington Post opinion article, Jason Rezaian.

Mohammadi has an eight-year sentence hanging over her head for supposed “crimes against national security”, for her activities as a human rights activist and may be hauled off to prison any moment to serve it.

Cofounder and chair of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, Mohammadi has been to jail several times over the past two decades. She was freed from Evin prison in September 2020 after serving five and half years when she had no contact with her husband and children for long periods of time.

But one of Mohammadi's supporters in a tweet Thursday said she could not understand why she was criticized so strongly. "She has said that sanctions destroy the civil society. Do you doubt this statement? wrote Banafsheh Jamali, a feminist activist. "People are not going to have any demands other than economic ones when they are in dire need of food to survive," she added.

Some argue that it is difficult to put in place effective sanctions that do not lead to economic pressure on the people, and mention the example of Russia. If the government is supposed to be pressured to stop a certain behavior, it must feel economic pressure, which invariably also impacts the people.

Others say that the civil society Mohammadi refers to has not been able to reform the Islamic Republic and has been badly suppressed, so sanctions are the remaining tool to bring about a change.

In a letter led by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, 11 senators told President Joe Biden that his new nuclear deal with Iran will provide the regime with a pathway to nuclear weapons and warned of major negative regional implications of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Stressing the necessity for a course-direction, they said, the new agreement “would put at risk the existence of the State of Israel and the governments of our Arab allies, destroy America’s position in the Middle East, and ultimately threaten the US homeland”.

The senators also warned of the grave threats of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, its support for terrorism, and other destabilizing activities in the Middle East.

“The Iranian regime arms the Houthis in Yemen with the missiles and drones that they use to attack civilian targets in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates”, they wrote, adding that “Iran equips Hezbollah and Hamas with tens of thousands of rockets”.

They also highlighted the escalation of attacks against Americans in Iraq, particularly the ballistic missile attack near the US consulate in Erbil.

Iran has demanded that its Revolutionary Guard be removed from the US list of terrorist organizations, a move that many say put Iran and Israel on a collision course.