Iran-Backed Forces In Syria Behind Drug War Along Border – Jordan

The fighter jet crashed Tuesday morning at the Anarak training site located at the edge of Iran’s central desert of Dasht-e Kavir, some 200 kilometers east of the city of Esfahan.

Esfahan province's deputy governor Mohammad-Reza Jannessari said the aircraft was on a training mission.

The two killed pilots were identified as Lieutenant Colonel Qasem Zamani and First Lieutenant Mohammad Javad Baay from Esfahan’s tactical air base.

The Army’s public relations manager in the region, Colonel Mohammadi, told ISNA that the accident happened due to a technical problem, adding that further investigations are also underway.

Iran’s F-7 fighters are believed to have been modeled after China’s jet Chengdu J-7, whose third-generation export version is called F-7 and is considered a copy of the Soviet-era MiG-21. Beijing built the aircraft for export to countries including Pakistan, Iran, Sudan and North Korea. Iran has long been using the aircraft for training.

Iran’s air force has an assortment of Russian and US-made military aircraft purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution which are not considered to be in optimal condition as decades of Western sanctions have made it hard to maintain the aging fleet.

In February, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet crashed into a soccer stadium in the northwest city of Tabriz, killing a civilian and its two pilots.

Four years ago, another F-7 similarly crashed near Esfahan during an aerial exercise due to what was later described as a technical problem.

According to a shipping report seen by Reuters on Monday and vessel tracking data, Iran-flagged Suezmax tanker Silvia I, owned and operated by National Iranian Tanker Company, arrived on Sunday to an anchorage area near Venezuela's Amuay port.

The vessel departed in early April from Khor Fakkan, on the Gulf of Oman, and switched off its transponder when navigating near the Cape of Good Hope towards the Atlantic Ocean, according to Refinitiv Eikon monitoring data.

Weeks later, the vessel was seen in satellite pictures close to Venezuela's largest port, the Jose terminal, according to monitoring service TankerTrackers.com.

Iran and Venezuela, which have recently expanded a swap agreement signed last year, have increased the supply of Iranian heavy crude to Venezuela's El Palito refinery and Paraguana Refining Center (CRP).

Despite potential oil market competition, Iranian firms are planning to revamp Venezuela’s largest oil refinery in a deal that would deepen an energy relationship which has become a lifeline for Venezuela’s dilapidated oil industry amid a crisis caused by decades of mismanagement and lack of investments.

However, Iran’s Sharq newspaper reported on Sunday that Iran’s energy dealings with its South American ally have backfired, as Venezuela’s discounted oil exports have increased potentially taking market share from Iran.

Both countries are under American sanctions and try to sell their oil by illicit shipments mostly to China, which has increased its purchases since early 2021. Iranians do not hide that China is buying their oil, but the quantity and price remain a state secret.

According to the latest annual report by the Amnesty International published on Tuesday, executions surged 20 percent in 2021 led by China and Iran while the number of death sentences handed down increased by 40 percent.

At least 579 people were killed by states across 18 countries while at least 2,052 were given a death sentence. The figures do not include China, North Korea and Vietnam, where thousands are thought to be executed or sentenced to death each year secretly.

“The increase in executions was primarily driven by rises in the yearly figure for Iran (from at least 246 in 2020 to at least 314 in 2021, a 28-percent increase), which was the highest figure on record since 2017,” the report said.

“The spike in Iran appeared particularly for executions of people convicted of drug-related offences (132), which represented 42 percent of the total and constituted a more than five-fold rise from 2020” -- a flagrant violation of international law which prohibits use of the death penalty for crimes other than those involving intentional killing, the rights group said.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia more than doubled its number of executions, a grim trend that continued in 2022 with the execution of 81 people in a single day in March.

According to figures compiled by two advocacy groups -- Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) and Paris-based Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort or ECPM (Together Against the Death Penalty) -- the number of executions in Iran doubled in the second half of 2021, around the time when President Ebrahim Raisi took office.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who returned to London in March along with another dual national after Britain repaid a historic debt of £400 million, said on Monday that she signed the statement "under duress" as a condition of her release after about six years of imprisonment on trumped-up spying charges, expressing worries that Tehran would use the “confession” against her in the future.

Saying that the whole process of signing the forced confession was filmed, she said, “It’s a tool. So, I’m sure they will show that someday.”

She told the BBC that she was taken to the airport by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards without seeing her parents, adding, “Instead I was made to sign the forced confession at the airport in the presence of the British government”.

The former prisoner said she wanted to make sure people knew she had been forced to sign, to prevent the Iranian regime from exploiting her "dehumanizing" confession, which is “just propaganda for the Iranian regime to show how scary they are, and they can do whatever they want to do.”

Iran is holding several Western prisoners in what human rights organizations have dubbed hostage diplomacy, accusing the Islamic Republic of holding dual-nationals as bargaining chips for money or leverage in negotiations with the West, something Tehran denies.

The source, a European security official, who spoke to Iran International on condition of anonymity said Hassan Sayyad-Khodaei who was shot in front of his house in Tehran in broad daylight Sunday had been involved in a number of terrorist operations against Israelis in three continents including Asia, Europe, and Africa including an attack in the Indian capital, New Delhi, on February 13, 2012.

The intelligence source also told Iran International that Sayyad-Khodaei tried not to attract attention to himself as an intelligence agent and avoided wearing the IRGC uniform. According to the source, Sayyad-Khodaei who went by the alias Shekarchi was fluent in regional languages including Turkish, Kurdish, and Arabic.

“Sayyad-Khodaei was responsible for the work on the ground when the Qods Force’s secretive Unit 840 tasked him with carrying out missions,” the source said.

In the 2012 New Delhi attack, the explosion of a magnetic bomb attached to the car used by the wife of Israel’s defense attaché wounded her and his driver.

Israeli and Indian media at the time said a motorcyclist had placed the explosive device on the vehicle and pointed out that the attack resembled some of the attacks that had killed four of Iran’s nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2012.

Two of the attacks on Iran’s nuclear scientists were carried out with magnetic bombs attached to their cars.

Yoram Cohen, then chief of Israel’s security agency Shin Bet, also accused Iran of trying to take revenge for covert operations, including the assassinations of its nuclear scientists.

On the same day as the New Delhi attack in 2012, other operations against Israeli targets, allegedly by Iranian agents, were uncovered and aborted in Tbilisi, Georgia, and several Central Asian countries.

Then prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, immediately blamed Iran for the bombs aimed at Israeli Embassy personnel in the Indian capital, New Delhi and Tbilisi.

Two days later, on February 14, a series of explosions against Israeli diplomats occurred in Bangkok, Thailand, for which the Thai authorities blamed Iranian nationals. One of the suspects, Saeed Moradi, was seriously injured before the operations were carried out when the bomb meant for the attack exploded at his rented house and injured him. He sustained further injuries during a standoff with the Thai police when a grenade he threw at the police bounced off a tree and severed both his legs.

Moradi was convicted in court for attempting to kill an Israeli diplomat and was sentenced to life. Moradi and his two co-conspirators were freed from Thai prison in November 2020 in exchange for Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British prisoner in Iran. They received heroes' welcome upon their arrival to Tehran.

“The Qods Force chose individuals without any connection to the IRGC for these operations. They were civilians who had not had proper military training. Sayyad-Khodaei was responsible for establishing contact with criminals including drug traffickers to carry out such operations on its behalf,” the source told Iran International.

He added that Mansour Rasouli, who was reportedly interrogated by the Mossad a year ago inside Iran, was among the individuals recruited by Khodaei to kill Israelis and others in countries including Turkey and Germany.

On April 30, Israeli media, including Channel 12, released an audio recording with the photo of a man introduced as Iranian national Mansour Rasouli, 52, who they claimed the Mossad had interrogated inside Iran. Israeli media did not provide a source for the audio file that they said Mossad operatives posing as Iranian secret service recorded at Rasouli's home in Iran.

The recording surfaced hours after Iran International's report of an alleged Iranian triple assassination plot. Iran International's diplomatic sources had said a member of the IRGC'S Qods Force had been detained in an unnamed European country for assassination plots in Germany, France and Turkey.

In an audio tape released in early May, a man who introduced himself as Rasouli claimed he had been taken by unknown agents and been coerced to make the confessions in the audio recording.