For The Second Time In Two Days, Israel Hits Iranian Targets In Syria

Resignations began when Vahid Karimipour, a professor of quantum physics at Sharif University of Technology (SUT), published an open letter to say he had been summoned by an “external body” to “discuss” matters related to the university.

“I’d welcome any such discussion in my office,” he wrote, “but I find the order to appear in an institution outside the university is disrespectful to all professors.”

Karimipour did not offer any more details. But to call in people for a ‘conversation’ is standard practice for various intelligence organs in Iran. It is intended and understood as a threat, which may be followed by detainment.

Shortly after Karimipour published his resignation letter, four other members of the elected council resigned. Another member had been sacked by the university a few weeks ago, leaving the seven-member council with only one member standing.

The mass resignation is remarkable since academics in Iran tend to not express political opinions. Higher education institutions in Iran are state owned and state controlled. Professors, even tenured and well established, are not safe in their jobs as is customary in most other countries.

“You should think of professors as government employees… many are on fixed-term contracts these days, which makes their position all the more precarious,” a faculty member at SUT told Iran International on condition of anonymity.

At least 110 academics have been sacked from universities across Iran in the last year.

“They call it khales-sazi,” the SUT professor said, “which could be translated as purification or refinement. But it should be translated as cleansing, as in ethnic cleansing, because that’s what it is: to force out the people you don’t like and replace them with your own people. That’s what they used to call it, in fact, right after the revolution.”

‘Cleansing’ universities began almost immediately after Islamists took power in 1979. It was part of a much larger project by the revolution's leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his aides to stifle freedom of expression and establish a monopoly of the ‘narrative’, be it social, historical, artistic, or even economic.

They called it the Cultural Revolution.

In the four decades since then, hundreds of academics have been sacked in waves of purges that rose and subsided but never stopped.

The latest wave seems to be a direct result of the 2022 protests, which began in mid-September 2022, coinciding with the beginning of the academic year. Universities became a hotbed of protests with students refusing to attend classes and chanting against the regime.

Security and intelligence organs hit back with mass arrests and brutal force. SUT was particularly targeted and bruised badly.

On October 2, 2022, security forces and thugs layed siege to the campus. Earlier that day, a video had gone viral of a group of SUT students chanting a harsh, explicit slogan against the Supreme Leader. Having blocked all exits, the thugs attacked students, injuring and arresting dozens.

This year, to prevent student rallies on the anniversary of the protests, the authorities took a variety of measures, adding guards, installing cameras, summoning and suspending students, even changing the academic calendar to ensure campus was not busy in mid-September.

The ‘cleansing’ of professors is yet another attempt to 'tame’ the campuses. It has become so widespread and so crass that a cautious figure like the former president Hassa Rouhani has come out against it.

On the other hand, however, hardline lawmakers have demanded even harsher measures against academics who step “out of line.”

“A member of faculty is employed to advance the system’s objectives,” said Fereydoon Abbasi, a hardline MP who once headed Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, “a professor has to teach students according to the system’s objectives and conduct research on topics that the system wants.”

With such sentiments prevalent among the Islamic Republic’s officials, it is likely that many more members of faculty will be sacked in the next few weeks, often on false administrative pretenses.

“The bottom line is, they don’t like universities,” the SUT professor concluded, “they don’t like the spirit, the liveliness, the curiosity. University is where you learn, or you are supposed to learn, to think critically. And critical thinking is anathema to the Islamic Republic.”

Al-Ittihad football (soccer) club players did not leave their dressing-room because a statue of Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was placed at the entrance to the pitch at Esfahan’s Naghsh-e- Jahan Stadium. The team went directly to the airport and left for Saudi Arabia. 

The game was postponed by officials at the stadium, where around 60,000 fans had turned out to see Sepahan take on an Al-Ittihad starting line-up that was due to include former Premier League stars Ngolo Kante and Fabinho.

The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) said the game had been "cancelled due to unanticipated and unforeseen circumstances". 

"The AFC reiterates its commitment towards ensuring the safety and security of the players, match officials, spectators, and all stakeholders involved," the body said in a statement. "This matter will now be referred to the relevant committees."

Qassem Soleimani was a key figure in Iran's external military and intelligence operations, responsible for supporting and organizing militant proxy forces, including Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militia groups that have engaged in hostilities against US forces in the region. He was killed near Baghdad airport in a United States drone strike in January 2020. 

Introduced as a hero, he is viewed as a martyr by the country's ruling regime, which has erected dozens of statues of him all across the country. It has also set up numerous annual events to commemorate the general of the IRGC’s Quds Force, which has been a threat to the US and its partners in the region, including Israel and Saudi Arabia. 

Opposing the regime’s mystification and heroization of Soleimani, who formed several regional militia groups aligned to the regime in Tehran, Iranians have set fire to or destroyed his statues and banners as an icon of the Islamic autocracy. 

Photographs from the stadium published on social media showed a bust of Soleimani had been placed at the entrance to the pitch and would have been in full view of the players as they exited the tunnel.

In June, visiting Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan also walked out of the room at Iran’s foreign ministry building – where a news conference was being held -- in protest to a picture of the IRGC general, the architect of proxy wars in the Middle East, including arming Yemen’s Houthis against Saudi Arabia.

Prince Faisal immediately requested the venue of the press conference to be changed and the Iranian side complied in a bid not to tarnish the newly revived relations between the two countries after years of tension which isolated the Iranian régime in the region.

Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been strained and this year's Asian football Champions League is the first since 2016 in which clubs from both nations have been permitted to play one another home and away. Matches between clubs from the two nations were previously played on neutral territory due to security concerns.

Maryam Lotfi was apprehended while investigating the case of the young girl who was using the metro with her friends on Sunday without wearing their hijab, when an altercation with law enforcement authorities caused her to fall and hit her head on an iron bar, according to Farzad Saifi-Karan, a correspondent for the Radio Zamaneh website. On Monday night reports surfaced that Lotfi was released.

The young girl was transported to Fajr Air Force hospital and the CEO of Tehran Metro, Masoud Darabzadeh, confirmed she had been administered "life-saving" measures. The hospital has since been surrounded by heightened security as the case continues to draw concern, for both the victim and the imprisoned journalist, the latest in a list of scores of journalists imprisoned during the last year's uprising.

Footage released of the incident fails to give a clear picture, in spite of mass surveillance camera coverage across the metro and the city at large, showing only a cropped video from outside the train car depicting a group of unveiled teenage girls entering the car and later passengers assisting an unconscious girl. No footage from potential cameras inside the metro car has been made available thus far.

On Monday, Darabzadeh denied any wrongdoing and declared that the girl's loss of consciousness was caused by a "sudden drop in blood pressure." He rejected claims of any altercations between staff and the young girl.

It is unclear which authority exactly was involved in the altercation nor that responsible for the arrest of Maryam Lofti for her reporting on the incident which has chilling echoes of the case of young Mahsa Amini who died in the hands of morality police for the inappropriate wearing of her headscarf.

During a press briefing on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani was asked about the joint report by Iran International and Semafor revealing that several individuals closely connected to President Joe Biden's former Iran special envoy, Robert Malley, were part of an influence network established by Iran's foreign ministry. 

Kanaani dodged a direct answer but attempted to portray the issue as part of domestic US politics, saying, "We do not wish to comment on issues that are raised in the competition between political parties in the United States, and we leave these matters to the internal parties in the United States."

He claimed that the revelation is playing an “Iran card” in the domestic politics of the US,” without further explanation. It took a week for Iran’s foreign ministry to come up with this response. However, the investigative report did not involve US domestic politics and was about its foreign policy issues, directly relating to Iran.

Media in Iran have also started to analyze the repercussions of the compromised network of the Islamic Republic’s “Soft War” which has revealed deep holes in the regime's so-called watertight secrecy. 

Faraz Daily, an online pro-reform newspaper based, raised a series of questions, such as who leaked the correspondence between the Iran analysts and Iran’s Foreign Ministry officials. Iran International’s Bozorgmehr Sharafedin combed through thousands of emails from Iranian diplomats to reveal the Islamic Republic's network of academics and journalists under the aegis of the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), established by the Iranian foreign ministry in 2014.

The IEI members simultaneously worked for top Western think tanks and gave advice to the US and Europe. At least three individuals, namely Ariane Tabatabai, Ali Vaez, and Dina Esfandiari, were, or later became, key aides to Robert Malley, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance.

Out of the individuals exposed in the report, only one, Ariane Tabatabai, is still a US government employee. She holds the position of Chief of Staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, a high-ranking role with access to top-secret information. Dozens of US senators have demanded her security clearance be revoked.

Faraz Daily also claimed that the revelation was also welcomed by Iranian hardliners who seek to tarnish the efforts by [former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad] Zarif, a figure in Iran’s political sphere known as an advocate of diplomacy with the US. “They (hardliners) have always been pursuing the elimination of Zarif and diminishing his influence,” the outlet stated.

Faraz Daily also highlighted the timing of the report that came out amid rumors of negotiations between Iran and the United States, implying that it was aimed at stifling the efforts of diplomatic ties between the two. Sharafedin, the writer of the investigative report, has said in several interviews that the data was available to them for months but the fact-checking process delayed the publication of the report. 

Conservative online magazine Tablet published an article Monday titled “High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington,” opening with how the Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy “helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments.” 

Even at home, Iranian reformist newspaper Ham-Mihan described the report as an effort to smother secret Iran-US talks and tried to whitewash the analysts exposed in the report as well as all other Iranian-American individuals who are trying to promote relations between the US and the Islamic Republic. The daily cited several pundits to justify that “lobbying” for Iran is different from “infiltration.” 

Quoting Jahanbakhsh Izadi, a university professor in Iran, Ham-Mihan said, "Direct negotiations between Iran and the United States have always existed since the beginning of the Islamic Republic, but this issue has often been hidden.” 

Another pundit, Mehdi Zakerian, said that if a country seeks to exert influence in another country and impact its policymaking to secure greater gains using influential individuals, “we no longer call this infiltration, we refer to it as lobbying," which he said could be done by figures "from athletes, artists, and journalists to university professors and researchers". 

Izadi underlined that "Lobbying is a widely accepted principle in international politics... and is considered legal in many countries, including the United States." He apparently ignored the fact that to be a lobbyist in the US, one must be registered as one and have a contract for it, not like the analysts exposed in the report who claimed neutrality and independence. 

London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat said in an article Sunday that the report provided details and evidence for an “open secret” that “the Iranian lobby is real and has been operating in Washington since the Obama years.” 

“The experts were the liaison between the US and Iran when the nuclear negotiations kicked off. Their role was to bolster Iran’s image and drown out critical voices in Washington,” read the article, adding: “The question now is, has the network succeeded? Has the IEI succeeded in deceiving American and European officials? I believe the Democrats, especially those affiliated to Obama, wanted to be deceived.” 

Iran International continues to be stonewalled, declined comments from key figures and institutions in the unraveling web including Iran’s Foreign Ministry, its in-house think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), and former foreign minister Javad Zarif who was the mastermind of the network. Others approached include Mostafa Zahrani, a former director general of strategic affairs in the foreign ministry and an advisor to Zarif, and Saeed Khatibzadeh, a diplomat and an IPIS member.

In a typical regime slanted speech, Ebrahim Raisi claimed on Monday that Westerners “are not genuinely advocating for women's rights or human rights,” meanwhile the government's repressive measures continue to deepen, with punishments against hijab rebels including fines, imprisonment and bans from public spaces.

Speaking at a festival in Tehran, Raisi went as far as to claim that "Iran considers itself a champion of human rights", ignoring the Women, Life, Freedom movement which has grown in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini who died in morality police custody for the inappropriate wearing of her hijab.

Since the inception of the movement, tens of thousands of girls and women have chosen to remove their compulsory hijabs. The Iranian government aims to criminalize hijab defiance, but no branch of the government wants to bear sole responsibility for the potential societal complications arising from such a provocative action.

Innumerable women have been imprisoned and sexually abused as a state-sanctioned punishment across Iran as state crackdowns have become harsher as the last year of uprising continued. New 'hijab and chastity' laws are set to come into force with ever more strict punishments for hijab rebels.

Human rights advocates have warned that the implementation of this law could result in increased violence, harassment, and arbitrary detentions of women and girls in Iran, and the United Nations has branded it gender apartheid.