EU Council Announces Further Sanctions Over Iran’s UAV Program
A view shows the logo of the European Council in Brussels, Belgium March 23, 2023.
The EU Council has sanctioned six Iranian people and three entities for involvement in Tehran’s UAV program,supplying Russia for its invasion of Ukraine or armed groups in the Middle East and Red Sea region.
Sanctioned individuals include Iran’s Defense Minister Mohammad-Reza Gharaei Ashtiani; Commander of Revolutionary Guards' extraterritorial Qods Force Esmail Qaani; Afshin Khaji Fard, who heads the Iranian Aviation Industries Organization (IAIO); Kavan Electronics Behrad LLC CEO Mehdi Dehghani Mohammadabadi;its board chair Hossein Hatefi Ardakani; and Gholam Ali Rashid, the commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters.
The entities listed in the new measure are the IRGC Navy, IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, and Kavan Electronics Behrad LLC, which procures and sells components for manufacturing UAVs.
The European Council also strongly and unequivocally condemned the Iranian attack on Israel and affirmed its full solidarity with the people of Israel and commitment to Israel's security and to regional stability.
The Council also called on Iran and its proxies to cease all attacks that have escalated following Hamas October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the current Middle East conflict.
“The European Council stated that Russia’s access to sensitive items and technologies with battlefield relevance must be restricted to the maximum extent possible, including by targeting entities in third countries enabling the circumvention of sanctions.”
The European Council also called on the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and on the Commission “to prepare further sanctions, notably on Iran.”
Abdolnasser Hemmati, the former governor of the Central Bank of Iran and a so-called ‘reformist’ politician, registered to run for president in Iran’s June 28 snap election in his second attempt.
After registration at the Iranian Interior Ministry headquarters in Tehran on Friday, he told reporters that despite the challenges Iran faces, “I remain optimistic about the future.” "My hope is reinforced every day when I witness the passion of our educated youth and the aspirations of Iranian women and men for a brighter future for themselves and their children."
In 2021 elections, Hemmati finished third with less than 10 percent of the votes, after late president Ebrahim Raisi and Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guards commander who served as Raisi’s vice president for economic affairs.
Hemmati is known for his harsh criticism of the economic policies of the hardliner government of Raisi, blaming his administration for the worsening economic crisis in the country.
In March, he accused the government of creating three-digit inflation of food prices and the impoverishment of tens of millions of people “while Iran has the biggest combined oil and gas reserves in the world.” Hemmati believes that Raisi’s policies led to higher inflation and more corruption, by offering economic privileges to insiders.
Earlier on Friday, former Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani officially registered to run in the snap election. In addition to Larijani, conservative MP Mahmoud Ahmadi-Bighash, former governor of Khorasan Province under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also registered to run for office.
“So far, 6 people have definitively registered,” said Mohsen Eslami, spokesperson for Iran's Election Headquarters, on Friday, confirming Larijani and Ahmadi-Bighash’s registration.
Eslami emphasized, “Three women applied for registration, but they did not meet the requirements.”
Confirmed known registrants so far also include ‘reformist’ Mostafa Kavakebian and conservative figure Saeed Jalili.
Yemen's Houthis launched a missile attack on the US aircraft carrier Eisenhower in the Red Sea in response to US and British strikes on Yemen, Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Friday.
Six US and British strikes have killed 16 people and wounded 41, including civilians, Saree said in a televised statement.
Strikes on the province of Hodeidah targeted the port of Salif, a radio building in Al-Hawk district, Ghalifa camp and two houses, Saree said.
The US and British militaries said they launched strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen on Thursday to deter the militant group from further disrupting shipping in the Red Sea.
The US Central Command said American and British forces had hit 13 targets in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.
The British defense ministry said the joint operation targeted three locations in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, which it said housed drones and surface-to-air weapons.
"As ever, the utmost care was taken in planning the strikes to minimize any risk to civilians or non-military infrastructure," the British defense ministry said.
"Conducting the strikes in the hours of darkness should also have mitigated yet further any such risks."
Houthi spokesperson Mohamed Abdelsalam said the strikes were a "brutal aggression" against Yemen as punishment for its support of Gaza.
In Tehran, Houthi-allied Iran condemned the strikes as "violations of Yemen's sovereignty and territorial integrity..., international laws and human rights", Iranian state media reported.
"The aggressor US and British governments are responsible for the consequences of these crimes against the Yemeni people," Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said.
The Houthis, who control Yemen's capital and most populous areas, have attacked international shipping in the Red Sea since November heeding a call by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to blockade Israeli trade, drawing retaliatory US and British strikes since February.
UN experts are warning of transnational violence, threats, and intimidation by Iranian authorities and their proxies targeting the Persian language news service Iran International and its journalists.
“We are deeply alarmed that death threats and intimidation against Iran International staff escalated into the violent stabbing of journalist Pouria Zeraati outside his home in London on 29 March 2024,” the experts said.
Zeraati, one of the network’s most prominent television hosts and journalists, was stabbed outside his home in London in March, prompting British police to launch a counterterrorism investigation.
Last year, Scotland Yard disclosed that police and MI5 had foiled 15 plots since the start of 2022 to either kidnap or kill UK-based individuals perceived as “enemies of the Iranian regime.”
The five special UN rapporteurs urged the Iranian authorities to “refrain from violence, threats and intimidation against Iran International and its staff, online and offline, and other journalists and media workers reporting on Iran from abroad.”
The threats faced by Iran International and its staff from Iranian authorities and their proxies are intended to silence critical media reporting on Iran, the experts assert.
Since its founding, the network and its journalists have endured threats, but these reportedly surged dramatically after the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests erupted across Iran in 2022.
The months-long nationwide demonstrations by Iranians were met with a brutal crackdown by authorities, resulting in at least 550 deaths, tens of thousands of detentions, and a sharp increase in recorded executions.
Iranian authorities falsely blamed Persian media abroad for fueling the unrest, leading to a sharp increase in threats and assassination plots against its journalists, the UN experts said.
After multiple threats from Tehran, Iran International wastemporarily forced to relocate its broadcasting activities to the US in 2023. The broadcaster has since resumed its work from a studio in the UK.
In 2022, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) orchestrated an assassination plot targeting two Iran International news presenters, Fardad Farahzad and Sima Sabet. The plan initially involved a car bomb but was later foiled by a double agent working for a Western intelligence agency.
The following year, Iran International journalist Kian Amani was physically and verbally assaulted by a member of Iran’s delegation to the United Nations at a hotel in New York.
“Such attacks not only violate the human rights to life and personal security but are also aimed at suppressing freedom of expression and the media, including legitimate criticism of the Iranian Government,” they said.
Iran also imposed travel and financial sanctions on Volant Media, which owns Iran International, in 2022 for supposedly supporting terrorism and froze the assets of the owners and their family members in Iran in 2019.
Islamic Republic Targets Dissidents and ‘Enemies’ Abroad
The experts also asserted that the threats emanating from Iran were part of a broader pattern of attacks against Persian language media and dissidents abroad, including journalists working for BBC News Persian, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, IranWire, and Radio Farda.
In recent years, headlines have repeatedly highlighted threats and targeting by the Iranian state against the Iranian diaspora and anyone deemed an enemy of the Islamic Republic.
This week, the Swedish Security Service says it “established that the Iranian regime uses criminal networks in Sweden to carry out violent acts against other states, groups, or individuals in Sweden that Iran regards as threats.” It also said that Iran has carried out acts of violence in other European countries to silence criticism and “what it regards as threats to its regime.”
Germany has marked a rise in Iran’s activitiestargeting Jewish communities and the Iranian diaspora. A notable incident involved an attack on the Old Synagogue in Essen, where bullets were fired at the building. German and Western intelligence officials identified Ramin Yektaparast, a Hells Angels leader operating from Tehran, as the orchestrator of the attack, allegedly directed by the IRGC.
Canada’s spy agency, in late 2022, noted credible death threats against Iranians in Canada. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service reported that state actors from the Islamic Republic of Iran are monitoring and intimidating individuals within Canada to silence those who publicly criticize the regime.
One of the most high-profile incidents of Iran’s transnational repression involved Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad. She was targeted in a kidnapping plot announced by the Justice Department, and later, in a murder-for-hire plot. Prosecutors charged a group of Iranians, said to be working at the behest of the country's intelligence services, with planning to kidnap her.
The repression of Iranian dissidents on Western soil dates back to the chain murders of 1988–98, when several Iranian intellectuals critical of the Islamic Republic disappeared or were killed.
Among the victims was TV host and political activist Fereydoon Farokhzad, whose murder on German soil is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the authorities in Iran as part of this series of assassinations.
The Supreme Court of Canada has rejected an appeal from the victims families of passengers who died aboard an airliner shot down by Iran, who are trying to enforce a $107- million judgement against Tehran.
The victims families asked the courts to seize Iranian state property and bank assets held on Canadian soil to cover millions of dollars in unpaid compensation.
The passenger plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran with two surface-to-air missiles by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on January 8, 2020 - killing everyone on board.
176 people were killed, including 55 Canadians, 30 permanent residents and many others with close ties to Canada.
On December 31, 2021, six family members obtained a default judgment from an Ontario court against Iran for $107 million plus interest and costs. They had filed a civil lawsuit against Iran and senior officials they believe were to blame for the incident.
The family members of the victims include Mehrzad Zarei, Shahin Moghaddam, Ali Gorji and several anonymous plaintiffs.
The Association of Families of Flight PS752 told Iran International they are not part of the law suit, but several of the PS752 victims families are. The Association has been formed to pursue formal international condemnation of the Islamic Republic for shooting down the Ukrainian airliner, then hiding the truth for three days, and eventually barring an international investigation.
The plaintiffs in the $107 million judgement took measures to try and enforce the ruling against the properties and bank accounts of Iran in Canada.
But an Ontario judge dismissed the motion, claiming the Iranian property was protected by diplomatic immunity under Canada law.
On Thursday, that decision was upheld on appeal.
In 2021, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that the Islamic Republic of Iran intentionally shot down the passenger plane.
At the time, the government of Canada also agreed that Iran was responsible for the shooting down the airliner, but also argued in Ontario Court that the courts do not have the power to seize Iranian assets.
The courts concluded that Iranian property is protected by diplomatic immunity under Canadian law.
Iran has stonewalled an multilateral international effort to reach an agreement to resolve the overall issue and satisfy the families of victims. It insists that the firing of anti-air missiles were the result of human error by a military missile operator. However, the incident took place on January 8, 2020, hours after Iran had fired missiles at US bases in Iraq and was expecting retaliation. Despite the tense military situation, it refused to close the airspace over Tehran and allowed civilian planes to take off.
Artificial intelligence company OpenAI says it has disrupted covert influence campaigns originating from Iran, Russia, China and a private company based in Israel.
The company, which launched AI system ChatGPT in 2022, said on Thursday that it identified five campaigns involving “deceptive attempts to manipulate public opinion or influence political outcomes without revealing the true identity or intentions of the actors behind them.”
Open AI said that it terminated accounts associated with an Iranian network called International Union of Virtual Media, two Russian operations, dubbed Bad Grammer and Doppelganger; a Chinese campaign known as Spamouflage; and an Israeli operation dubbed Zero Zeno.
The threat actors used OpenAI's powerful language models for tasks like generating text and images that were posted across social media as well as comments, articles, social media profiles, and debugging code for bots and websites. According to OpenAI, in some cases the ChatGPT tools were exploited to produce content with “fewer language errors than would have been possible for human operators.”
The Iranian group -- the International Union of Virtual Media -- was disrupted for using OpenAI to create articles, headlines and content posted on Iranian state-linked websites, the company said.
The company led by CEO Sam Altman said these operations "do not appear to have benefited from meaningfully increased audience engagement or reach as a result of our services."
“We are committed to developing safe and responsible AI, which involves designing our models with safety in mind and proactively intervening against malicious use,” the California-based start-up said in a statement posted on its website.
Microsoft disclosed in February that state-backed hackers from Iran, Russia and China have been leveraging tools developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI to enhance their cyber espionage capabilities.
It followed revelations in November that Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) had issued a warning that Iran, Russia and China are likely to plan to influence the upcoming elections in the United States and other countries later this year.
