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TOP STORIES
Iran's minister of communication and information
technology has said that the country is making the final preparations
for the launch of four satellites into space, Mehr News Agency
reported... US officials have expressed the worry that Iran's
satellite and space work may function as a cover to produce
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Saudi Arabia's air force intercepted a ballistic missile
launched by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Kingdom's
military said Monday.
A former consultant to Iran's mission to the United
Nations was sentenced to three months in prison on Friday for evading
taxes by concealing his income and helping family and friends make
money transfers that violated U.S. sanctions against Iran.
UANI IN THE NEWS
Panicked Hawaiians abandoned their cars and prepared to
evacuate their homes last month after a false alarm warned of a
ballistic missile heading for the islands. This incident hit home for
me, as I had just left Hawaii after visiting with family on Oahu over
the holidays. My family in Hawaii spent 38 panicked minutes wondering
what they should do in the event of a nuclear missile strike. Now,
they've started preparing for the worst - just in case. Some of us
remember a time when all Americans knew exactly what to do in the
event of a nuclear attack on our soil. In school, kids learned from
"Bert the Turtle" to duck and cover. Families built fallout
shelters in their homes and backyards and stocked them with canned
goods to last for months. Nuclear preparedness may seem like an
antique relic of yesteryear, but is it?
President Donald Trump's threat that the United States
could withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement unless it is
strengthened has alarmed the accord's advocates. Yet the danger to
the deal is not new - the seeds of its possible demise were sown in
2014 and 2015, during its negotiation in Europe and the attendant
debate in Washington. Trump's critics are right that the
administration's gambit could kill the deal. Yet Trump's position
also represents an opportunity to stabilize and strengthen the
agreement - a chance both its advocates and critics would be wise to
seize.
MILITARY MATTERS & PROXY WARS
"The entrenchment of Iran in Yemen and the transfer
of advance weaponry to the Houthi forces in the region constitutes a
threat to merchant ships making their way to the Mediterranean
Sea" via the Bab al-Mandab crossing, a senior Israel Navy
official said...
Iran announced on Monday that it has begun
mass-producing a new weaponized drone that carries smart bombs
capable of precision strikes, according to the Islamic Republic's
military leaders.
IRAN PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
Another Iranian protestor, Khalid Kayseri, who served 20
days in detention in Kermanshah prison died after being tortured by
the intelligence service there, Iranian human rights groups have
reported. This brings the number of demonstrators who have died in
Iranian prisons to 11 since the start of the uprising on December 28.
Iranian emergency specialist Ahmadreza Djalali, who is a
resident in Sweden, was arrested during a trip to the Islamic
republic in April 2016. He was found guilty in October 2017 of
passing information about Iranian nuclear scientists to Israel's
Mossad intelligence agency... An initial appeal was rejected in
December, and his lawyer now says a further request to have the
sentence overturned has been denied.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has waded into a highly
charged debate over the country's mandatory hijab law, abruptly
releasing a three-year-old report suggesting that nearly half of
Iranians were opposed to the government dictating what women should
wear.
Ali Younesi, President Hassan Rouhani's special
assistant for ethnic groups and religious minorities affairs, says
the main objective of recent protests in Iran was to topple the
Rouhani administration... The speculations appear to be part of
Iranian officials trying to explain what drove the protests that
spread to over 100 cities and small towns across Iran in late
December 2017 and early January.
Iranian security forces besieged on Sunday the house of
Noor Ali Tabandeh, one of the most prominent leaders of Shiite Sufism
in the Iranian capital Tehran... The Iranian regime holds a religious
doctrine based on its own reading of Shi'ism, which calls for the
acceptance of the ruling and pledging allegiance to the Wali al-Faqih
who has the duty to apply the sharia. Therefore, the Sufis who reject
the interference of religion in politics pose a danger to the Wilayat
al-Faqih known in English as the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist.
From her cell inside Tehran's Evin prison, Nasrin
Sotoudeh took a small stand against the Iranian regime that jailed
her: she refused to wear a hijab... Guards would come to her,
sometimes pleading and sometimes threatening, to try to make her put
on a prison-issue chador, a full length garment that leaves only a
woman's face uncovered. She resisted, even when authorities extended
her sentence for bad behaviour. Nearly a decade later, Ms
Sotoudeh is fighting a new and larger battle as she represents young
women arrested for taking off their headscarves in public to protest
against laws that force them to wear a hijab.
More than a month has passed since protests in Iran's
northeast metastasized into anti-regime demonstrations across the
entire country. This outpouring of discontent, which took the United
States almost completely by surprise, should help lay to rest a range
of tenuous assumptions about Iranian politics that had become
conventional wisdom in Washington-namely, an underestimation of the
Iranian people's willingness to oppose the regime and an
overestimation of Iran's reformers. Now, as Washington weighs how to
address the multitude of challenges emanating from Iran, it must also
reconsider the foundations of its knowledge about the country.
Iran has now arrested at least 29 women for refusing to
wear the hijab, or headscarf. These acts of defiance reflect women's
second-class status in the Islamic Republic, where they face a range
of discriminatory laws aimed at reducing their perceived threat to
the sexual and religious norms championed by the regime.
An increasing number of young women have been hoisting
their headscarves on sticks in the streets of Tehran and other major
Iranian cities all this week in protest to mandatory veil
regulations. Here are five points about the kind of dress code and
veil requirement the fundamentalists have imposed not only on Iranian
women, but also on foreign female diplomats visiting Iran.
The Secretary of State recently re-designated Iran as
one of ten "Countries of Particular Concern" for engaging
in or tolerating "systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious
violations of religious freedom." The state of religious freedom
in Iran remains extremely poor.
CONGRESS & IRAN
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, who has repeatedly clashed with
Iran's ayatollahs, wants to make it harder for them to hide their
financial assets from public scrutiny. The Republican from Dardanelle
on Monday introduced the Iranian Leadership Asset Transparency Act,
which would "require the Secretary of the Treasury to report on
the estimated total assets under direct or indirect control by
certain senior Iranian leaders and other figures."
IRANIAN REGIONAL AGGRESSION
In May, 2017 Major General Qassem Soleimani, chief of
the Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps' foreign operations branch known
as the Qods Force, visited the Iraq/Syria border in the company of an
Iran-backed Shia militia... Now, it is reported that one of Iran's hardest-line
leaders, Ibrahim Raisi, has visited the Israeli-Lebanese border...
Like Soleimani's Iraq/Syria border visit, Raisi's Lebanon/Israel
border visit delivers several messages. First, borders have no
meaning for Iran; the Islamic Republic is determined to be the
dominant player in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Second, the governments
of those countries have no control of their own borders and
territory; Iranian military and terrorist leaders can come and go as
they please. Third, whether Lebanon gets into a conflict with Israel
will be determined by decisions made in Tehran, not in Beirut.
HEZBOLLAH & LEBANON
From selling drugs to profiting from a pig farm,
Lebanese Hezbollah's hypocrisy knows no bounds - a political party
with a military army that does the bidding of the Iran's Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps. That was the description of the group by
Trump administration officials who announced new sanctions Friday -
little noticed during the brouhaha over the Nunes memo. The sanctions
are meant to delay the flow of illicit cash to Hezbollah's coffers,
and frustrate its support of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad, as the
group fights alongside Iranian volunteers at the behest of Iran's
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
At the end of January 2018, in the midst of the warnings
by the Israeli prime minister, defense minister, and military
spokespersons against Iran and its plan to build facilities in
Lebanon for manufacturing precision weapons, Sayyed Ebrahim Raisi
came for a visit to Syria and Lebanon. Raisi is a member of Iran's
Assembly of Experts and is thought to be the designated successor of
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
OTHER TERRORISM & EXTREMISM
Following the events of September 11, 2001, the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard helped relocate al-Qaeda members and leadership
by providing them with new clothes, shoes, Iranian passports and
money. These details were discovered in a series of letters from the
al-Qaeda communication officer Atiyyatullah al-Libi, whose real name
is Jamal Ibrahim al-Shtaiwi al-Musrati. He was appointed by Osama bin
Laden himself as an al-Qaeda envoy in Iran.
The spokesman for the Arab Coalition in Yemen confirmed
at a press conference in Riyadh on Monday that humanitarian aid is
still entering Yemen through all entry ports, also revealing that
Iran has supplied Houthi militias with weapons to target the
international shipping in Bab al-Mandeb strait.
The head of Afghanistan National Directorate of Security
(NDS) has said that Iran and Russia are in contact with the Taliban
and are supporting the militant group in Afghanistan.
US President Donald Trump's special Middle East envoy
Jason Greenblatt, who recently visited Israel's communities on the
Gaza perimeter and toured the terror tunnel the IDF exploded, claimed
Sunday that Iran provided $100 million annually to Hamas.
Ghanoon, an Iranian newspaper with ties to Iran's
Reformists, attacked Hamas Jan. 21, publishing a photo of the
movement's political chief Ismail Haniyeh holding the flag of the
Syrian revolution. The newspaper presented Hamas' project and
positions as no longer compatible with Iran's policy in the region.
.. [A] member of the Iranian Islamic Shura Council told Al-Monitor...
"There is no absolute consensus in Iran on supporting
Hamas, amid declining interest by Iranian circles in the Palestinian
issue. The priority is now on internal issues. The newspaper's attack
on Hamas does not represent the official Iranian position toward
Hamas, but exposes a muffled disagreement in some Iranian circles on
the need to support Hamas in light of the economic crisis Tehran is
battling."
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
An Iranian member of parliament has revealed that French
President Emmanuel Macron has sent a message setting three conditions
ahead of his upcoming visit to Iran. The first demand was that Iran's
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei should accept the negotiations, secondly,
that Iran should accept negotiations over Tehran's missile programs.
The third conditions reportedly focused on Iran's interferences in
the region, its regional war and support for extremist groups.
SYRIA & IRAN
Germany's Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export
Control approved a license for a company to sell military applicable
technology to Iranian companies that subsequently was used in Syrian
regime chemical weapons attacks, reported the German publication Bild
on Monday. The German company Krempel, located near the southern city
of Stuttgart, sold electronic press boards to Iranian companies that
were used in the production of rockets.
GULF STATES, YEMEN, & IRAN
A rise in tension between Qatar and the United Arab
Emirates in a row over military flights threatens U.S. strategic
interests in the Gulf and could benefit regional rival Iran.
IRAQ & IRAN
Iraqi forces are preparing an operation to consolidate
control of an area near the Iran border to be used for the transit of
Iraqi oil, two officials said on Monday, highlighting concern about
mountainous terrain where two armed groups are active.
Iraj Masjedi, Tehran's ambassador to Baghdad, met with
Ammar al-Hakim, the leader of Iraq's National Alliance, to discuss
the latest security and political developments in Iraq. According to
Iranian and Iraqi media, Masjedi, the former deputy chief of Iran's
Quds Force, and Hakim, a prominent Iraqi politician and cleric who
recently established the Wisdom Party, also explored ways of further
boosting ties and cooperation between the two countries... Masjedi is
the third consecutive Quds Force commander appointed as Iran's
ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq.
IRANIAN INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's more
than 28-year rule came to an end on January 23. Unlike his
predecessor, Khamenei's rule was not cut short by nature, nor was it
due to an abdication. Khamenei reached the end of his rule as the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) publicly humiliated him by
disobeying his decree to give up its economic interests.
Real interest rates in Iranian money markets have risen
to all-time highs under the administration of President Hassan Rouhani.
This is due to the sharp reduction in inflation, which the
administration boastfully declares as its cornerstone achievement.
Nonetheless, the rise in real interest rates has mostly occurred on
the back of lackluster growth given macroeconomic fluctuations both
at home and abroad.
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