Monday, June 25, 2018

Eye on Iran: Iran Protesters Confront Police at Parliament



   EYE ON IRAN
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Protesters in the Iranian capital reportedly swarmed its historic Grand Bazaar on Monday and forced shopkeepers to close their stalls, apparently angry over the Islamic Republic's troubled economy, months after similar demonstrations rocked the country. The unplanned demonstration came a day after protests forced two major shopping centers for mobile phones and electronics to close in Tehran.


Iran said it doesn't believe buyers of its oil will get waivers from the U.S. government that would allow them to continue purchasing cargoes after President Donald Trump's renewal of sanctions... "I don't believe they can receive waiver from the United States," Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said Friday in a Bloomberg television interview. "We are going to find some other way."


The Iranian rial plunged to a record low against the U.S. dollar on the unofficial market on Sunday, continuing its slide amid fears of returning U.S. sanctions after President Donald Trump in May withdrew from a deal on Tehran's nuclear program.

NUCLEAR DEAL & NUCLEAR PROGRAM


Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned Sunday that failure to save the nuclear deal after the exit of the United States would be "very dangerous" for Tehran. 


U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday warned Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons, saying it would face the "wrath of the entire world" if it did so, but added that he hoped it would never be necessary for the United States to take military action against the country.


Christophe Eck, a senior partner at GIDE, says that the French law firm will remain active in Iran regardless of Trump's decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. 

SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC NEWS


Based on the latest reports from Tehran, the value of each U.S. dollar climbed to 80,000 Iranian rials on Saturday, the first day of the week in Iran. The Iranian currency has lost almost one third of its value in the last two months and the dollar has climbed from around 40,000 rials a year ago to double that amount.


Iran plans to establish a secondary market for foreign exchange to help get around a dollar shortage that has hurt trade and is likely to worsen as U.S. sanctions resume. The secondary market will allow exporters of non-oil commodities to sell their foreign currency earnings to importers of consumer products...


Iran said on Saturday the world will see little extra oil reaching the market if OPEC and its partners adhere properly to a supply pact, underlining a disagreement with top exporter Saudi Arabia. 

SYRIA, RUSSIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN


Facebook and Twitter accounts belonging to Hezbollah have been closed, the Lebanese terror group said Saturday... Despite the closures, internet users were directed to new and already existing pages associated with Hezbollah, the Ynet news site reported.


Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps announced Saturday that one of its senior commanders was killed on Friday while fighting Islamic State fighters in northeastern Syria. The exact circumstances of Shahrokh Daiepour's death were not disclosed, but the state-run Fars news agency said he had been involved in training fighters from the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy which has been fighting in Syria alongside forces loyal to President Bashar Assad.


Eight members of Hezbollah were killed in northern Yemen, said the Arab Coalition on Monday as it continued to advance in the provinces of Saada and Hodeidah.


The Iran-aligned Houthi movement launched missiles on the Saudi capital Riyadh on Sunday, and reinforced Yemen's main port city of Hodeidah as an Arab coalition moved closer to the city center in the largest offensive of the war.


Saudi Arabia says it has intercepted two missiles over the capital, Riyadh, that were launched from rebel-held territory in neighbouring Yemen. Yemen's Houthi rebels have fired a series of missiles into the kingdom in recent months in retaliation to air raids by a Saudi-Emirati coalition backing pro-government forces in the Arab world's poorest country.


Lebanon's army chief arrived in Washington on Monday to discuss counterterrorism co-operation, aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces and his country's border security.


The deputy commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said that the Islamic Republic has expanded its soft power and hard power across the region by creating an "international Islamic force" from different nations. 


A former head of the Shin Bet security service said Saturday that prior to being recruited by Iran to spy on Israel, disgraced ex-minister Gonen Segev was a kidnap target of the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group, an Iranian proxy. 


Hezbollah on Friday aired new footage from the 2006 border attack on Israeli soldiers that sparked the Second Lebanon War.

PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS


A brother of an Iranian Kurdish man sentenced to death for belonging to a Kurdish nationalist group says the dissident has told a lawyer that he has hours to live after being transferred back to death row. 


Iran has charged prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh with security offences after re-arresting her earlier this month, her husband was quoted as saying on Saturday. "


Iran's semi-official ISNA news agency is citing the husband of a prominent human rights lawyer who says authorities have set bail at 6.5 billion-rial (around $152,500) for his imprisoned wife, who rejected it. 


Her late father was a pillar of the Islamic republic. But for Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, the survival of the system in Iran that her family helped create requires negotiations with the US president Donald Trump and the kind of domestic reforms the regime has avoided in its near 40-year rule.


In mid-May, Iranian judge Abolghassem Salavati told a British-Iranian prisoner to expect a new conviction on fresh charges of "propaganda against the state." Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whom Salavati first sentenced to five years in prison in 2016 on equally specious espionage allegations, constitutes one of more than a dozen known dual and foreign nationals - including at least seven U.S. citizens and permanent residents... While the European Union sanctioned Salavati for his human rights abuses in 2011, Washington has yet to follow suit. A U.S. designation of Salavati, one of the harshest figures in Iran's judiciary, would mark an important way to increase pressure on the regime for its longstanding repression of Iranians and Americans alike.


On Friday, 18 influential Iranian women living in the West, published an open letter to FIFA calling on the organization that governs international soccer to help put an end to a decades-old ban on women attending male sporting events in Iran.


The Kazakh Consulate in the northern Iranian city of Gorgan has said Kazakh filmmaker Qanat Beisekeev was detained by the Iranian authorities on suspicion of a "violation of visa regulations." 

IRAQ & IRAN


Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric who emerged as the main winner in Iraq's parliamentary elections last month, campaigned on a platform to end sectarian politics and replace it with a government that puts Iraqis first. Instead, he has forged a postelection coalition with a rival Shiite bloc that includes some of the most powerful militias operating in Iraq - groups that get their funding and support from Tehran.


Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, an umbrella grouping of mostly Iran-backed Shi'ite militias, said on Sunday it would not remain silent over an alleged U.S. air strike it said killed 22 of its members across the border in Syria last week.

MISCELLANEOUS


Head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi said Friday "If Europe and rest of the world's countries that support the nuclear deal don't actively oppose the US's policy, the region and the entire world would have a terrifying future with no security on a scale that has not been seen yet."






Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more information please email press@uani.com.

United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons.  UANI is an issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of nuclear weapons.

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