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TOP STORIES
European security officials have
intercepted communications that suggest an Iranian diplomat was not
only involved in an alleged plot last year to bomb a meeting of
Tehran opponents outside Paris, but coordinated efforts with
colleagues back in Iran, a well-placed western official told The
Independent.
Iran says European nations have
not responded to its offers to sell them crude oil despite having
U.S. waivers. The semi-official Fars news agency on Tuesday quoted
Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh as saying "we have called them many
times, but they do not return our calls." He did not name the
oil importers, but appeared to be referring to Greece and Italy,
which were among eight nations granted waivers to import Iranian oil
when the U.S. restored sanctions in November.
European diplomats have
convinced themselves that they must abide by the flawed 2015 nuclear
deal with Iran to demonstrate their credibility. Their latest attempt
to keep the deal alive despite U.S. opposition shows otherwise.
Behold the special-purpose vehicle, unveiled last week by the
European Commission and Europe's three signatories to the 2015 deal.
The SPV, now christened the Instrument for Supporting Trade Exchange
(Instex), is supposed to allow European Union companies to keep
trading with Iran under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA). Instex will do this by managing complex barter transactions
to avoid running afoul of sanctions the U.S. reimposed last year when
it withdrew from the nuclear deal.
NUCLEAR DEAL & NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Trump did withdraw the United
States from the deal, though the other countries that signed it are
still in it. Although some parts of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) sunset over time, gradually allowing Iran to pursue
more nuclear energy research, the deal includes this permanent
restriction: "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will
Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons." CIA
Director Gina Haspel last month testified to Congress that Iran was
technically in compliance with the terms of the deal.
Iran celebrated the 40th
anniversary of its 1979 Islamic Revolution by unveiling a new land
attack cruise missile called the Hoveizeh that experts say
looks like a knockoff of the Kh-55, a nuclear-capable Soviet missile.
A 2015 deal struck between the US, UK, Russia, China, France,
Germany, the EU and Iran forbids Tehran from building nuclear
weapons, but the deal places no real limits on Iran's missile
program.
SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC
NEWS
As Iran could soon pass four controversial bills that would remove it
from the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF) blacklist, the
so-called E3 (Britain, France and Germany) joint statement on the
unveiling of a new trade mechanism has provided Iranian hard-liners
with a pretext to firmly proceed with their plans. Iran's government
has submitted four FATF-related bills to parliament, which has passed
them after extensive, fierce debates and fervent opposition of
hard-line parliament members.
India's Hindustan Petroleum Corp
could buy 0.9 million tonnes of Iran oil in its 2018/19 financial
year, said Vinod S Shenoy, the company's director of
refineries. HPCL bought 0.7 million tonnes of Iranian oil from
April 2018 to February 2019, Chairman M K Surana said. Surana
said the company will buy about 4.5 million tonnes of Iraqi crude oil
in 2019, the same as last year.
MISSILE PROGRAM
Iran dismissed on Tuesday
European Union unease about its missile program and rights abuses,
calling it "non-constructive", as Europe seeks to shield
Iran from US sanctions while containing its regional policies. The
European Union said on Monday it was gravely concerned by Iran's
ballistic missile tests and called on it to stop activity that
deepened mistrust and destabilized the region.
Iran on Saturday displayed a new
cruise missile with a range of 1,300 kilometers. The regime's
official media reported the unveiling during celebrations marking the
40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. Defense Minister Amir
Hatami identified this surface-to-surface missile, dubbed
"Hoveizeh," as part of the Soumar family of cruise
missiles, which he said Iran had added to its arsenal in 2015. He
added that the "cruise missile needs a very short time for its
preparedness and can fly at a low altitude."
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
The halls of the former prison
in the heart of Iran's capital now are hushed, befitting the sounds
of the museum that it has become. Wax mannequins silently portray the
horrific acts of torture that once were carried out within its walls.
But the surviving inmates still remember the screams. Exhibits in the
former Anti-Sabotage Joint Committee Prison that was run under Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi include a frightened man trapped in a small
metal cage as a cigarette-smoking interrogator shouts above him.
A group of Iranian lawyers has
condemned Iran's government for imprisoning a fellow lawyer convicted
of slandering a former official and demanded that their colleague be
released. In an open letter to the Iranian people dated Monday and
shared with VOA Persian by lawyer Hossein Ahmadiniaz, he and 18 other
lawyers said Sunday's jailing of their counterpart, Mostafa Tork
Hamedani, at Tehran's Evin Prison violates Iran's international
commitments to the principles of a fair trial.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS & NEGOTIATIONS
U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged that the United
States will continue to confront Iran's clerical regime. In his
second State of the Union address delivered to the U.S. Congress on
February 5, Trump declared, "We will not avert our eyes from a
regime that chants death to America and threatens genocide against
the Jewish people."
Iran's foreign minister is
pushing back after President Donald Trump said the country does
"bad, bad things" and appeared to link it to the deadly
attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue last year by an American
anti-Semite. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted Wednesday
that "Iranians - including our Jewish compatriots - are
commemorating 40 yrs of progress despite US pressure, just as
@realDonaldTrump again makes accusations against us."
The United States supports
"dictators, butchers and extremists" in the Middle East,
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a Twitter post
Wednesday in a response to U.S. President Donald Trump's State of the
Union speech. Tensions have ramped up between Iran and the
United States since Trump pulled out of a multilateral nuclear deal
last May and reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani
said Tuesday that President Donald Trump's expressed wish to keep
U.S. forces in Iraq in order to monitor neighboring Iran has exposed
American "lies" about fighting terrorism. In a recent
interview with CBS News' "Face the Nation," Trump said the
U.S. has an "incredible base" in Iraq that he intends to
keep, "because I want to be able to watch Iran."
President Donald Trump in his
State of the Union address linked his actions targeting Iran to the
threat to Jews manifested in the October massacre at a synagogue in
Pittsburgh. Trump also bookended his speech with references to D-Day,
including salutes to troops, among them Jewish American veterans, who
helped liberate Europe, and Holocaust survivors who were liberated
thanks to the American-led action. The salutes earned standing
ovations.
MILITARY/INTELLIGENCE MATTERS & PROXY WARS
Iranian state media has released
an animated video showing one of the country's Ghadir-class
submarines sinking an American aircraft carrier. The video opens with
the aircraft carrier cruising on an open sea escorted by four
smaller ships and carrying two planes on its deck. A green periscope
bearing an Iranian flag then appears, sinister music begins playing,
and one by one, the American ships disappear beneath the surface.
IRANIAN INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS
Iran's state TV says gunmen have
killed a policeman and wounded a police officer in a shootout in
which a stray bullet hit a fuel tanker, causing it to explode. It
said Wednesday that the shootout erupted near a gas station in the
western province of Lurestan. It says the explosion shattered the
windows of a nearby building. State TV says the wounded police
lieutenant is in "satisfactory" condition after being
transferred to a local hospital.
Ashkan Gomrokian is a young man
who's easy to find. Most afternoons he's in the skate park in
downtown Tehran, perfecting his crooked kickflip and lipslide. The
commonplace scene would've been considered deviant in Iran a few
years ago. Gomrokian recalls once getting dragged off to a police
station and accused of being a satanist. He says authorities still
don't like his skater tribe much-"the oversized clothes, the
hair, the tattoos"-but the Tehran municipality has built
multiple dedicated skateboard spaces in the past few years...
It all began with petitions
signed by "the revolutionary people" of Karaj, a city west
of the capital Tehran, where parliament speaker Ali Larijani was
scheduled to deliver a speech on the upcoming 40th anniversary of
Iran's Islamic Revolution Feb. 11. According to ultra-conservative
outlet Raja News, the petitions were an expression of
anger backed by the city's Friday prayer leader Seyyed
Mohammad Mehdi Hosseini Hamedani, who declared it a
"legitimate" protest.
Mohammad Bathaei, Iran's
controversial education minister, can finally claim some victory
in gathering bipartisan support for his campaign against the
country's educational book publishers. During his two years in
office, the 55-year-old former teacher has managed to ban
supplementary books from schools, claiming that they are
"detrimental" to the school curriculum.
RUSSIA, SYRIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
Iran warned Israel on Tuesday of
a "firm and appropriate" response if it continued attacking
targets in Syria, where Tehran has backed President Bashar al-Assad
and his forces in their nearly eight-year war against rebels and
militants. Without responding directly, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu nevertheless said it was important to block
Iranian influence in Syria.
Senior Iranian figures said
Wednesday that Syria was a top foreign policy priority and American
troops should withdraw, as planned by U.S. President Donald Trump.
"Whether they want to or not, the Americans must leave
Syria," Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Iran's Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was reported as saying.
Iran is ready to help rebuild
Syria, the Islamic republic's top diplomat said Tuesday as he hosted
his Syrian counterpart in Tehran. Mohammad Javad Zarif, whose country
has been a staunch ally to Damascus throughout Syria's devastating
war, met Walid Mouallem for closed-door talks at the Islamic
republic's foreign ministry.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said Tuesday he would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin
later this month in Moscow for talks on Iranian military activity in
Syria.It will be their first face-to-face meeting since November and
follows a series of air strikes in January against what Israel said
were facilities belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds
Force in Syria.
Iran's latest threat to Israel
is worth your attention. Coming from the head of Iran's national
security council, Ali Shamkhani, it represents the current thought
process of the Iranian hardliner bloc under Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. Shamkhani is a longtime conservative who has been at
the cornerstone of Iranian efforts to build a strategic deterrence
capability via ranged missile platforms and research of ballistic
missiles and nuclear weapons.
GULF STATES, YEMEN & IRAN
...Across the Middle East, we face the menace of
extremism. Radical interpretations of Islam represent a tiny minority
of those who practice the faith. But often the shrillest voices shout
the loudest - whether it is on TV, on the internet or in a mosque.
They twist and obscure the fact that Islam is a religion of peace. As
one article from Dabiq, the English-language magazine of the
so-called Islamic State, declared to its secular readers, "We
hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you
reject the oneness of Allah - whether you realize it or not."
IRAQ & IRAN
Top Donald Trump administration officials indicated today that US
bases in Iraq would have little role in monitoring Iran-backed
proxies after the president vowed in a TV interview that American
troops would stay in the country to "watch" Iranian forces.
Iraqi political figures roundly criticized Trump in the wake of a
Sunday interview on CBS' "Face the Nation."
OTHER FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The Iranian revolution is eating
its own children. A few weeks ago, while the Tehran regime was
polishing its plans for the celebration of the Islamic revolution's
40th anniversary, the young activist Sepideh Qolian was savagely
beaten by a dozen goons, tossed into the back of a van and
"disappeared". Her crime: taking part in a protest of sugar
cane workers who hadn't been paid.
CYBERWARFARE
The Remexi malware began an
operation to target foreign diplomats in Iran using locally-produced
spyware linked to a Farsi-speaking hacking group named Chafer. The
group used Windows-targeting surveillance-ware to monitor figures in
the Middle East. A new build of the Remexi software has been spotted
lurking on multiple machines within Iran, mostly those located within
foreign embassy buildings.
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