Shake-Up In Iran's Reformist Party May Have Longer Implications

Ali Naderi, who is close to sources of information in President Ebrahim Raisi’s government, did not provide any details as to which country released the funds.

“Less than 100 days after the 13th government took office, $3.5 billion of Iran’s frozen funds in one of the countries was released and a considerable part of it is entering the commercial market,” Naderi tweeted.

Iran has around $20 billion frozen in several countries because of US banking sanctions imposed in 2018, when the United States pulled out of the Obama-era nuclear deal called JCPOA.

South Korea holds around $7 billion and had been targeted by Tehran’s pressures to release the funds.

There has been no indication by the Biden Administration that funds have been released.

In October, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said that Tehran wants US to allow $10 billion to be freed as a show of “goodwill” before talks on Iran’s nuclear program resume.

Iran’s currency, rial, has dropped by around 20 percent since Raisi took office in August, due to lack of oil exports and pessimist about the JCPOA talks.

British foreign office officials also told Bagheri Kani at a meeting in London that Iran should conclude the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal under the terms on the table now, the foreign ministry said.

"The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister was also pressed on the need for Iran to urgently release all British nationals unfairly detained in Iran, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Anoosheh Ashoori and Morad Tahbaz," the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said in a statement.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at a Tehran airport in April 2016 and later convicted of plotting to overthrow the clerical establishment.

In April, an Iranian court sentenced Zaghari-Ratcliffe to a new term in jail on charges of propaganda against Iran's ruling system, just a month after she finished a prior five-year sentence.

Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, is on a hunger strike to highlight her case. He met British minister for the Middle East James Cleverly on Thursday.

"If I'm honest, quite a depressing meeting," Ratcliffe told reporters after he left the Foreign Office, adding that Cleverly told him the meeting with Bagheri Kani had been cordial.

"(Cleverly) couldn't give a timeline on when things were going to move forward."

The FCDO said Cleverly had reaffirmed the government's commitment to reuniting Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her family in the UK.

The tribunal, which styles itself a “Russell tribunal” after the late British philosopher Bertrand Russell, convened in London Wednesday to examine the atrocities of violence against protesters in Iran in November 2019. Iran declined an invitation from the organizers to take part.

Social media traffic showed great interest among Iranians in following the proceedings and posting comments.

‘Witness 195,’ who said he was a former major in the Iranian police, testified via video-link disguising his voice to protect his identity, that he had refused a command from an officer in the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) to deploy his 60 officers to suppress the protests in a city in the west of Iran. He said he had told the police under his command they had “no right to use firearms against unarmed protesters.”

Witness 195 claimed he had seen "plainclothes agents of the IRGC and intelligence ministry spraying the protesters with bullets,” killing 15 on November 19. "Armed [agents] shot at protesters with no purpose other than intimidating them," he said. The witness said that the security forces had destroyed public property and blamed protestors.

Witness 195 said he was arrested a few months later for disobeying an order to shoot at the protesters, held in solitary confinement and subjected to psychological torture. He said he had been sentenced to nearly six years in prison but that the sentence had not been enforced.

‘Witness 128’ testified in person that he had witnessed the killing of two protesters in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan.

After the tribunal was shown video footage of protests on a road leading to Rask, a city of Sistan-Baluchestan, witness 128 said he had seen IRGC forces 200 meters from where the film was taken, and claimed they had shot at protesters from nearby villages trying to reach Rask by the road.

‘Witness 366,’ testifying via videoconference, displayed an x-ray, which he said was of his chest and showed a bullet, lodged in his spine on November 16, 2019, that had put him in a wheelchair. Witness 366 told the tribunal he was certain he had been shot by security forces and not by armed protestors.

The tribunal on Thursday also heard Raha Bahraini, a researcher at Amnesty International, report that many arrested protesters, including children, had been sexually assaulted, raped, or tortured by hanging and staged executions.

"This people's tribunal is very important," Bahraini told Iran International. "It's a strong initiative against the continued impunity for crimes in Iran," she said. Bahraini said there was no chance of justice through the Iranian judicial system so responsibility fell on the United Nation's Human Rights Council and the United Nations Security Council to bring those responsible for the “atrocities” to justice.

The rial on Thursday was trading above 284,000 against the US dollar.

There were hopes among Iranians that the national currency can rebound once positive news emerges regarding the resumption of talks to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement, JCPOA. If the nuclear talks succeed, US oil and banking sanctions will be lifted, giving Iran a financial lifeline.

The rial has declined another 2.8 percent in the past seven days, bringing its losses in a month to more than 3 percent and in the past six months to 31.5 percent.

The foreign currency market reaction in Iran can show a lack of optimism about the outcome of the multilateral nuclear talks.

The Iranian rial has lost value ninefold against major currencies since the former US president Donald Trump indicated that he would withdraw from the nuclear deal and impose sanctions. Once he implemented his threat, rial’s fall accelerated in 2018.

Oil exports provide at least half the revenue the Iranian government needs to operate. In the absence of sufficient oil exports, the Central Bank of Iran has been printing money, with liquidity rising rapidly since 2017 and fueling inflation.

The US Navy said that the amphibious assault ship “Essex and the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit are deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations in support of naval operations to ensure maritime stability and security in the Central Region, connecting the Mediterranean and the Pacific through the western Indian Ocean and three strategic choke points.”

In another development, forces from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Israel and the United States Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) began a multilateral maritime security operations exercise in the Red Sea on Wednesday, NAVCENT said on Thursday.

This is the first publicly acknowledged naval exercise between the United States, Israel and the two Gulf Arab countries.

The new naval and Marines’ forces joining CENTCOM’s theater of operations conducted bilateral interoperability training with the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth with landing helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft on US F-35 fighters and British aircraft cross-landing on each other’s platforms.

The move coincided with Iranian exercises along the Sea of Oman that began on November 7 and included land, air and naval unites. The army said its drills covered an area of one million sq kilometers or 386,000 sq miles, well over half the territory of Iran. Navy vessels and submarines, as well as old American Phantom fighter-bombers and drones took part.

Tensions are high in the region as Iran tries to flex its muscles following Israeli warnings that it will take action if Tehran gets any closer to nuclear capability. An Israeli official told Iran International on October 25 that attacking Iran was now the Israeli air force’s top priority.

The United States has also warned that “other option” could be considered if Iran does not seriously negotiate over its nuclear program.

Iran’s new hardliner government left multilateral talks over reviving the 2015 nuclear agreement in June, delaying resumption of negotiations for five months. New talks are finally scheduled to resume at the end of November, but Iran has been hardening its posture.

Iran also claimed last week that it had a confrontation with the US Navy and prevented the seizure of Iranian oil in the Sea of Oman. The US denied any confrontation and said Iran seized a Vietnam-flagged tanker in October and the Navy was simply observing the incident. Iran finally released the tanker on Tuesday.

Commodore Steve Moorhouse, commander of the United Kingdom’s Carrier Strike Group, was quoted as sayingabout joint drills, “The force development work we have been undertaking with the U.S. Navy has been ground breaking. We are all comfortable with helicopters lilly-padding from one deck to another but doing it with fixed wing aircraft is a whole new game. This level of interoperability goes far beyond anything we have exercised before with any partner and offers a degree of flexibility and agility that Commanders have long dreamt of.”

The US 5th Fleet area of operations covers about 2.5 million square miles of water area and includes the Arabian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, Red Sea and parts of the Indian Ocean. The area encompasses 20 countries and includes three chokepoints, including the Strait of Hormuz, critical to the free flow of global commerce.