Iran's Football Team Sings Anthem Amid Jeers From Spectators

Mohammad Pakpour emphasized that reinforcing border troops is meant to prevent “infiltration by teams of Kurdish parties based in Iraqi Kurdistan.”

Iran has deployed military firepower against Iranian Kurdish civilian protesters in western Iran, killing at least 12 people since November 16. It has also repeatedly shelled bases of Iranian Kurdishinsurgent groups in Iraq, portraying the popular protests as a separatist movement.

Iran International reported earlier that Iran was sending troops to its Kurdish-majority regions. It is not clear if these reinforcements will be used against civilian protesters or are solely meant to intimidate Kurdish groups in Iraq, that have so far stayed out of the popular protests in Iran and there have been no signs of separatist agitation.

The Iraqi government that has protested Iranian missile attacks on its soil, decided Thursday to work on a plan to boost its own border troops. A member of the Iraqi parliament, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Iran International that Kurdish lawmakers have been putting pressure on the central government to act.

Pakpour said that armor and “special units of ground forces” is being dispatched to the Iraqi border.

Mohammad Esmail Kowsari, a former IRGC commander and currently a member of the Islamic Republic parliament, also confirmed that military units were being dispatched to deal with Kurdish insurgents in Iraq.

In a report titled, “Do German Instagram employees help the mullahs?”, Bild investigated the removal of critical posts by Iranian users on Instagram, alleging that German employees help the platform to practice the censorship.

Bild added that “some of the Farsi-speaking Instagram moderators are said to have a positive attitude towards the regime and interpret the Instagram community rules strictly against the Iranian opposition in order to block posts critical of the regime.”

In May, some Iranians complained that their Instagram posts were being restricted, allegedly by other Iranians working for the company’s content review subcontractor.

Some BBC sources alleged that pro-regime employees of the German branch of Telus International, a Canadian contractor which provides content moderation to Instagram, are responsible for restricting antigovernment content of Iranian users.

A few days later, three human rights groups called on Meta, the owner Instagram and Facebook, to review its Farsi-language content procedures for Iran.

Bild says Golsa Golestaneh and Maryam Namazi two Iranian activists as well as an Iran International journalist Maryam Moqaddam have told the daily their critical posts have been deleted by Instagram.

A spokeswoman for Instagram parent company Meta told Bild, “Our teams are following the situation very closely. They will remove content that violates our rules and will fix bugs with mistakenly removed content as soon as possible.”

However, Bild asks Instagram officials how one can draw attention to the crimes of the Iranian regime when depictions of police violence or demonstrators calling for the overthrow of the government are considered depictions of violence.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) announced Wednesday the joint night maneuvers were staged at the outskirts of Homs Governorate where Al-Tanf base is located.

Al-Tanf is a US military base within territory controlled by the Syrian opposition. It is located 24 km west of the al-Tanf border crossing along the Iraq and Jordan-Syria border.

The Syrian Observatory says heavy weapons were used to raise the fighting readiness of their forces, coinciding with explosions heard in Al-Omar oil field, which is the largest “International Coalition” base in Syria.

Earlier this month, SOHR said it was informed that “Russian officers, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard officers as well as Afghan Fatemiyoun militia are present east of Palmyra in eastern Homs countryside near Al-Tanf base.

Fatemiyoun Brigade is an Afghan Shia militia formed and supported by Iran since 2014 to fight in Syria on the side of the Bashar al Assad’s forces.

“These drills were designed to train Iranian-backed militiamen on the use of short and medium-range Iranian-made missiles on inanimate targets in the Syrian desert and Palmyra military airbase,” added SOHR.

The region has been the scene of clashes between Iranian-backed forces and US troops.

Iran has long backed the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad’s, government in Syria’s grinding civil war. Iran says it has no troops in Syria but the IRGC military “advisers”.

The last-minute amendment was rejected with 25 against, six in favor and 15 abstentions.

China's envoy Jiang Yingfeng told the council that the motion led by Germany was "overwhelmingly critical" of Iran. "It obviously will not help resolve the problem," he added, calling for a key paragraph to be deleted.

The paragraph in question would establish an "international fact-finding mission" that would be operational until early 2024. Iran's representatives also repeatedly criticized the motion which it called "completely biased".

Representatives from the dozens of countries backing the motion, including the United States and Britain, criticized the last-minute change and called for the 47-member Geneva council to vote it down.

"(The amendment) denies the survivors, the families, the victims, the right for their suffering to be recorded," said British Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Simon Manley. The US ambassador for human rights Michele Taylor said she was "appalled" by China's last-minute revision.

Earlier in the day UN officials and dozens of countries and human rights organization backed a probe into Iran's use of force against protesters and the violation of their rights, as well as treatment of women.

The Islamic Republic’s mission to the UN in letters to members of the Security Council claimed that its attacks on Kurdish groups in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region “aim to defend the country’s national security.”

The clerical regime has renewed its attacks on Kurdish targets in the Iraqi Kurdistan region since protests in Iran broke out in September, launching sustained missile and drone attacks in the past five days, on the pretext that separatist Kurdish groups are fanning the flames of conflict in Iranian Kurdish cities by supporting the protesters.

In its letters to UNSC member, Tehran alleged it “has recently launched necessary and proportionate military operations against terrorist groups’ bases in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, which was meticulously planned and precisely targeted on terrorist locations.”

It also noted that the Islamic Republic has shared “irrefutable evidence and credible information” with the central government in Iraq about the use of their territory by “terrorist and separatist groups to plan, support, organize and carry out terrorist and subversive acts” against Iran.

This letter was sent in a situation when the United Nations Human Rights Council is scheduled to hold an emergency meeting about the ongoing protests in Iran on Thursday.