Riyadh Says ‘All Bets Off' If Iran Gets Nuclear Weapon

London-based Asharq Al-Awsat quoted on Saturday some political sources in Tel Aviv as saying that Israel will not be lenient with the transport of Iranian weapons through Beirut airport, warning to launch military strikes if the airport is used for Iranian ammo deliveries.

Israel was informed of a report broadcast by “Al-Arabiya Channel” about the Islamic Republic’s plans to use a new smuggling route for its weapons through Beirut after the failure of the Damascus corridor, sources told the daily.

They also added that Israel has launched a probe into Tehran’s attempt to smuggle weapons through civilian flights to Beirut airport.

Asharq Al-Awsat said they have also confirmed that Israel’s air raids on Syria in recent years helped prevent smuggling of Iranian weapons to its armed militias in Syria and in Lebanon.

This comes after a visit made by Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah to Syria where he met Syrian President Bashar Assad two weeks ago.

The sources say Nasrallah discussed the difficulties faced by the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah in Syria because of the Israeli strikes there.

Israel has in recent months intensified strikes on Syrian airports and air bases to disrupt Iran's increasing use of aerial supply lines to deliver arms to allies in Syria and Lebanon including Lebanon's Hezbollah.

Speaker of the Council of Representatives Mohamed Al-Halbousi said in an interview with a local Iraqi TV December 7, that "We must tell people who these disappeared people are,” confirming that they are slain. 

There were reports by Amnesty International in 2016 that Iraqi government forces and paramilitary militias tortured, arbitrarily detained, forcibly disappeared and executed thousands of civilians who had fled the rule of the Islamic State (ISIS) militant group. No official had ever confirmed the allegations. 

Al-Halbousi said "the state must do justice to their families and include them in the list of victims of terrorism, and they should be considered for compensation,” adding that the government had been misleading their families since 2014. It would not be right to give their families false hope of their return, he said, noting that they were abducted and assassinated. 

A member of parliament from the party led by al-Halbousi said, “Everyone knows that they are dead, but for years no one dares to be frank with people, especially the wives, mothers, and children of the victims.” 

The Iraqi Observatory for human rights issued a statement in which it considered al-Halbousi's remarks as "an official announcement of their execution at the hands of armed militias during the expulsion of ISIS from Iraq."

According to the Amnesty report, Shia paramilitary groups and Iraqi government forces carried out revenge attacks on Sunni Arabs suspected of supporting ISIS, as Iraqi and Kurdish forces backed by US-led coalition began the battle for Mosul in August 2014. It added that Baghdad – which was especially close to the Islamic Republic at the time -- was complicit in "brutal revenge attacks" as thousands of older boys and men were rounded up, tortured and extrajudicially executed. 

Numerous militia groups, most notably Hezbollah Brigades Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, Badr, Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Imam Ali, al-Khorasani, and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, are accused of being behind the mass killings. These militias were brought under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) in June 2014 and officially designated as part of the Iraqi armed forces in February 2016, but even before that they had enjoyed government support and backing. 

“PMU militias have been responsible for a pattern of cases of enforced disappearance, abductions, torture and unlawful killings of captured and detained individuals in a climate of impunity,” the report said, adding that “Iraqi government forces have also directly committed violations including arbitrary detention, torture, unlawful killings and enforced disappearances.”

The number of victims is estimated at more than 22,000 from the cities of northern and western Iraq. Amnesty did not provide a total but said that “tens of thousands have been forcibly displaced.” 

The report claimed that ISIS atrocities, armed conflict and insecurity led to the displacement of some 4.2 million civilians. Many fled with little more than the clothes on their backs, setting off at night to avoid detection and walking for hours.

The campaign initiated by the founding members of “Iranians for Justice and Human Rights” called on the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and Italy to immediately designate the ambassadors or other representatives of the Islamic Republic in their countries.

The signatories urge G7 countries to designate the envoys personae non grata and order their expulsion in protest to the illegal and inhumane treatment of protesters in Iran.

The petition also calls on the countries to forcefully and unequivocally demand the release of all prisoners of conscience in Iran.

“The brutal crackdown and violence by …Islamic regime in Iran has resulted in countless deaths, injuries, and incarcerations. It is evident that the Islamic regime in Iran intends to continue and escalate the inhumane violence against its own citizens,” reads the petition.

Since the beginning of the protests after Mahsa Amini's death in the custody of ‘hijab police’, many young and under-age protesters have been apprehended and interrogated. Some were found dead after security forces arrested them in the streets or shot during demonstrations.

Over 18,000 people have been arrested during the recent protests. However, the Iranian regime denies providing any official information about the number of detainees.

The US government imposed new sanctions on Iranian officials over the protests crackdown sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in detention after she was fatally beaten in the head for alleged violations of the country’s strict dress code.

The United Nations Human Rights Council held a special session on Iran on 24 November and passed a resolution condemning the deteriorating human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the violent crackdown on peaceful protesters, the death of hundreds of people, including scores of children, and the arrests of thousands in connection with the nationwide protests, and voted to establish a Fact-finding Mission to Investigate Alleged Human Rights Violations in Iran Related to the Protests.

On December 14th, there will be an opportunity for the United Nations to undo one of the most grotesque decisions in the history of this world body: appointing the gender-Apartheid Islamic Regime of Iran to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).

Since 1946, CSW has been empowering women and promoting gender equality, contrasting with rules, laws, and regulations in Iran's Islamic Regime. The request to hold a vote in the UN's Economic and Social Council came from a resolution led by the US, at the request of Iranian women activists inside and abroad, to oust Iran due to the government crackdown on the women-led protests. But what we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the Islamic Regime of Iran’s (IRI) successful activation of its supporters and apologists in western media, think tanks, and universities to be their propaganda machine against revolution. The IRI and its proxies are engaged in a concerted effort to perpetuate a false narrative about the uprising of Iranian people against their government’s ideology and soften the brutal face of Iran’s regime.

We Iranians living abroad see the competing versions of reality out of Iran, and who gets to choose which reality becomes the narrative, and it’s obvious the some proxies of the regime who have the money and influence are often the ones who decide. For decades, what these so-called experts or pundits said was gaslighting and made us question our account of reality in our experiences by making us question what we know to be the truth.

After years of activists exposing IRI's proxies on social media accounts and revealing the IRI's lobbies, Hossein Ronaghi, a prominent Iranian human rights activist, blogger, and political prisoner, wrote in an Op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, expressing his frustration. "For us, it is as if there are two Irans—the one where we live and another that you read about. Your Iran is defined by a pesky nuclear negotiation. Ours is much worse. It is a religious police state where we live in fear, with countless red lines that most dare not cross. It is a country of repression, censorship, and violence."

A recent New York Times piece shows the propaganda machine in action in regard to Iran’s ‘morality police’ and its future in the country. In response to a reporter's question, IRI's Attorney General said: "The Morality Police has nothing to do with the judiciary, and it was abolished by the same authorities who installed it.” These words prompted reporter Farnaz Fassihi to write an article entitled “Iran Has Abolished Morality Police.” The only problem? It’s not true. On the morning of December 4th, Al-Alam—a channel affiliated with the IRI Broadcasting—denied the possibility of the morality police being shut down and wrote: "Some foreign media have tried to interpret the words of the Attorney General as a retreat by the IRI on the issue of hijab and chastity and affected by the recent riots,” when, according to the IRI, that was not the intended meaning.

For years, Iranians have complained on social media about Fassihi’s reporting and have asked the Times to fix this problem. Iranians even wrote letters to the paper about her “professional infractions”, which include normalizing the Islamic Republic’s brutality through the obfuscation of truth in her journalism over several years.” But our concerns continue to be ignored.

Regardless of whether or not the morality police were actually disbanded, "compulsory hijab" is codified by law in Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code. It states: "Women who appear without an Islamic hijab in the streets and public will be sentenced to imprisonment from ten days to two months, or a fine of fifty thousand to five hundred thousand Rials." And according to Article eight of the IRI’s Constitution, if someone is not following the Islamic Rules, any citizen can demand that person follow the laws. That’s why we see plain clothes officers or even regular citizens verbally abuse women or even threaten them by calling the police if they don’t wear their compulsory Hijab.

The cruel reality for Iranian women goes far beyond the rules around Hijab. By law, women can’t divorce their husbands, have no child custody rights, receive half inheritance, and can’t leave the country without their husbands' permission. Women also cannot become judges, study certain subjects, play certain sports, enter stadiums, mingle with men, or get elected or appointed into several key positions, including Supreme Leader, President of the Country, President of the Judiciary System, Member of the Guardian Council or Expediency Council, and others. Girls as young as nine can be forced to marry men their father’s pick. Men can legally marry four women and have as many concubines as they wish. Men also can beat their wives. So how can a regime that subjugates women, with so many discriminatory laws, be a member of the Commission on the Status of Women?

Iran is going through a real ‘Renaissance,’ a revolution demanding freedom, democracy, secularism, equality, and justice. Iranians are tired of the restrictions of the gender-apartheid Islamic regime on what they can eat or drink or wear, who they can talk to, and whom they can love. They are tired of the mismanagement of their country's natural resources and nature by clerics and their offspring. A free-democratic Iran means peace and prosperity for the Middle East. Without the Islamic regime, a state sponsor of terrorism, its neighboring countries will be more peaceful, and Iranians will have the freedom and justice they desperately seek. And we need western voices to help get us there.

The opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily the views of Iran International

In an open letter December 10, 45 Iranian activists told António Guterres that only a prompt reaction of the United Nations, democratic governments and influential figures can stop the execution and repression machine of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Condemning Shekari's execution, the signatories called his trial “horrifying, hasty and extra-judicial” saying it was similar to “Kangaroo and war time court(s).”

Mohsen Shekari, who was convicted of injuring a security guard with a knife and closing off a street in the capital Tehran, was hanged December 8 as the first detained protester to receive the death penalty.

“We, the undersigned…strongly condemn this murder [and] urgently ask your excellency, as the highest authority at this august institution…to use every legal lever to mobilize the international community…to directly and immediately call on the Islamic Republic to cease issuing such sentences,” reads the letter.

Lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, Mahmoud Amiri Moqqadam, Saeed Dehqan, Parastou Forouhar are among the prominent activists who have signed the letter.