Iran 'Deeply Involved' In Red Sea Attacks On Commercial Vessels

However, this was not the first step in this process. For the first time in the Islamic Republic, a "pre-registration" stage was introduced, instructing potential candidates to submit their required documents on the Ministry of Interior's website.

More opportunities to disqualify

The introduction of this pre-registration stage, which occurred several months before the official registration, aimed to provide more opportunities for the interior and intelligence ministries, and the Guardian Council to scrutinize applicants' files, align them with the standards of provincial monitoring boards, and expedite the review process. The Ministry of Interior and the Guardian Council, now working in close coordination, feared that individuals who had previously passed their filters might later be disqualified if their online activities, such as "inappropriate" tweets or photos, did not meet the standards of the provincial monitoring boards in terms of lifestyle and obedience to the core of the regime. This allowed the government to disqualify candidates in two stages, avoiding the sudden disqualification of tens of thousands of individuals all at once.

Absolute Obedience

The main condition for passing these various sieves was not political independence or a criminal background, but rather absolute obedience. This condition has been explicitly emphasized by hardliner regime insiders: "Absolute guardianship [rule by Supreme Leader] is not enough; absolute obedience must also be next... The condition for people to participate in the battle is absolute obedience. Obedience is important, and the first principle of stability is absolute obedience to the Guardian Jurist,” a firebrand cleric Morteza Aqa-Tehrani said. 

New Totalitarian Parties: Sharyaan And Azma

The 11th Majles elections in 2020 was the end of the presence Reformists’ and the moderates in the parliament. Hardliner allies of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blocked most of them from getting elected to parliament, using the Guardian Council’s candidate vetting scheme. The new generation of the totalitarian hardliner faction, embodied in Paydari (endurance) party, paved their way to power by dominating the 12th parliament. They have launched two new parties recently: Sharyaan and Azma.

The members of Sharyaan (Persian acronym for the strategic network of supporters of the Islamic revolution) are mainly the high-ranking managers of the Raisi administration whose goal is to curtail the political influence of the Paydari Party and "Shana" (the Revolutionary Forces Coalition Council), which works under the general supervision of Haddad Adel, a close ally of Ali Khamenei. In the statement of this group, there are no policy recommendations and program for the country. They have announced their intention only to create a network for streamlining and gaining government positions. The key person of this group is Hamid Rasa`ee, who has a serious conflict with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, in terms of filling posts with their cronies.

Hossein Allah Karam, a member of Hezbollah, has also launched a party called Azma to participate in the upcoming elections. His party’s agenda is to enforce Khamenei’s orders.

The members of these groups are mainly recycled from the Ahmadinejad administration, and ex-members of the Khamenei’s office who want to be promoted to higher positions. By closing the road for the previous insiders, the Guardian Council has opened the way for them to run.

Purification

In domestic politics, repression even against regime insiders has escalated. This policy of eliminating people with any sign of disobedience has been called “purification”. It targets insiders who are not 100 percent loyal to Ali Khamenei. "Today we have reached the stage of purifying the revolution and we will definitely win", Mehdi Ta`eb, the commander of Ammar group and brother of Hossein Ta`eb, the former head of IRGC intelligence, said during the 2021 presidential elections. The Guardian Council is following this direction. By acting to stamp out “the impurity” of a part of the government, the ruling class is getting smaller.

Future implications

The result of this type of election engineering has been the entry of incompetent and corrupt people into the Majles and the abandonment of its core mission. In the 11th Majles, checks and balances were forgotten, and the legislature was not even able to draft laws, approving most executive branch bills without expertise. Dozens of investigation plans were initiated in the parliament, but due to lack of follow-up and orders from Khamenei’s office, the IRGC, and the executive branch, they were abandoned. Beyond that, the Majles has had no input in the most important affairs of the country, including a 50-percent inflation rate, astonishing government corruption, regional tensions made worse by the IRGC, and unprecedented emigration of skilled professionals.

Here are some of the scandals of the 11th Majles: manipulation of the budget figures by the Speaker after the approval of the budget in 2021; rejection of the credentials of the reformists after being elected; bribing members of the Tehran Municipality to shelve investigations; humiliation of the Speaker of the Majles by the Russian government, and reneging on the promise for transparent voting. Now these same politicians are aiming to control the fate of the 12th Majles.

The IRI 12th Majles will be another slough house where washed-up Basij and IRGC members go to spend what is left of their failed careers. 

“Microsoft has observed the Iranian nation-state actor Peach Sandstorm attempting to deliver a newly developed backdoor named FalseFont to individuals working for organizations in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) sector,” said Microsoft Threat Intelligence Unit, the firm’s global network of security experts.

Peach Sandstorm, (formerly Holmium), also known as APT33, Elfin, and Refined Kitten, has recently focused on organizations in the US Defense Industrial Base (DIB), which includes hundreds of thousands of American and foreign entities and subcontractors that perform work for the US Department of Defense (DOD) and other Federal departments and agencies.

The first instances of FalseFont in action were detected against targets in early November 2023.According to Microsoft’s investigative team, Peach Sandstorm is actively pursuing intelligence gathering for the Iranian government. Microsoft did not attribute the hacking to any particular Iranian government entity, but the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) is known for its large ‘cyber army’ that engages in both suppression of internet access and cyber surveillance within Iran and disinformation activities abroad, as well as sophisticated hacking of Western and other targets.

The new report follows Microsoft’s earlier findings, outlined in a September 2023 blog post, where Peach Sandstorm was identified as targeting sectors such as satellites and pharmaceuticals on a global scale. 

Earlier this year, Microsoft warned that Russia, Iran, and China are likely to plan to influence the upcoming elections in the United States and other countries in 2024. Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center also confirmed that Iran has intensified its cyberattacks and influence operations since 2020.

As the 8-year-long Iran-Iraq war ended in the late 1980s, some of the veterans who returned home, realized that the country has changed while they were in the battlefronts. Their generals got financial concessions from the government, and the cities looked as if there had never been a war, with women defying the compulsory hijab and male and female students mingling at the campuses and elsewhere.

Furthermore, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death almost a year after the war made the situation look even worse for the veterans. Saddam Hussain, the Islamic Republic's arch enemy was now being referred to as Brother Saddam and an ally.

So, the former soldiers organized themselves as Ansar Hezbollah and started to attack the relatively moderate government of President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Having been indoctrinated during the war with Islamist propaganda, they beat women and university students in the streets of Tehran, Esfahan, Mashhad, and other major Iranian cities.

When the new leader, Ali Khamenei came to power, he used the Ansar on a few occasions to suppress dissent in Tehran and Mashhad, but generally, he did not give them much of a space to be politically active. Hossein Allahkaram, the vigilante group's leader was not happy with the spoils of war he had won, which was the much-sought license for a travel agency that could make anyone rich almost overnight. He wanted to have a say in politics, but everyone looked at the vigilante group as a bunch of reckless thugs.

Allahkaram, cleared the streets and went to the university using the government entitlement given to former soldiers. After his graduation, according to Etemad newspaper, he was no longer a man to stand in the streets. Now he wanted to sit at the political bureau of a political party. That was how he officially established The Society of Combatants Defending the Islamic Revolution, aka known as Razma. 

The party's platform is one of "eliminating poverty, offering political and cultural insight, explaining the merits of the revolution, preparing cadres for the country, and nominating revolutionary candidates for elections." This, he said, "Is an independent party."

Coming from the lower depths of the Iranian society, and the poor neighborhoods of southern Tehran, Allahkaram, now 67, still travels on a motorbike and lives near a cemetery in southern Tehran. His violent past is almost forgotten, and he can now invest in his credentials as someone from the poor neighborhoods. Until late 1990s, he organized rallies in the affluent northern part of Tehran against capitalism and "hijablessness" and heavy-handedly tackled any barrier to the rallies. The price he paid, was the ban on his group's publications, otherwise he and his group passed the test of time almost without any serious consequence.

The government turned a blind eye on his activities as hardliners benefitted from his street battles with "liberals". However, Allahkaram never assumed any responsibility for the violence his group employed in the streets. His political track record includes his support for government agents murdering Iranian intellectuals in the 1990s and his mild criticism of Iranian thugs who attacked the British embassy in 2011.

Allahkaram may not be in a good position to compete with Iranian hardliners who are now at the center of Iranian politics, and he may not win as many seats in the parliament as he hopes. Other hardliners have turned into dragons and monsters, while Allahkaram and his group fought in Iraq, Bosnia and on the streets.

Javad Norouzi and Mostafa Abbasi, two workers from the Ilam petrochemical complex in the province’s Chavar (Chovar) district, attempted suicide in protest against their job terminations. They survived thanks to prompt intervention by their coworkers and were taken to the hospital, but their condition is critical.

Workers in petroleum and petrochemical companies in Iran are particularly vulnerable due to their challenging working conditions and low wages. However, suicide by workers in other industries, as well as teachers, has become a prevalent phenomenon in Iran.

Reports indicate that employees at Chavar have to endure harsh working conditions and receive very low wages. This, combined with the worsening economic situation in Iran, has contributed to unbearable livelihood problems, leading over a dozen other workers to end their lives in the past few years.

A notable issue is the absence of an independent trade union organization for the over 1,000 workers at Chavar Petrochemical Company, most of whom are contracted employees. This lack of job security, insurance, and benefits exacerbates their challenges.

The workers of the company have held several rounds of protests, but their appeals to the labor ministry and governorship have not yielded positive outcomes.

Food prices have risen by more than 80 to 100 percent in recent months, on top of high inflation in the past few years, while most wage earners get less than $200 a month.

Behrouz Mohebbi Najmabadi, a member of parliament’s budget committee, said that when the current administration took office, the country's daily oil sales were 400,000 barrels. “However, by utilizing the capacities of neighboring and special allied countries, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, and regional agreements, today Iran's crude oil sales have exceeded 1.5 million barrels per day."

According to Najmabadi, the previous administration sought to raise the country’s crude exports through lifting the sanctions, but President Ebrahim Raisi's government devised a sanctions-neutralization plan in addition to diplomatic pursuit of removing the sanctions.

He claimed that global developments, particularly Europe’s sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, was one of the factors contributing to the rise in Iran’s oil sales.

“Today, Iran is experiencing better economic conditions, and economic growth is a result of these developments,” a claim in stark contrast to the realities of life for Iranians who do not see any progress in solving their economic woes.

Earlier in the week, the CEO of the National Iranian Oil Company announced a 60% growth in the country's oil production over the past two years despite global sanctions. Iran’s oil minister Javad Owji claimed last month that the country is producing 3.4 million barrels per day (mb/d) of crude oil.

Despite full US sanctions on Iranian oil exports imposed in May 2019, China remains the primary buyer. Initially, Iran's shipments dropped significantly to around 300,000 barrels per day. However, following the Biden administration's indirect talks with Tehran to revive the JCPOA nuclear deal, Chinese purchases increased. Some observers suggest that the United States has exercised restraint in cracking down, possibly to avoid jeopardizing the prospects of a nuclear deal.