An IRGC Commander Suggests No Revenge Against US Leaders
The killing of all US leaders would not be enough to avenge the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander said on Wednesday.
The killing of all US leaders would not be enough to avenge the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander said on Wednesday.
"Martyr Soleimani was such a great character that if all American leaders are killed, this will still not avenge his assassination," commander of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) ground forces Mohammad Pakpour was quoted as saying by Iranian state media.
"We should avenge him by following Soleimani's path and through other methods," he added.
Pakpour referred to missile and other attacks against American targets and Israel as alternatives to killing US leaders.
Soleimani was killed in a targeted air strike by the orders of former president Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 in Baghdad. He was Iran's top military and intelligence operator in the Middle East, organizing militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere to attack American targets and US allies in the region.
Since his death, Iranian officials have threatened revenge against former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The statement comes as nuclear negotiations that started more than a year ago in Vienna are in limbo since March, because of Tehran’s demand for the United States to remove the IRGC from its Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list.
The Biden Administration so far has not accepted the demand, as bipartisan opposition in US Congress has grown to such a move. Pakpour’s statement might be intended to signal a retreat from the intention of killing American leaders, but it would hardly mollify those who aregue the IRGC is a terrorist organization.
However, reports have suggested Washington has been considering removing the IRGC from its foreign terrorist organization blacklist in return for Iranian assurances about reining in the elite force's influence in the Middle East.
Reports earlier also said that Washington might have offered Iran a solution to renounce any revenge against American leaders in exchange for removing IRGC as an FTO.
Then-US President Donald Trump’s administration said Soleimani was targeted for plotting attacks on US interests and that he had helped coordinate strikes on American forces in Iraq in the past through Iraqi Shiite militia proxies.
Pakpour's comments came days after US Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he does not support removing Iran's Qods (Quds) Force, an arm of its Revolutionary Guards, from a list of foreign terrorist organizations, as demanded by Tehran.
Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear agreement, known as JCPOA, under which Iran had agreed to curbs on its nuclear program in return for the lifting of international sanctions. Trump said the agreement was weak and could not prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons in the future. He also demanded Tehran stop its meddling in the region and arming militant proxy groups.
Proponents of removing the iRGC from the US terrorist list argue that the move will have little practical impact as other sanctions will remain in place. Opponents of the move say that the FTO list is not just symbolic, and many US anti-terror laws are based on a formal terror designation.
Iran's top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Tuesday that his country's future should not be tied to the success or collapse of nuclear talks with world powers.
In a new report, the global rights organization has documented how prison authorities routinely cause or contribute to deaths in custody, including by blocking or delaying prisoners’ access to emergency hospitalization. The 180-page briefing published on April 12 is based on reviewing ninety-six cases of death in custody in thirty prisons across Iran in the past twelve years.
In many cases, including the case of Nader Alizehi in Zahedan in 2017, prison authorities and its medical staff accused prisoners of "faking" or "exaggerating" their illness. When Alizehi sought medical care, he was sent away by prison clinic staff with gastrointestinal medication and died at the age of twenty-two in prison due to a heart condition.
Another young man, Abdolvahed Gomshadzehi, died in the same prison in Zahedan after prison officials refused to hospitalize him despite prison doctors' warning. The cause of the nineteen-year-old Gomshadzehi's death was neglected blood clots in his brain which he had sustained because of beatings during his arrest and interrogations two years earlier.
Like Gomshadzehi, at least eleven other prisoners out of the ninety-six, died after being denied medical care for injuries resulting from incidents that occurred at the time of their arrest or while they were in prison. The death of the remaining eighty-five resulted from heart attacks and strokes, gastrointestinal complications, respiratory complications, kidney problems, Covid-19 or other infectious diseases for which they had not received the required care.
“Deaths in custody resulting from the deliberate denial of healthcare amount to arbitrary deprivation of life, which is a serious human rights violation under international law," said Diana Eltahawy, deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International who called the authorities' disregard for human life "chilling".
Denial of medical care affects ordinary prisoners as well as political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. In January, Iranian writer Baktash Abtin died of Covid-19 complications after he was denied timely treatment at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. The Iranian Writers' Association alleged that Abtin’s condition was the direct result of “deliberate delay” to start his treatment.
Abtin was serving a six-year sentence for "propaganda against the state" and “assembly and collusion against national security”, two of the vaguely defined charges categorically brought against political dissidents.
In February 2021, another prisoner of conscience, Behnam Mahjoubi, aged thirty-three died in hospital after falling into a coma. Mahjoubi who was imprisoned for participating at a protest rally alleged he had suffered brutal torture in a psychiatric hospital during his imprisonment.
Out of the ninety-six prisoners whose deaths in custody were reviewed by Amnesty International, twenty-three were between 19 and 39 years of age, and twenty-six of them were between forty and fifty-nine.
Sixty-four of all these prisoners died inside their prison cells meaning they were not given even basic medical supervision in their final hours. Some died while in poorly equipped prison clinics, and at least 26 prisoners died during transfer or shortly after admission to hospital, following deliberate delays by prison medical staff and/or prison officials.
In at least six cases, critically ill prisoners were moved to solitary confinement, punishment wards or quarantine sections - four of these died alone in prison while two were eventually authorized for hospital transfers, but it proved too late, Amnesty said.
"Dust storms will definitely recur in the coming months, and more frequently if we can't solve the problem through diplomacy and international relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq where dusts originate from," Karim Hassani, member of parliament from Ahvaz in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, said.
Hassani urged the government of President Ebrahim Raisi to form a joint committee with regional countries as well as international bodies including the World Health Organization (WHO) to find ways to mitigate the problem.
Long-term measures to reduce dust storms include management of water resources and planting drought-resistant trees in deserts to hold down sands. Iran has for years used different methods to stabilize sand dunes with vegetation restoration, but not sufficiently.
Saudi Arabia and other regional countries also aim to plant billions of drought-resistant trees in the coming decades to reduce carbon emissions, pollution and land degradation.
Since mid-March, massive dust storms have hit various parts of the country, including the capital Tehran. Dust and sand originate both within Iran and in neighboring countries. Dust storms have caused a health crisis in recent days and forced the government to shut down schools and government offices in some cities and cancel outdoor sporting events. Officials warned of another wave hitting on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The capital Tehran was logged as the most polluted city in the world on Friday with air quality hazardous and visibility very low largely due to the very high level of airborne particles.
Dust storms and other pollutants have increased markedly in recent years in several Iranian provinces, including Khuzestan, Kermanshah, and Sistan-Baluchestan.
Although air quality in Tehran is generally bad due to the huge number of inefficient vehicles, industries, and the city's position at the foot of mountains that trap pollution, recent levels of pollution are unprecedented.
Municipality and health ministry officials have attributed the very high level of pollution in Tehran and other cities including the west and southwest of the country in recent days to dust coming from neighboring Iraq.
Sand and dust storms affect much of North Africa and countries in the Middle East. While many sandstorms have natural causes, environmentalists blame anthropogenic factors such as building dams on rivers and drying of marshes and wetlands for desertification of vast areas.
In Iran's southwestern Khuzestan Province, for instance, the building of Gotvand dam on the Karoun river to support industries such as steel in other provinces and drying ancient marshes and lagoons to dig for oil have created vast sources of anthropogenic dust storms.
But Khuzestan is not the only place in Iran where mismanagement of water resources has created potential sources of dust storms. Lake Urmia (Urumieh), once a navigable lake in northwestern Iran, has shrunk to half its size in the past four decades due to allocation of water from rivers that fed it to agriculture.
In some cases, the building of dams hundreds of miles away in other countries can create potential sources of dust that affect Iran. Building of dams in Turkey, for instance, has caused loss of vegetation in Iraq.
Building of the Kamal Khan Dam in Afghanistan has also led to the drying of Hirmand (Helmand in Afghanistan) river, which flows into Iran's Sistan and Baluchestan Province feeding the Hamoun lake and its once green surroundings.