Pundits In Tehran Say Iran May Be Headed For War

In a phone conversation with European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Saturday, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said “in order to reach a good and lasting agreement, it is necessary for the other side to give up its double standards and contradictory behavior."

He added that the Islamic Republic still believes that "diplomacy is the best and most appropriate" solution to the outstanding issues on the revival of the deal,” reiterating that "Iran has never distanced itself from the negotiating table.”

“If the United States wants to continue its unconstructive behavior, it will face our proportionate response," Amir-Abdollahian emphasized.

The resolution called on Iran to engage with the IAEA without delay and expressed “profound concern” at Iran’s failure to satisfy the agency over traces of uranium found at three undeclared sites and highlighted earlier in June in a report by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi.

The resolution came as year-long talks paused since March between Iran and five world powers aimed at reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

Following the resolution, Iran retaliated, telling the IAEA it plans to remove more monitoring equipment, but intends to maintain a basic level of monitoring and inspectors’ access as required under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

In an interview with Nour News, a website affiliated to the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Behrouz Kamalvandi made the remarks on Friday in reaction to a report by the New York Times about the work at the underground nuclear facility purportedly able to withstand cyberattacks and bunker-penetrating bombs.

US officials told the Times that the new underground facility was to replace a centrifuge assembly plant that the Times said Israel blew up in 2020 “in a particularly sophisticated attack.”

Kamalvandi claimed that Iran had notified the UN nuclear agency of its plan to relocate the activities of the TESA complex in Karaj to the city of Natanz, saying that the transfer of some of the activities to an area near the Natanz nuclear site aims to prevent the recurrence of attacks, referring to last year’s sabotage at the TESA complex. 

He said that said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been informed about it, even though Iran has no obligation to provide such information to the agency.

The complex in Karaj, on the outskirts of Tehran, saw a sabotage attack in June last year, which authorities blamed on Israel. The attack damaged surveillance cameras at the site.

Head of the Paraguayan National Intelligence Secretariat Esteban Aquino told the country’s Spanish language digital newspaper ABC Digital Friday that despite claims by Argentina that no evidence links the case to the Quds (Qods) Force -- Tehran’s extraterritorial intelligence and secret ops outfit listed as a terrorist organization by the United States -- Captain Gholamreza Ghasemi did not merely share a name with a member of the group but is in fact the same man.

Reiterating the claim, Argentine Minister of Security Anibal Fernandez responded Friday that while the Paraguayan official "has his right to say whatever he wants... I'm not going to talk about conjecture... according to the official documentation, there is no specific relationship with terrorist organizations, according to all the databases."

The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires also released a statement on Thursday, saying that the Boeing 747 was used by the Iranian company Mahan Air and transported “a group of Iranian officials, including a senior executive of the airline Qeshm Fars Air,” accused of transporting weapons for Hezbollah during the civil war in Syria.

Iran has denied that the Boeing 747 belongs to Mahan Airlines, sanctioned by the US in 2008 for links to the Quds (Qods) Force.

Ghasemi is also reportedly a relative of current Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, whose appointment by President Ebrahim Raisi triggered condemnation from Argentina given his suspected role in the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed 85 people and injured over 300.

The army’s public relations manager for the central province of Esfahan told Tasnim news agency, affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, that the pilot and co-pilot of the plane landed with parachutes thanks to ejection seats and were taken to hospital for treatment. 

According to a survey by Flight Global in 2019, the Iranian air force operates around 24 F-14 Tomcats from a batch of 79 of the Grumman-made, swing-wing fighters that Iran purchased in the mid-1970s before the Islamic revolution. Some of them are still in service in Iran by improvisation in maintenance, since the US sanctions prevent purchase of new equipment and parts while the US Navy retired its last Tomcat in 2006. 

This is the second aviation incident in Iran in less than a month. In May, an F-7 fighter jet of the Iranian Air Force crashed near the same city while on a training mission, killing both of the aircraft’s pilots.

Iran’s F-7 fighters are believed to have been modeled after China’s jet Chengdu J-7, whose third-generation export version is called F-7 and is considered a copy of the Soviet-era MiG-21.

Iran’s air force has an assortment of Russian and US-made military aircraft which are not considered to be in optimal condition as decades of Western sanctions have made it hard to maintain the aging fleet.

Iranians with some knowledge of the affair have reported that the counter-espionage unit of the IRGC arrested several journalists in Tehran, most notably Ali Gholhaki, a hardliner, conservative investigative journalists with a proven access to insider information from the Iranian establishment.

The arrest stirred a controversy on social media as various people with knowledge of personalities involved gave different accounts of Mr. Gholhaki’s background, performance and character. Iranian journalist Ali Maliki wrote in a tweet that Gholhaki’s arrest sounded odd as he was an example of journalists who are linked to Iran’s power centers.

Another Iranian journalist, Mojtaba Purmohsen quoted a post published on the hardliner Ammarioun channel on Telegram and wrote that the reason why Gholhaki was arrested was that he had disclosed Israeli infiltration into the IRGC Intelligence Organization.

Another netizen who introduced himself or herself as Emilia, wrote in a Twitter post: “If I were a spy I would have wanted to look like Ali Gholhaki and other hardliner journalists or even some of the Iranian lawmakers if I did not wish to be recognized easily.” Emilia was only one of the social media users who pointed out that spies usually chose to be disguised as hardliner Muslims.

An Iranian teacher, Siavash Khoshdel, tweeted: “Gholhaki has been arrested. But has he been detained legally? Even if yes, has there been a trial or a verdict? No. And there is no reason to believe that there would be a fair trial for him.”

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In an interview with Iran International TV, analyst Mehdi Mahdavi-Azad quoted lawmaker Malik Shariati as having said that Gholhaki was arrested by the IRGC’s Counter Disinformation unit. “If this is true, one can say with a degree of certainty that Gholhaki was a member of The IRGC or Basij militia or he was in charge of a major IRGC project,” said Mahdavi Azad.

Mahdavi-Azad added that several Iranian journalists including Saba Azarpeik and Massoud Kazemi have said that Gholhaki was involved in fabricating incriminating evidence against them. The analyst argued that if this claim is true then Gholhaki was in one way or another cooperating with Iranian security-intelligence forces.

Mahdavi-Azad said that in the past Ali Ghazali the editor of Baztab news website and Mohammad Hossein Rostami the managing editor of ultra-conservative website Ammarioun had been arrested on similar charges, and they are still in jail. Similar arrests including that of investigative journalist Reza Golpour, said Mahdavi Azad, happened at a time when there was an internal conflict in the IRGC, and one part of the corps wanted to silence another part.

The analyst said that probably disclosures about parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s family luxury shopping trip, and the leaking of tapesincluding statements made by former IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari as well as leaking another tape including remarks by Mehdi Taeb, the brother of IRGC Intelligence Chief Hossein Taeb could be reasons why Gholhaki was arrested. Interestingly, all of these controversies involved Ghalibaf.

Meanwhile, as Twitter user Anvari wrote in a warning to other conservative journalists and Twitter users: “Ali Gholhaki, a well-known conservative journalist has been arrested by the IRGC Intelligence on charges of espionage. Let it be known that the IRGC has no mercy even for you my dear friend.”

There is still no news about Gholhaki’s whereabouts or about the names of others who may have been arrested.