Trudeau ‘Figuring Out’ How Canadian Parts Reached Iran Drones

The Bahrain-based United States Fifth Fleet said in a statement Saturday that it was the “second major illegal weapons seizure within a month" along the maritime route.

“This significant interdiction clearly shows that Iran’s unlawful transfer of lethal aid and destabilizing behavior continues,” said Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of US Naval Forces Central Command.

“US naval forces remain focused on deterring and disrupting dangerous and irresponsible maritime activity in the region,” he underlined.

The statement also said that the fishing trawler, intercepted Thursday, was transporting “nearly 7,000 rocket fuses and over 2,100 kilograms of propellant used to launch rocket propelled grenades.”

“The direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer of weapons to the Houthis in Yemen violates UN Security Council Resolution 2216 and international law,” added the statement.

Last month the US navy said it had scuttled a vessel carrying “explosive materials” from Iran to supply the Houthis, with enough power to fuel a dozen ballistic rockets.

The Houthis receive military and political support from Iran in their conflict with other Yemenis, who have been backed by a Saudi-led coalition since 2014. Iran has been sharing its missile and drone technology with Yemen’s Houthis and has also supplied other proxy forces, such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militias.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Aviv Kochavi said Israel had been carrying out its “war between the wars” strategy mainly through a series of airstrikes on Iranian targets in Syria and Iraq, in order to prevent the formation of a “Hezbollah 2”.

Israeli officials have rarely admitted their bombing campaign of Iranian targets in Syria.

Kochavi further noted that the Islamic Republic has sought to deploy drones and air defenses to Syria and even building a base called Imam Ali on the border with Iraq near Albukamal.

“Hezbollah has massively increased its power in the last decade and a half… In a sense, Hezbollah has already become Hezbollah 2 and it would like to establish Hezbollah 3 in Syria, while it grooms another Hezbollah in Iraq and in Yemen… Trying to keep them from fully swallowing part of Syria is a major challenge,” Kochavi told the Jerusalem Post.

Iran has been deeply involved in the Syrian civil war for more than a decade, deploying tens of thousands of its own forces as well as hired Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani Shiite fighters, who helped save Bashar al-Assad’s regime, with help from Russia.

However, since 2017 Iran has been trying to set up a presence on the Israeli border, possibly to create a new front to complement what the Lebanese Hezbollah has in southern Lebanon against Israel.

In a phone conversation with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said that NATO’s decision to expand eastward was wrong and that was the root cause of the Ukraine war.

However, it is not clear from Iranian media reporting how Guterres reacted to the Iranian minister’s comments and in what context he made those comments.

Earlier, Amir-Abdollahian had acknowledged that Tehran “sold very few Iranian drones in the framework of defense cooperation with Russia 11 months before the start of the Ukraine war.”

He also warned that that Tehran believes diplomacy and dialogue are the best option, but the Islamic Republic will never be “tight-handed regarding other options.”

Russia has been using Iranian drones and missiles in its air attacks against Ukraine. In October, it targeted Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure, plunging it into blackouts as the winter cold began.

Amid international outcry over the Islamic Republic’s supply of drones and ballistic missiles for the Russian invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told a meeting of UN security council November 23, that the attacks are “an obvious crime against humanity” adding that Kyiv would put forward a resolution condemning “any forms of energy terror”.

The documents are several reports prepared by the IRGC’s media arm, Fars news agency, which were marked “top secret” indicate that the author believed at least parts of Iran's several intelligence organizations had knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack but did not take any action to stop it.

The documents were acquired by the hactivist group Black Reward recently which provided them to the media. These include both hearsay and excerpts from various media outlets on important political issues.

One of the reports says information provided by a Syrian group, Iran’s intelligence ministry had arrested three Taliban members who were planning terrorist operations on Shiite shrines.

The date of the arrest is not mentioned in the report which was written in the aftermath of the attack on Shahcheragh shrine in Shiraz on October 26.

Hours after the attack, Reuters quoted a statement from an ISIS telegram channel saying that the group claimed responsibility. ISIS also released a statement through its affiliated Amaq news agency and said one of its members had targeted groups of Shiite “infidels inside the shrine.”

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Many Iranians, however, have been very skeptical of the official account. They suspect the government of complicity with ISIS in the attack, to create its own narrative and martyrs to divert attention from fierce antigovernment protests.

The suspicion was partly due to the coincidence of the shooting with the 40th-day memorial for Mahsa Amini for which the opposition planned large widespread protests. Many also said this could be an excuse for blaming protesters for causing insecurity and justifying harsher suppression of their movement.

The author said some members of a terrorist group which was behind the Shiraz shooting had been arrested “several weeks before” with 18 kilos of explosives and recounted a rumor “in some political circles” about Salami’s decision to sack the IRGC commander of Shiraz.

He added, in different font, that the decision is believed to have been taken “because IRGC had prior knowledge of the attack on Shahcheragh”. The metadata of the document created November 11 indicates that this sentence was added by the author himself and was not a later addition by someone else.

The author of one of these secret documents wrote that the shooter, a citizen of Tajikistan, was taken down by an IRGC security agent who “happened to be present there for prayers.” The agent took his weapon from the lockers at the security gate, after hearing the shots, and rushed to encounter the shooter, he wrote, adding that the shooter had been to Afghanistan twice and taken the oath of loyalty to ISIS. He also wrote that even a police team that arrived at the shrine after the shooting had only been in the area for another operation.

According to the same document, the shooter was helped by an Afghan citizen residing in Tehran who stayed out of the shrine during the shooting and claims he was arrested in Tehran adding that the commander of the operation, a citizen of the Republic of Azerbaijan who had entered Iran legally on a visa, was also arrested on his way to Tehran.

According to another document also prepared for Salami’s attention, it has been claimed that the intelligence ministry had identified the Afghan member of the group who was arrested in Tehran “on the day of the incident” but did not announce the news “to gather more intelligence on the group.”

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action against two individuals and two companies based in Lebanon for providing financial services to Hezbollah, along with an additional individual involved in facilitating weapons procurement for the group, it said in a statement.

Founded in 1982 by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and classified by the United States and other Western countries as a "terrorist organization," Hezbollah is a powerful group in Lebanon and acts as a proxy for the Islamic Republic. It has been fighting in Syria with other Iran-backed forces.

OFAC regulations generally prohibit all dealings by US persons or within the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated entities.

Among the individuals sanctioned on Thursday were Adel Mohamad Mansour, who led a Hezbollah-run quasi-financial institution; Hassan Khalil, who worked to procure weapons on behalf of Hezbollah; and Naser Hassan Neser, who worked with an entity that provided financial services to the group, the Treasury Department said.

The two companies sanctioned on Thursday over providing financial services to Hezbollah were named Al-Khobara and Auditors.

Last month, the United States issued sanctions against an international oil smuggling network it said supports Hezbollah and Iran's Quds Force, targeting dozens of people, companies and tankers.

Reporting by Reuters