Controversy Continues Over Tehran-Riyadh Fragile Relations

Bagheri-Kani confirmed his meeting in a tweet on Wednesday, claiming the two had a “serious and constructive” meeting.

“We exchanged views and discussed a range of issues including negotiations on sanctions lifting,” added the Iranian diplomat.

Mora also confirmed the negotiations saying they were on “a range of difficult bilateral, regional, and international issues, including the way forward on the JCPOA.”

Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian arrived with a delegation possibly including Bagheri-Kani who is also deputy foreign minister in Doha Monday evening and held talks with Qatari officials on Tuesday, in what many believed to be related to issues pertaining to disputes with the United States.

In recent weeks there have been a flurry of reports about direct and indirect talks between Washington and Tehran on the nuclear issue, Americans held hostage in Iran and possibly Iran’s military cooperation with Russia.

Some reports suggest that the US intends to reach an unwritten interim nuclear deal, whereby it offers sanctions relief to Iran in exchange for a freeze on uranium enrichment at 60 percent.

With Russia using hundreds of Iranian-made suicide drones in Ukraine since October 2022, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was grilled in parliament about the report by the Jewish Chronicle earlier this month.

“We take all allegations of breaches of export controls seriously and my understanding is that officials in the Department for Business and Trade are currently now investigating the allegations made in the recent press article cited,” Sunak said.

“We will not accept collaborations which compromise our national security,” he said, pointing to stepped-up controls on academic collaborations in technology.

Alicia Kearns MP, chair of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs had earlier said: “This is a horrifying collaboration, one that I fear risks breaching sanctions in place around sensitive and dual-use technologies.”

According to the Jewish Chronicle, Tehran funded researchers in Britain working on improving drone engines in a project that boosted altitude, speed, and range.

In addition to its ban on military and "dual-use" technologies being exported to Iran, the UK has recently imposed new sanctions against Iranians supplying Russia with kamikaze drones that are being used in Ukraine.

At least 11 British universities, including Cambridge, Cranfield, Glasgow and Imperial College London, were named by the Jewish Chronicle as taking part in studies with potential Iranian military applications.

The killing happened near the West Bank settlement, Eli, in what Hamas called a response to a major Israeli operation in nearby Jenin.

Emergency services reported that four other people were wounded, including a minor, when the gunmen opened fire at a roadside restaurant and a gas station near Eli settlement.

After the attack, Israel said it was beefing up its forces’ presence in the West Bank.

Authorities said the two gunmen belonged to Hamas' armed wing. One was killed by a civilian at the scene and the other by Israeli security forces.

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and has a network of fighters across the West Bank, described the attack as a "heroic" response to Monday's Israeli operation in Jenin and said it may be followed by more actions against Israelis "that will shatter their fragile state and turn the lives of their soldiers and settlers into a nightmare".

Israel blamed Iran for a large-scale military confrontation in early April when Palestinian groups aligned with the Islamic Republic launched hundreds of rockets against Israel from Gaza and Lebanon.

The Iranian regime as a Shiite Muslim political force has limited appeal with Sunni Muslims and its reach is mainly among Shiites in Middle Eastern countries, such as Iraq and Lebanon. However, it directs billions of dollars a year to finance an array of militia forces and their political networks.

While sharp criticism about the deteriorating economy and “mismanagement” by Iran’s hardliner government has increased by both friends and foes, Raisi tried to present an acceptable picture of his performance by making claims and citing misleading or cherry-picked statistics. 

The televised interview Tuesday evening was aired on the second anniversary of his win in the 2021 presidential vote that had none of the attributes of a competitive race. His most serious rivals were disqualified by the Guardian Council, a non-transparent body controlled by regime insiders loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Raisi repeated the regime’s unsubstantiated claim, first made by Khamenei, that the nationwide ‘Women, Life Freedom’ movement was a conspiracy by enemies to derail the success of the regime.

“The esteemed leader of the revolution indeed correctly proclaimed that the basis of the riots was the fact that enemies felt the country was moving toward progress and hope was returning to the people,” Raisi said about Khamenei drawing the line and defining the cause of the protests.

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Regime officials never use the word ‘protest’ when it is about Iran. All anti-government demonstrations are ‘riots’.

The head of the Revolutionary Guard intelligence organization, Mohammad Kazemi claimed this week that 20 foreign secret services were involved in planning and organizing the protests that began last September when a 22-year-old woman was killed in ‘hijab police’ custody.

Raisi even claimed that nuclear talks with the West came to a halt because of the protests, while these negotiations hit a snag in the end of August or early September 2022, weeks before the anti-government movement began and the extent of the violence against protesters was revealed.

The United States said many times in 2022 that the Islamic Republic had presented “extraneous” demandswhen the European Union mediators presented a compromise draft agreement in mid-2022.

The bloody government response to protests that eventually took more than 500 civilian lives did become part of the US reasons for not pursuing a return to the JCPOA nuclear deal, but the first signs from Washington emerged in October and had nothing to do with the initial impasse in negotiations.

Raisi also made a series of misleading statements on the economy, including a claim that inflation dropped during his presidency, while Tehran media in May reported an inflation rate close to 70 percent.

Worse of all what he ignored to mention was a devastating drop in the value of the currency, rial, since September 2022. The rial, which was trading at around 280,000 to the US dollar in mid-2022, dropped to as low as 550,000 in early May. It is now trading at around 490,000. In short, the rial’s value almost halved in less than a year, with an incalculable damaging impact on the inflation rate in the months to come.

But the president in his interview tried to blame the war in Ukraine, which did have an inflationary impact on global prices, but nowhere near 70-percent inflation.

Iranian observers are at a loss to explain extravagant and demonstrably false statements by officials. Is it ignorance of facts, rosy reporting by bureaucrats to senior politicians or an outright and deliberate attempt to justify their failures?

Raisi’s statements come against the backdrop of reports about direct and indirect talks with the United States to reach an unwritten deal so the Tehran can receive some badly needed foreign currency if Washington agrees to allow its frozen funds in Iraq and South Korea to be released.

Two days before the executions, six Baha'i men had been also hanged over trumped up charges. They were among the 22 Baha’is who were sentenced to death out of about 100 Baha'i arrested as part of a crackdown in the southern city of Shiraz in the spring of 1983. 

They were convicted for espionage as well as promoting Baha’i faith but in reality their crime was not recanting their beliefs, long hated by the Shia Muslim authorities who had taken over Iran a few years earlier. 

The youngest of these women was Mona Mahmoudnejad, a 17-year-old girl whose father was also executed four months earlier, and the oldest of them was 57-year-old Ezzat Janami-Eshraghi, executed along with her daughter Roya that day, and two days after their father Enayatollah Eshraghi. 

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According to Ronald Reagan, the then US president who had pleaded to world leaders to join him to prevent the Iranian government's decision to execute the 22 Baha'is, 113 had already been hanged across Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. 

Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, replied to Reagan’s plea at the time, saying: “If we don't have any other reason that they are American spies, Reagan's support for them is enough."

In the past several days, Iranian expatriate communities in addition to Baha’is and relatives of the victims held events to condemn the Islamic Republic’s executions and the unrelenting persecution of ethnic and religious minorities. 

After an event in Oslo, Norwegian-Iranian politician Bijan Gharahkhani told Iran International that the most important issue for Iran today is the unity among people from different ethnicities and religions. He expressed hope for a future Iran in which no one is persecuted for their identities and views. 

In Canada, Nahid Mazloum, the other daughter of Ezzat Janami Eshraghi who survived and escaped from the Islamic Republic, told New Canadian Media that “life goes on, but the pain never goes away,” before addressing a gathering of about 650 people from the Baha’i community in Vancouver last Friday, June 16.

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in his message to the community in April during Ridván — a 12-day festival and the holiest time of the Baha’i calendar — said Canada is deeply concerned about the injustices endured by members of the faith in Iran. 

In a letter from inside prison obtained by Iran International, human rights activist Narges Mohammadi said the execution of Baha’i women was “a manifestation, representation, and exposure of the tyrannical, anti-women regime of the Islamic Republic.”

The campaign of terror against Baha’is has been intensifying in recent years, according to the Worldwide Baha’i Community’s statement published in July 2022.

The Baha’i -- who number around 300,000 in Iran -- are the most persecuted religious minority in Iran. They are deprived of government jobs and university education, and the regime periodically instigates attacks on their communities, arrests them, confiscates their businesses and other assets, and demolishes their houses. The intelligence apparatus of the regime usually accuses the arrested Baha’is to having connections with the Baha’i Universal House of Justice in Haifa, Israel, the nine-member supreme ruling body of the Bahaʼi Faith.

Established by Bahaullah in the 19th century, the Baha’i faith initially spread in Iran and parts of the former Ottoman empire and remained mostly confined to Iran and the Ottoman empire until after the death of Bahaullah.

Its roots trace back to the religion of Ali-Mohammad Shirazi, known as the Bab (the gate), the founder of Babism who claimed to be a messenger of God in southern Iran in 1844. The Bab who said God would soon send a new prophet to mankind was executed for heresy against Islam which considers Muhammad as the last prophet of God.

In 1863 Bahaullah, the founder of Baha’i faith who was banished from Iran and settled in Iraq later, announced that he was the prophet promised by the Bab. The leadership of Baha’is fell to his son Abdul-Baha after his death in 1892 near Acre in present day Israel.

Baha’is believe in Muhammad as a prophet of God, and in the Quran as the Word of God while the Shia clergy consider Babism and the Baha’i faith as heretical sects. 

The 1979 constitution of the Islamic Republic recognizes only Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has on several occasions called the Baha'i Faith a cult and in a religious fatwa in 2018 forbade contact, including business dealings, with followers of the faith.