Over 60% Of Iranians Want Transition From Islamic Republic

The drawing ceremony was held in Qatar on Friday, while Iran’s legendary goal scorer Ali Daei was also in attendance.

The fourth team of the group will be the winner of European playoffs that may be either Ukraine, Scotland or Wales.

The last time Iran and the US played against each other was the 1998 World Cup in France where the Iranian side beat the United States 2-1 with goals by Hamid Estili and Mehdi Mahdavikia.

According to the updated FIFA rankings, Group B is the ‘group of death’ -- the moniker that is used to describe a World Cup group that looks particularly challenging. Two teams will qualify to move up to the next round of matches.

This comes as FIFA has been urged by many people and organizations from Iran and other countries to ban Iran’s national football team from the 2022 World Cup for Iran’s recent action forcibly barring women from entering the stadium to watch a qualifying match.

A campaign on social media has seen hashtags such as #Fifabaniri (FIFA ban Islamic Republic of Iran) and others rising to the top of most-used hashtags in Persian-language Twitter.

On Tuesday, security forces denied women entry into a stadium in Mashhad, north-east Iran, to watch a FIFA World Cup qualifier between Iran and Lebanon, using pepper spray to disperse them.

A campaign inside Iran sees some former and current members of Iran's national team pledging not to enter stadiums as long as women are not allowed.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been listed by the United States since 2019 as a ‘foreign terrorist organization,’ a designation otherwise reserved for non-state bodies. Ghorbani, a Canadian resident, was travelling Friday to perform at a concert marking Noruz (Nowruz), Iranian New Year, at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center, California, Saturday when he was questioned by agents at a Toronto airport and denied entry to the US.

“He got on his flight, sat on his seat and some [US immigration] officers got on the flight and took him out,” Alireza Ardekani, executive director of Los Angeles-area nonprofit Farhang (culture) Foundation, joint host of the event, told the Los Angeles Times.

“They interrogated him for nearly four hours and eventually told him his visa was going to be canceled and he could no longer travel to the US,” Ardekani said Tuesday, adding that he had learned that Ghorbani’s denial of travel likely stemmed from the 49-year-old’s service decades earlier in the IRGC.

The Iranian Canadian Congress (ICC) in a statement on Twitter said it was concerned at Ghorbani's detention and interrogation and had brought the issue of the US refusing entry to Iranian-Canadians conscripted by the IRGC to the attention of Canadian government officials on many occasions.

"We continue our efforts to end discriminatory behavior against our community," the statement said. While Canadian permanent residents may need a non-immigrant visa to enter the US, the US State Department stipulates that “members of a designated FTO, if they are aliens, are inadmissible to and, in certain circumstances, removable from the United States.”

The IRGC is part of the Iranian Armed Forces, which also includes the ‘regular’ Army and Law Enforcement, all under the overall command of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The three branches each includes young men serving a 21-month compulsory military service

Wider worry

Around one-fourth of IRGC's 190,0000 are conscripts and Ghorbani, who like many other young men do military service after graduating from high school, was probably assigned to the IRGC when drafted three decades ago.

Masih Fouladi, deputy director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Los Angeles Times, that the case illustrated a wider worry for Iranians in north America.

“They may have served 20, 25 or 30 years ago, and many of them may have served in clerical roles, nothing that had anything to do with combat,” he said. “And now they’re facing obstacles to residency status… I think [the designation] was intended to marginalize Iran’s government, but the truth it is has really impacted Americans here who identify as Iranian.”

Ghorbani has performed in many countries including with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra in 2019. Among international awards, he took the silver medal of the Global Music Awards in 2020 for outstanding achievement. Singer Sina Sarlak filled in for Ghorbani Saurday, performing “Ey Iran!”

Mansouri, the first woman to lead an Iranian party said the election was “a turning point…as the regime completely ignored the need for people's participation at such an important juncture and barred many candidates from running.”

The watchdog Guardian Council set a field of five candidates for the June 2021, excluding the best-known reformists from the poll, which was won by Ebrahim Raisi with 72 percent of the votes.

“When nobody wants a maximum turnout, reformists will not have a chance to run, let alone win in the election,” she said. “However, if we ever get a chance to run, we must invest in the votes of women and the younger generation of Iranians.”

Mansouri reiterated the notion, which she aired in an earlier interview with Nameh News, that reformists should use the coming period to consolidate their role in society, “seek the people's trust and be their voice and give up the idea of grabbing political power for a while."

Being chosen as leader reflected the “political maturity” of a party where 85 percent of members were men, Mansouri said. Opponents had tried to “tarnish my image by mudslinging and through disinformation,” she noted, with Mashregh News trying to convince readers “that I am an illiterate housewife.”

Mansouri also said that people feel deeply disappointed that their country lags in global and regional developmental trends.

Rouhani’s failure

In an interview Cheshmandaz magazine, the party’s former leader Ali Shakouri Rad said that President Hassan Rouhani, who held office from 2013 and was ineligible in 2021 to seek a third consecutive term, had not developed a good relationship with reformists, despite the electoral support they gave him.

“During the eight years of his presidency, reformists had the chance to see him [Rouhani] once a year on the occasion of Ramadan,” Shakouri Rad said. “His behavior as president eroded the remnants of reformists’ trust in him...Rouhani's performance during his first term as president is still defendable. But in the second term, Rouhani's ties with reformists were severed after his first six months in office. He destroyed his own career and our social capital.”

While Rouhani’s strategy for attracting international investment and cooperation, especially in energy, was undone by the United States leaving the 2015 nuclear agreement and imposing draconian sanctions, Shakouri Rad highlighted the role of Rouhani’s brother.

"Rouhani's weak point was his brother Hossein Fereydoun who was behind the former president's failure and frustration after he was arrested in 2018 [on corruption charges],” Shakouri Rad said. “Everything ended for Rouhani after his brother ended up in jail."

Fazeli, a sociologist who was fired from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran in January for undermining the party line in his lectures, said "the government's competency, its social capital, and the international situation are three variables that determine the country's economic prospects."

He offered an optimistic and a pessimistic scenario. He ruled out that the government’s poor performance can improve, because a change in the combination of players is out of the question.

President Ebrahim Raisi came to office with the motto of hardliners uniting to run the government and his choice of officials is limited to leftovers of former controversial president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s aides.

In the light of public dissatisfaction with the Raisi administration, Fazeli argued that any improvement in the government’s standing should come with a change in its foreign policy to open doors for economic improvement. But so far there is no sign of a shift.

Although the paradoxical formula leaves little room for optimism, Fazeli said that there might be a tentative breakthrough if Iran reaches a nuclear agreement with the West, which would lend a new lease of life to the economy and help the government, similar to what happened after the nuclear deal in 2015.

Fazeli insisted that the benefits of an agreement would not last long as Donald Trump or someone like him could always win the presidency in the United States. During the short breakthrough, however, the government can put up a show of its competence by controlling inflation and prices, and boost the battered Iranian currency.

Nonetheless, Fazeli said that Iran is a country at the brink. The government needs political courage and honesty to confront interest groups who are used to getting unfair economic advantages.

Fazeli went on to say that the worst-case scenario will occur when government officials adopt policies or make statements that would erode its legitimacy further. The situation will become even worse if negotiations with the West are not fruitful and radicals take the upper hand in the government. This, he said, will lead to protests with unpredictable consequences.

Iran needs ‘a détente’

Meanwhile, Abdi, who regularly writes for Iran's reformist newspapers, said that Iran needs a process of detente in its international relations to reach a long-term solution for its nuclear crisis. However, he expressed doubt that such a change would occur in the new year.

Abdi added that Iran's economic problems need political rather than economic solutions. "We are talking about those political variables that will totally change the government's approach." He added that the key elements affecting Iran's situation include, foreign policy, domestic politics and managerial approaches which are interlinked.

A good solution to the nuclear question can give the economy a boost although its effect may not be as big as it was in 2015. However, a deal on the nuclear issue will not encourage foreign investment because the companies know that the situation may change in two years. Without a fundamental solution to the nuclear program, the economic crises will worsen, Abdi said.

On the domestic front, the hardliners' rise to power is irreversible. But the problem is that coalitions among hardliners are loose and unstable, so there is a chance that political instability and social tensions will rise. The year that just started will be a continued purgatory, he argued.

The managerial approach, which is based on reliance on managers less educated than average Iranians, cannot create any sustainable growth or boost employment. All they can do is wasting resources. This is the Iranian economy's main problem Abdi said, adding that even if nuclear talks lead to an agreement, not much can be done in the absence of good plans, management, and coordination.

In a recent interview, Ruhollah Mo’men-Nasab -- a former head of Culture Ministry’s Digital Media Center and the current secretary of cyberspace activities of the Popular Front of Islamic Revolution Forces political party – talked about their tactics to disrupt the flow of information and tarnish the image of activists.

He is an outspoken opponent of social media platforms and free internet access, describing them as espionage tools, and has been a consultant and staunch supporter of the bill pushed by hardliners to limit internet in Iran, entitled 'Legislation to Protect Cyberspace Users'.

In a video of his remarks that surfaced last week, Mo’men-Nasab seems quite pleased with the result of their misinformation campaigns, elaborating that they made numerous counterfeit twitter accounts with photos and names of influential rights and political activists “who were against the revolution and interests” of the regime.

Describing the disinformation network as part of a psychological warfare, Mo’men-Nasab said they have made software for the tweets and retweets and had created at least 256 accounts to make the process faster and more effective.

Twitter and Facebook have been suspending or shutting down hundreds of Iranian fake accounts over recent years, suspected of spreading disinformation, even in during elections in the United States.