Residents Hold Protest Against Water Transfer Plans In Southwest Iran

Condemning the desecration, Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said on Sunday that the Islamic Republic is waiting for Stockholm's immediate, strong and clear reaction against the perpetrators of the insulting act and practical measures to prevent such moves.

Leader of the right-wing extremist party, Rasmus Paludan, went to an open public space in southern Linkoping -- a heavily Muslim-populated neighborhood on Thursday, put the Quran down on the ground and burned it while ignoring protests from onlookers.

The intentional repetition of the anti-Islam blasphemous act in the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan has hurt the feeling of Muslims both in Sweden and across the world, Khatibzadeh said.

The Foreign Ministry also summoned the chargé d'affaires of Sweden to convey the Islamic Republic’s protest at the desecration.

Malaysia and Indonesia along with the Swedish Islamic Center and many other groups and organizations also strongly condemned the provocative action.

Iraqi Shia cleric and the leader of Sadr Movement, Muqtada al-Sadr, called on the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on Saturday to summon the Swedish ambassador

Since Thursday, a number of cities across Sweden, such as the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby as well as in the cities of Linkoping and Norrkoping, were scenes of violent clashes with social media videos showing young men smashing windows of police cars and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest).

Paludan is a Danish lawyer who also holds Swedish citizenship and set up Stram Kurs in 2017 with an anti-immigration and anti-Islam agenda. He once burned the Quran in 2019 and also wrapped the book in bacon and tossed it in the air. In 2020, Paludan was banned from entering Sweden for two years and was also prevented from entering Germany for some time after he announced plans to hold a similar demonstration in Berlin.

According to the report published on Friday, Turkey clinched its best March ever in terms of property sales as Iranian citizens bought 784 homes, topping the list followed by Iraqi citizens with 741 units and Russian citizens with 547.

Iranians bought 2,256 residential units in the first quarter of this year, while Turkey has recently increased the minimum monetary value needed by a foreigner to apply for citizenship investment program from $250 thousand to $400 thousand.

House sales to foreigners rose 31 percent in March compared to the same month last year to 5,567. The purchases by foreigners were over four percent of all home sales in March with Istanbul on top of the list followed by the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya and the capital Ankara.

Total Turkish annual home sales also rose 20.6 percent in March to 134,170 houses amid declining supply and soaring prices, but industry representatives say the data show that households continue to view real estate as an attractive investment tool.

A senior member of Iran’s parliament said in October 2021 that Iranians bought $7 billion of real estate in Turkey in about three years from 2018 to 2020, with estimates of 3,000 residential units every year.

By buying property in Turkey, Iranians try to protect their capital as the country’s currency keeps falling and hope to gain Turkish citizenship and be able to do business without being restricted by US sanctions, which make it hard for Iranians to even open bank accounts in other countries.

According to a statement from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance Saturday, the United States has violated its commitments over hosting international events and was obstructing, not the first time, the attendance of Iranian delegations at international events taking place in the US. Washington has not responded to the charges.

Ehsan Khandouzi, who has been in office since last August and has called for tighter monetary control, had planned to lead the Iranian delegation to the World Bank-IMF spring meetings due April 18-April 24. The meetings are expected to focus on the detrimental fall-out from the Ukraine war, particularly with poorer countries of the global ‘south’ facing rapidly rising commodity prices including foodstuffs.

In February, the Iranian national freestyle wrestling team had to call off a trip to Arlington, Texas, for a friendly match after the US government refused to issue visas for six members of the party, including Alireza Dabir, the chairman of Iran's Wrestling Federation, two wrestlers, a coach, the team manager, and a referee.

The Houthis’ chief negotiator and spokesman, Mohammed Abdul-Salam, said late Friday that formation of such a taskforce amid a cease-fire in the country’s civil war contradicts Washington’s claim of supporting the UN-brokered truce.

He said on his Telegram social media account that the US taskforce “enshrines the aggression and blockade on Yemen”, referring to the Saudi-led coalition’s blockade of Houthi-held areas. The rebels seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014, about a year before the coalition entered the war on the side of Yemen’s legal government.

Iran has long been accused of smuggling weapons to the Houthis, a charge Tehran denies, but the US has seized a few shipments of Iranian weapons destined for Houthis.

The new naval task force will consist of up to eight vessels and will be part of the 34-nation Combined Maritime Forces, which has three other task forces in nearby waters targeting smuggling and piracy.

Its launch comes amid a two-month truce in the nearly seven-year Yemen war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more, and pushed the Arab world’s poorest nation to the brink of famine.

The petrochemical plant in Miankaleh, northern Iran is planned to be built next to a nature reserve, which galvanized opposition by activists and citizens in the past two weeks. President Ebrahim Raisi came out against the project earlier this week and Iran’s Judiciary issued an order to stop construction until further studies.

However, the governor of Mazandaran province and the Friday Prayer Imam of the region strongly defended the project. The governor is appointed by Raisi and the Imam by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Some hardliners went as far as saying opponents of the project are in essence opponents of the Supreme Leader, thus trying to accuse them of a political crime.

The Speaker of parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf also has backed the project.

In addition, it was alleged in the media that the owner of the petrochemical plant is a super-borrower from government banks, making the whole project politically more controversial. The individual owners of the land and the project remain hidden from public view, as a host of front companies are officially holders of the permit.

Super-borrowers are influential political insiders who borrow huge sums using their influence, often with no intention to pay back.

The government of former president Hassan Rouhani in an apparently hasty move approved the petrochemical project last year and it obtained the oil ministry’s permission in an unusually fast-tracked manner.