Cleric Has Neck Slashed In Subway Attack

In a show of unity with the regime allies who also share the anti-US animosity, a raft of so-called economic agreements were announced as a show of force as Iran rattles its saber.

IRNA, the Iranian government official news agency, published an article on the eve of Raisi’s visit, titled “Why Iran's president is welcomed with open arms in America's backyard?”, a celebration of what it hailed as a diplomatic coup de force.

“The political atmosphere and political attitude of the people of this geographical area can be defined in opposition to the US,” read the article, citing Raisi as saying: “The common position between us and these three countries is standing against the regime of domination and unilateralism."

Although Iran and Venezuela signed over two dozen memoranda of understanding during Raisi’s extravagant visit to his comrade Nicolas Maduro’s land and voiced willingness to increase bilateral trade to $20 billion, up from a self-proclaimed figure of $3 billion, both countries are so broke that can hardly keep themselves afloat.

“The level of economic cooperation was at a level of $600 million two years ago but today this has increased trade and economic cooperation to more than $3 billion,” Raisi said in Caracas.

During the signing ceremony, Maduro said the countries had signed a whopping 25 agreements “during this historic visit of President Raisi” stating there was more to come with investments in the pipeline across industries from oil and gas to gold and iron, though no details were provided regarding the agreements.

In a hopeful spirit, he said: “We are signing an agreement to establish a joint shipping company Iran-Venezuela that allows us to raise trade to the levels that President Raisi is pointing out.”

On a more serious note, there is concern over The Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy position that states any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is considered a potentially hostile act against the United States.

Raisi’s two-day visit to Venezuela this week along with a huge entourage and scheduled trips to Cuba and Nicaragua -- all sanctioned by Washington – seems like an effort to encroach on the region, especially following similar inroads by Tehran’s allies China and Russia.

Over almost two centuries, the Monroe doctrine has protected the US from unwanted foreign influence in the region. Most recently, it was invoked in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Kennedy gave an ultimatum to the Soviets to pull out their missiles. The last time the doctrine made headlines was in March, when two Islamic Republic’s warships docked in Brazil.

Experts wonder if such a historic foreign policy principle could be the answer to the threat of Iranian encroachment.

In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal this week, Walter Russell Mead, a fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, said that Raisi’s visit is also a chance for Latin American politicians to gain solace from fellow opponents to the US, blaming capitalism and the US for the otherwise inexplicable failure of their policies, and roll out the red carpet for America’s opponents.

He pointed out that ties with Russia and China are booming, as Moscow has resumed its Cold War efforts to subsidize a Cuban economy and China is offering Cuba billions of dollars in exchange for the construction of a sophisticated intelligence facility to be used against the US.

“But Moscow’s efforts are dwarfed by Beijing’s. Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean rocketed from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion 20 years later and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2035,” he said.

“The steady incursions of US rivals into the Western Hemisphere would have touched off a political firestorm at any time since James Monroe issued his famous doctrine,” Mead argued, adding: “But Latin America and the Caribbean are the last remaining places where the American foreign-policy establishment appears to cling to post-Cold War complacency about America’s rivals.”

Research released by Iran’s parliament claims that as many as half of the postgraduate theses produced between 2019 and 2022 have been fraudulently written.

Etemad daily presented the details of the report on Monday, saying that a total of 72,0057 doctoral dissertations were submitted during the mentioned years, out of which 21,264 (29%) had more than 30% similarities with other scientific texts.

In the same period, 675,713 master's theses were uploaded, out of them 311,648 (46%) were copied with more than 30 percent similarity.

Previously, in January 2016, it was reported that the Dutch Elsevier publishing house removed 26 papers by Iranian authors who were affiliated with Azad University due to fraud in the referencing of the outsourced journals.

Even though various experts in Iran have repeatedly emphasized the need to raise the quality of scientific production in Iran instead of mass production of articles and dissertations, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, has always boasted of the high number of productions of scientific papers in Iran, calling it a sign of power.

Last week, the results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test showed that Iranian students are among the weakest in the world in terms of educational abilities.

France-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) said the heights of Kosalan mountain near the city of Sarvabad in Kordestan province were shelled while IRGC forces were deployed to the region in the latest attacks against Iran's Kurdish population.

Villagers told the rights group that the heights of Razab village were bombarded, and in the afternoon, IRGC forces were sent to the area along with bulldozers.

According to the report, explosions were also heard at night, but the reason or motive remains unknown.

Last week, IRGC forces were deployed to the cities of Ravansar, Paveh and Sarvabad in the provinces of Kermanshah and Kordestan, bombarding the areas with drones.

On June 5, Hengaw Human Rights Organization, a Kurdish rights group published the images of the deployment of government forces to Kordestan while the internet was disrupted in some cities in Kurdish regions.

The Islamic Republic calls Iranian Kurdish armed groups "terrorist groups" while these groups say that the goal of their armed campaign is "defending the rights of the Kurds".

Late last year, the Islamic Republic intensified its repression on Kurdish-majority cities and towns in western provinces of the country following reports that parts of some small towns have fallen into the people’s hands. 

The majority of Iran's 10 million Kurds live in the western parts of the country. It has also launched repeated attacks against Iranian Kurds sheltering in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The US military's Central Command said 10 service members were evacuated to higher-level care facilities outside the region, without detailing the severity of the injuries.

Central Command, which oversees US troops in the Middle East, said no enemy fire was reported but added that the cause of the incident was under investigation.

There are about 900 US personnel deployed to Syria, most of them in the east, as part of a mission fighting the remnants of Islamic State. American troops there have come under repeated attacks in recent years by Iran-backed militia.

In March, 25 troops were wounded in strikes and counter-strikes in Syria, which also killed one US contractor and injured another.

While Islamic State is now a shadow of the group that ruled over a third of Syria and Iraq in a caliphate declared in 2014, hundreds of fighters are still camped in desolate areas where neither the US-led coalition nor the Syrian army, with support from Russia and Iranian-backed militias, exert full control.

Thousands of other Islamic State fighters are in detention facilities guarded by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, America's key ally in the country.

US officials say that Islamic State could still regenerate into a major threat.

The threats from Iran-backed militia to US forces are a reminder of the complex geopolitics of Syria, where Syrian President Bashar al-Assad counts on support from Iran and Russia and sees American troops as occupiers.

Reporting by Reuters

The 84-year-old authoritarian ruler told his top officials this week that a deal with the West on the nuclear issue can be accepted only if it does not adversely affect the country's nuclear infrastructure. 

Mehdi Zakerian, an outspoken academic and a critic of Iran's policies on nuclear negotiations, reiterated in an interview with Rouydad24 that "the behavior of successive governments in Iran have no impact on foreign policy" as those policies are determined elsewhere, meaning by Khamenei. He had said the same the night before in a debate with hardliner academic Foad Izadi on live state TV.

Meanwhile, he added in the interview that people should not pay any attention to allusions about "beggars’ diplomacy." The only person who had used that expression in reference to the Rouhani administration's more pragmatic approach to nuclear negotiations was no one other than Khamenei.

Zakerian argued that key decisions in Iran are made on case-by-case basis, despite lofty statements, and sometimes it seems the government undermines its own previous decisions. 

He said the government should acknowledge that the pressure of sanctions was the main reason why the Islamic Republic succumbed to a nuclear deal in the first place. He had said on TV that it was Iran's behavior that led former US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the JCPOA.

Zakerian made it clear that in the Iranian political structure major decisions are always made by Khamenei, and no Iranian official is entitled to make any decision or statement on his own on important issues.

He added that public opinion in Iran has a limited impact which was most clearly observed during the presidential elections in 2013 and 2017. Having elected the more pragmatic Hassan Rouhani, the outcome in the end was the same.

At the same time, referring to the country's difficult situation under President Ebrahim Raisi, conservative newspaper Jomhouri Eslami warned that Iran's political and economic situation is becoming increasingly similar to the last days of the Soviet Union where rich leaders had no idea what was happening to the poor nation.

The daily wrote in its editorial on Sunday that Iranian leaders should take a lesson from the fate of the Soviet Union, a system that had denied the people political freedom. The editorial pointed out the similarities between the Soviet Union that was founded based on the idea of equality but ended up being plagued by discriminations, and the Islamic Republic which was based on the idea of religion and social justice but created a social class of ‘nouveau riches’ managerial cadres. This new class, wrote the paper, undermines the constitution and benefits the insiders.

The daily warned that unlike North Korea, the people of Iran will not tolerate a closed system and a new social class of exceptionally and unjustifiably privileged minority who rule the nation.

Also speaking on the nuclear issue, lawmaker Jalil Rahimi Jahanabadi told Khabar Online that the hard-line lawmakers who set fire to copies of the 2015 nuclear deal in the previous parliament should be put on trial for what they did. Jahanabadi described them as "a loud minority that create all sorts of trouble for the nation." He further asked Iran's moderates: "Why don't you stand up against this minority?"

However, Jahanabadi failed to observe that although the opponents of the JCPOA comprise a minority in Iran, they hold most seats in parliament. However, he warned that "The nation has lost its patience while moderate politicians are silently hoping for a miracle…They left no future for us or for our children.”