Infighting Intensifies Among Iran Hardliners, Says Reformist Figure
A prominent reformist in Iran says hardliners are "tearing each other apart" over financial gains after pushing reformists out of the upcoming parliamentary elections.
A prominent reformist in Iran says hardliners are "tearing each other apart" over financial gains after pushing reformists out of the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Ali Soufi, a minister and top-level official in reformist President Mohammad Khatami's fist government (1997-2005) told Rouydad24 website that "There is an escalation in infighting over financial gains among Iran's conservatives now that they do not have to worry about competing with reformists in the upcoming elections."
He cited the recent scandal involving a $3.7 billion embezzlement in Iran's tea industry as an example of this infighting. Soufi emphasized that conservatives have gained greater access to the country's financial resources following their consolidation of power within the Iranian political system.
Soufi contended that such a situation often fosters financial corruption, as experienced during President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration. He further alleged that conservatives frequently disregard the law and exploit religious canon, Sharia, to evade it. Conservative groups compete to secure the largest share of the country's resources by exposing each other's activities.
Eighty percent of Iran’s economy is controlled by the government and entities linked with the clerical regime. This makes it possible for insiders to use political power for financial gains.
Speaking about the elections, Soufi said that there is a war going on between the Raisi Administration and the security forces. The government aims to give control of parliament entirely to the ultraconservative party Paydari. A government monopolized by hardliners will lead to nothing other than treason and corruption, he said.
While some conservative activists have alleged that reformists have secretly prepared a list of candidates for the parliamentary election in March 2024, reformist figure Mahmoud Mirlohi has denied this claim. He argued that when former lawmakers such as reformist Massoud Pezeshkian and moderate conservative Ali Motahari have their qualifications as candidates rejected by the Interior Ministry, it seems absurd to suggest that reformists have prepared a candidate list.
Although the government may not want a high-turnout election, Iran's Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi has stated that it is the United States that aims to dissuade Iranians from participating in the upcoming parliamentary elections. However, Vahidi did not explain how or why the United States would pursue such a plan.
On the ground, however, if there is any indication of Iranian reformists' activity ahead of the elections, it must be among the centrists. Based on an analysis published by conservative Nameh News, the centrist Executives of Construction Party is likely to go its separate ways from other reformists and moderates who have been thinking of boycotting the elections. They did the same in the previous elections in 2021 but won only less than 2.5 percent of the votes, their critics have said.
Furthermore, developments within the far-left Unity of the Nation party suggest that some members have proposed replacing Azar Mansouri, the leader of the Reform Front, with a male politician who supports participating in the election, such as Behzad Nabavi. Other members in the front have denied any change in its leadership.
According to our sources, several of these women are based in the religious city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran and use social media to seduce Israeli soldiers by sending nude images or provocative footage of themselves in an effort to gather military intelligence.
While the screen names and details of these women are presumably fake, the explicit photos and videos they shared with Israeli soldiers appear to be genuine. To entice their victims, these cyber operatives sent photos and videos of themselves wearing revealing clothing, heavy makeup, and, in some cases, nude photos.
According to Iran International's investigations, members of this IRGC-run catfishing cell use a wide range of fake profiles across various online platforms, managing at least 22 different avatars in some instances.
Two of these Mashhad-based 'swallows', identified as Samira Baghbani Torshizi and Haniyeh Ghaffarian, used their real pictures but posed as Israeli soldiers in their attempt to seduce and extract information from real Israeli soldiers. Torshizi, whose screen name was “Or Olga,” had claimed to be a Jewish immigrant residing in London. She had asked a soldier if she could see pictures of a vehicle he used in the army, wondering if “it is secret or classified.”
Ghaffarian had also tried to make an emotional bond with an Israeli soldier through sending photos and videos of herself.
Last month, the IDF announced that it foiled a network of Hamas supporters using fake social media profiles to extract information from the IDF forces, including information on the units that would be sent into the Gaza Strip and the timing of dispatches or operations underway as part of the Israel’s offensive against Iran-backed Islamist militia Hamas.
The accounts made contact with troops and “managed a kind of romantic relationship… through correspondence, voice recordings and video calls” in order to gather information for Hamas, the IDF said. The number of potential victims was estimated to be between hundreds and thousands of soldiers, including reservists. The IDF said the faux social media profiles had additional fake profiles posing as relatives and friends, in order to “strengthen their credibility.”
"In one case, the operative asked for the name of the soldier’s base and inquired, 'When are you entering Gaza?' In another instance, a profile named 'Shira Simon' claimed to be an intelligence officer to an officer in the Givati brigade, subsequently asking why he was on a base in the Golan Heights. The soldier replied that he was there for training."
Last year, Israel's internal security service Shin Bet also revealed a similar case, an Iranian operator working under the name of Sara Puppi, pretending to be a young Jewish girl with connections and business in Israel. In February, Twitter and Facebook suspended pages and profiles of an Iranian disinformation unit that was targeting nationalist and ultra-religious Jews in Israel.
Sexpionage is a historically documented phenomenon and was one of the methods of choice for the Soviet intelligence. In the Soviet Union, female agents tasked with employing such tactics were called 'swallows,' while their male counterparts were referred to as 'ravens.' The Islamic Republic has famously used swallows to honeytrap or blackmail its critical figures.
In one of the major recent cases, Iran’s intelligence apparatus used one of these so-called swallows to lure and consequently abduct Habib Asyud (also known as Habib Chaab) -- an Iranian-Arab leading separatist – in Istanbul. He was smuggled to Tehran in November 2020 and was hanged earlier this year.
Iran supports Hamas but says it did not play any role in the Islamist militants' October 7 terror attack that triggered the current crisis. Iran also backs the Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group that has deep ties with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian faction in Gaza that is also backed by Iran.
In a report on Khabar Online website, Iranian academic Mohammad Hossein Gharib suggested that the largest corruption cases in Iran have occurred after 2005 when populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first came to power. Ahmadinejad brought with him individuals, who quickly proved adept at using their government positions to get rich.
These cases include a $6 billion corruption case resulting from Iranian tycoon Babak Zanjani's efforts to help the government bypass international sanctions and sell Iran's oil in in the international markets. A $7.2 billion case at the Iranian Insurance Company, a $5.3 billion embezzlement case at the Iranian Teachers' Pension Fund, and a one-billion-dollar embezzlement case about financial irregularities in importing poultry feed. All of these occurred when the rate of exchange for US dollar was around 30,000 rials per dollar.
The most recent case, amounting to $3.7 billion, was even larger considering the exchange rate at the time was over 500,000 rials per dollar. The report attributed this corruption to a centralized government economy, attempts to circumvent sanctions, the government's granting of concessions to its loyalists, and the traditional practice of nepotism.
Former lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh told local media on Saturday that at least $57 billion has been embezzled by government officials and operatives in the past two decades.
A report on Faraz daily website, investigated the role of former Agriculture Minister Javad Sadatinejad in the Debsh Tea corruption case, while describing the case as the tip of the iceberg of financial corruption in the government of President Ebrahim Raisi. However, the website added that Raisi has tried to blame the previous government under President Hassan Rouhani and the Iranian Judiciary for the case.
According to the report, Raisi claimed that his government had detected and stopped the embezzlement, leading to the firing of around 60 managers whose cases were sent to the Judiciary. However, Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei later contradicted this claim, stating that the government had not implicated anyone in the case.
The report also revealed that the Judiciary was the entity that initially exposed the corruption case, and Ejei disclosed that Sadatinejad had been forced to resign when signs of financial corruption became public. Ejei further revealed that despite ongoing corruption since 2019, additional funds were channelled to the Debsh Tea company by the government as recently as 2022, with Vice President Mokhber implicated in media reports as the facilitator. The report suggested that Mokhber may have tipped off Sadatinejad to resign.
Meanwhile, centrist Aftab News quoted Farshid Mohebbi, the managing director of the Union of Tea Planters in northern Iran as saying that the Iranian state TV pulled him off the air when he started to say that even the tea served at Iranian government offices is imported because the government does not wish to support domestic producers.
He revealed that Debsh Tea Company, mixed outdated Iranian tea with imported foreign tea and exported the blend to countries such as Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Russia although its officials knew that their product was carcinogenic.