Iran Considers Dividing Sistan-Baluchestan Amid Tensions

In his first interview after leaving Iran, the Award-winning artist, now in Germany, told the Guardian that, due to his legal status, he had "no choice" but to leave the country because he was determined to continue telling his people's story.

His latest film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, will be screened at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It explores Iran's protest movements following Mahsa Amini's death in 2022, in which security forces killed over 550 protesters. The UN found the Iranian regime responsible for the physical violence that led to Amini's death - after she was detained and beaten by "morality police" for reportedly wearing her hijab improperly.

Iran's Culture Minister, Mohammad Mehdi Esmaeili, condemned the production and distribution of his film, calling it "illegal."

“My mission is to be able to convey the narratives of what is going on in Iran and the situation in which we are stuck as Iranians. This is something that I cannot do in prison,” He told the Guardian, “like any other dictatorship or totalitarian system, they want absolute control over images they don’t like that confront the reality of their own being and their own system.”

The dissident filmmaker fled Iran on foot, crossing rugged mountainous borders after receiving an eight-year prison sentence, a flogging, a fine, and property confiscation for “the signing of statements and the making of films and documentaries,” which the regime claimed are “collusion to commit a crime against the country's security.”

Although his prison sentence was first announced by the court in January and sent for execution this month, Rasoulof told the Guardian he only had a few hours to decide whether or not to stay in Iran.

A friend advised him to cut off all communication via mobile phones and computers and walk to the border. “It was a several-hour long, exhausting and extremely dangerous walk that I had to do with a guide,” Rasoulof said.

Rasoulof first announced his departure on Monday in a statement: “I arrived in Europe a few days ago after a long and complicated journey. About a month ago, my lawyers informed me that my eight-year prison sentence was confirmed in the court of appeal and would be implemented on short notice,” he said.

“Knowing that the news of my new film would be revealed very soon, I knew that, without a doubt, a new sentence would be added to these eight years. I didn’t have much time to make a decision. I had to choose between prison and leaving Iran. With a heavy heart, I chose exile. The Islamic Republic confiscated my passport in September 2017. Therefore, I had to leave Iran secretly.”

First jailed in 2010, Rasoulof was banned from making films for 20 years for creating anti-regime content. An appeal reduced the jail sentence to one year. Despite the ban, he produced There Is No Evil, a drama that captured Iranian society under the Islamic Republic regime and won the Berlinale Golden Bear.

Rasoulof was arrested in 2022 after signing a letter in which he called on military and security forces not to suppress protesters, released later that year.
He is one of dozens of celebrities punished for supporting the uprising, with several arrested, suffering travel bans, salary cuts, property confiscation and in the extreme case of dissident rapper Toomaj Salehi, the death penalty.

The company, on Saturday, also confirmed that it would avoid Iranian airspace during the period.

The initial suspension followed heightened tensions after an Israeli attack on Iran on April 19, leading several other airlines to reroute their flights to avoid the area.

The move by Lufthansa and its subsidiary, Austrian Airlines—both notable for being among the few Western carriers operating flights to Tehran—follows aerial hostilities.

On April 13, Iran executed its first direct assault on Israeli territory, launching over 350 drones, missiles, and ballistic missiles, most of which were intercepted by Israeli defenses and a US-led coalition.

The airspace over Iran, critical for numerous major carriers including Emirates and Qatar Airways for flights to Europe and North America, remains a geopolitical flashpoint.

Hengaw Human Rights Organization, a Kurdish rights group, says the executed prisoners were identified as Parvin Mousavi, 50; Mansour Naseri, 45; Parviz Ghasemi, 35; Yousef Saeidi Chehreh, 32; and Ramin Lavandi, 27.

The prisoners had been jailed for four to five years, separately accused of involvement in drug trafficking.

Parvin Mousavi, who developed cancer while imprisoned, was the ninth woman executed in Iranian prisons since the start of the year amid a rising wave of execution.

The execution day was marked by protests from fellow prisoners during Mousavi’s transfer to solitary confinement, leading to altercations with prison guards.

Sareh Sedighi Hamedani, a former fellow inmate, spoke to Voice of America, asserting Mousavi’s innocence and questioning the fairness of the trial that saw a co-defendant acquitted despite a criminal record.

Amnesty International has highlighted a significant uptick in executions related to drug offenses in its latest report, stating that over half of the 853 death sentences issued in Iran in 2023 were for drug-related crimes. This marks a return to stringent anti-drug measures, a contrast to the relatively lower rates of execution for such offenses recorded between 2018 and 2020.

The organization's report titled "Don't Let Them Kill Us" calls for urgent international intervention to halt the surge in executions, which it describes as transforming Iranian prisons into grounds for mass executions. The report also warns against the disproportionately impact of such policies on impoverished and marginalized communities, urging a reconsideration of the approach to drug-related offenses.

In his November 2023 address to the United Nations General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres highlighted the “alarming” rise in executions in Iran. The concern was widely shared both within and outside Iran, prompting calls for the Iranian government to halt the "state killings," and sparking numerous global protests.

In February, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei responded to the global condemnation by minimizing it as "some noise," and categorizing the executed individuals as "criminals." He further exploited the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas to criticize Western reactions. "Those in the West who protest the execution of a criminal turn a blind eye to the killing of 30,000 people in Gaza," he stated.

According to the report, talks focused on how to reduce the likelihood of more military clashes in the region. Since the Hamas attack on Israel in October, Iranian backed proxies have launched nearly 200 attacks against US forces in the region.

Israel in turn has attacked a multitude of Iranian targets, including a strike on its diplomatic compound in Damascus on April 1. In that attack two Revolutionary Guard generals and five other officers were killed. Iran retaliated on April 13 by launching more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted by Israeli air defense and allies air forces.

Two sources told Axios that President Joe Biden’s top Middle East adviser, Brett McGurk, and Abram Paley the acting US envoy for Iran arrived in Oman on Tuesday and held talks with unidentified Iranian envoys. In addition to discussing regional tensions, the two sides also discussed Iran’s escalating nuclear program, according to the report. In recent weeks Iranian officials have threatened to opt for producing atomic weapons.

They had held similar talks with Iranian officials in January. At the time, tensions were rising between Israel and Iran and Tehran-backed Yemeni Houthi forces were attacking international commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The existing ‘sanctions waiver’ was granted by the US Treasury in September 2022, as thousands across Iran took to the streets following the death in custody of the 22-year old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for improper hijab.

On Friday, that waiver was codified and entered federal regulations, according to a notice published on the Federal Register. The new rule incorporates “a general license relating to the export, reexport, and provision of certain services, software, and hardware incident to communications over the internet,” the official summary of the document reads.

This would be good news for many Iranians, activists, in particular, who for many years have been stuck between a rock and a hard place –with US sanctions often aggravating the agony of internet users struggling to find a way around the regime’s censorship.

“This should give compliance teams at big tech companies more assurances to finally open up services such as Google Cloud Platform for hosting circumvention tools for Iran,” Mahsa Alimardani, an Internet researcher at Oxford University, posted on X.

Tech giants such as Google and Amazon are known to have been restricting the use of their cloud services and platforms for hosting tools that could help users in Iran to circumvent the government's draconian Internet censorship.

Advocates of free Internet, as well as technologists who want to provide circumvention tools to Iranian users, have criticized ‘blind’ US sanctions that they say harm ordinary people more than they deny technology to the sanctioned government. They now hope that the ‘waiver’ being codified into federal regulations would pave the way for the tech companies to provide services to Iranians that they until now refused.

“This codification is a reminder to technology companies that they bear the responsibility to ensure their platforms remain accessible to Iranian civil society in the face of the Islamic Republic’s digital repression,” freedom of expression campaigners Article 19 said in a statement published on their website.

US administrations –at least since the 2009 protests in Iran– have consistently underlined the importance of keeping ordinary Iranians ‘connected’ to the outside world. In recent years, the US Treasury has issued several licenses to exempt certain internet communications services from its Iran sanctions.

It remains to be seen whether the latest move –and the codification of the exemptions– is enough to convince tech companies to offer their service to Iranians inside Iran.

In 2022, amid the most widespread protests in the 45-year history of the Islamic Republic, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, was asked if he’d make Starlink internet services available to the people of Iran. In response, he said his company would apply for an exemption from the US treasury –which in turn exempted some satellite internet equipment from sanctions.

In December 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Starlink equipment was being smuggled into Iran. Roughly the same time, Google announced that it was working to create secure internet access for Iranians inside of Iran.