Qassem Soleimani – Iran Lobby

Iran Regime Goes For Broke to Save Assad in Syria

August 17, 2016 by admin

For the first time in the five year long Syrian civil war, Russian bombers took off from Iranian airfields to carry out strikes in Syria against ISIS; opening up a new and potentially disturbing new dimension to the widening war.

While the Russian military alerted U.S. military commanders in advance—a welcome break from past episodes that almost resulting in strikes against U.S. personnel—the attacks can be debated as to whether or not ISIS was truly the target or moderate rebel forces opposed to Assad were targeted instead.

The complications arising out of Syria grow even more intertwined as the mullahs in Tehran ratchet up the stakes to keep Assad in power and maintain their own foothold on that important region of the Middle East.

That commitment of going all in to save the Assad regime as well as their Shiite sphere of influence was confirmed by U.S. military officials who now estimate as many as 100,000 Iranian-backed Shiite militia are fighting on the ground in Iraq, raising legitimate concerns that if ISIS is defeated in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. would now be stuck facing a hostile force in three unified countries.

Whether the force size is 80,000 or 100,000, the figures are the first-known estimates of the Iranian-backed fighters. The figure first surfaced in a recent Tampa Bay Times article and marks the latest evidence of Tehran’s deepening involvement in the war against ISIS. The growth also could create greater risk for Americans operating in the country, as at least one Iran-backed group vowed earlier this year to attack U.S. forces supporting the Iraqis.

Last August, Fox News first reported Qassem Soleimani, head of the regime’s Quds Forces, visited to Moscow 10 days after the landmark nuclear agreement in July to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and top Russian officials to plan Russia’s upcoming deployment to Syria in late September.

That was followed by a massive arms purchase of Russian weapons by Iranian mullahs, following the nuclear agreement and now comes the staging of air strikes from Iranian airfields.

The strikes in Syria and Iraq mirror and heightened intensity within Iran to suppress dissent as well as gather more pieces to be used on the hostage chessboard as the regime confirmed the arrest of yet another dual-national citizen, this one reportedly a British subject.

The person faces espionage charges after being taken into custody, prosecutor general Abbas Jafari Dowlatabadi told the official Islamic Republic News Agency. He didn’t disclose the person’s name or second nationality, or elaborate further on the case according to the Wall Street Journal.

At least six other Iranian dual nationals have been arrested this year, many of whom stand accused of spying or attempting to undermine the Iranian system. The pickup in arrests follows a rare prisoner swap agreed to in January under which Iran released four prominent American prisoners—including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian—and the U.S. freed seven Iranians, along with a widely ridiculed payment of $400 million in cash the regime has claimed as ransom.

Recent arrests in Iran include Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of media giant Thomson Reuters, who was picked up in April and later accused of being a spy. Others include three Iranian-Americans and an Iranian-Canadian professor.

The latest American to be arrested, San Diego-resident Robin (Reza) Shahini was formally charged with “acting against national security,” “participating in protest gatherings in 2009,” “collaborating with Voice of America (VOA) television” and “insulting the sacred on Facebook,” but his lawyer has not been granted access to the evidence being used against Shahini, an informed source who requested anonymity told the media.

Interestingly, the Iran lobby has been particularly silent on the new wave of hostage taking, as well as the expansion of the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and news came out today of how one of the ardent supporters of the regime’s receipt of the $400 million ransom payment was on the payroll of a prominent Iran lobby group without disclosing it.

A Washington Post writer who recently claimed that a $400 million cash payment to Iran was “American diplomacy at its finest” failed to disclose that he has been on the payroll of an organization that emerged as a chief architect of the White House’s self-described campaign to build a pro-Iran “echo chamber,” according to information obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Allen S. Weiner, a Stanford law professor and contributor to the Post’s opinions section, co-authored a piece arguing in favor of the Obama administration’s decision to pay Iran $400 million in hard currency in what many described as a “ransom payment” for the release of several U.S. hostages.

Weiner and the Post failed to disclose that the writer has long been on the payroll of the Ploughshares Fund, an organization recently exposed as a key cog in a White House-orchestrated campaign to build what it called a pro-Iran “echo chamber.”

Ploughshares provided millions of dollars to writers and experts who publicly pushed for last summer’s nuclear deal with Iran. Senior White House officials subsequently cited the group as its top pro-Iran ally.

The disclosure paints an even more disturbing picture of the efforts the Iran lobby and supporters of the regime will go to in order to paper over the bloody conflicts the Iranian regime is now waging around the world.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Hands Military Over to Extremist While Seeking Cash

July 28, 2016 by admin

Iran Regime Hands Military Over to Extremist While Seeking Cash

In an unexpected development late last month, the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei announced the promotion of Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri as chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces. A shadowy figure from the country’s vaunted Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Bagheri has been tasked with overseeing all branches of Iranian regime’s armed forces, including the IRGC, the regular military (Artesh), and the police.

Bagheri has an extensive military background, including serving as the IRGC’s chief of intelligence and information operations, which has put him at the forefront of coordinating the regime’s work with terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, as well as maintaining the network of proxies throughout the region including Shiite militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Importantly according to a piece in the National Interest, Bagheri belongs to a clique of IRGC officers who form the organization’s core leadership, sitting alongside the likes of Mohammad Ali Jafari, the current commander of the IRGC, and Qassem Soleimani, the famed general directing the IRGC’s expeditionary wing, the Quds Force.

Composed of just a few members, this clique shares deep ties dating back to the Iran-Iraq War, and is hugely influential in shaping the organization’s trajectory. Neither is it averse to intervening in domestic politics: members of this clique, including Mohammad Bagheri, signed a letter in 1999 to then president of the mullah’s regime, Mohammad Khatami, threatening a military coup if Khatami did not crush a growing student rebellion. Notably, Rouhani the current “reformist” president was the Iranian regime’s National Security Advisor at the time and was at the forefront of suppressing the student movement.

This appointment is not some simple bureaucratic reshuffling. It represents a significant change in regime policy to put the nation’s military and police services firmly in the hands of the IRGC and away from the regular army. It places the most politicized unit of the military, which already controls wide swathes of Iran’s economy, at the top of the pyramid in terms of raw power.

The sharp end of Iran’s interventions in the Middle East has been the IRGC, which to date has lost hundreds of fighters and tens of commanders across the region. In Iraq, the IRGC has overseen the establishment of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization spanning hundreds of predominantly Shia militias that fights alongside Iraq’s regular military and often commands its own operations.

The IRGC provides training, weapons and frontline commanders to assist the PMF, which is dominated by militias that have pledged personal fealty to Iran’s supreme leader and not the nation as a whole; an important distinction.

The moves includes the outlining of a modernization plan by Bagheri to upgrade the Islamic state’s military which has already begun with an expensive shopping list of Russian military hardware, including new fighter jets, anti-ship missiles and advanced anti-aircraft batteries.

The costs of that upgrade may also explain why the regime has been complaining loudly of the lack of access to U.S. currency exchanges and the reluctance of foreign banks to handle Iranian transactions due to the continued threat of economic sanctions put in place by the U.S. over human rights violations and support of terrorism and not tied to last year’s nuclear agreement.

The fact that the regime has opted to use the unfrozen funds it has access to as part of the nuclear agreement to help fund its proxy wars and not to help spur the Iranian economy says loads about the intentions of Khamenei and the other ruling mullahs.

Instead, the regime has sought to place blame on the still anemic economy on the U.S. and the inability to get fresh cash. This has helped whip the Iran lobby into a lather writing editorials calling the cash crunch a “new sanction” and a threat to the nuclear agreement, which is silly when we consider the agreement has been a failure in stemming the regime’s nuclear and regional ambitions.

One example has been the near constant drumbeat of posts on regime loyalist blog Lobelog.com which put out a Q&A with noted regime supporter retired Amb. Peter Jenkins of the British Diplomatic Service, who blamed the Obama administration for doing nothing to help Iran access its financial windfall.

He also raised the issue of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s past support for some of the toughest sanctions ever placed on Iran and whether or not she would continue on that path if elected.

“I am concerned by Ms Clinton’s uncritical liking for the current Prime Minister of Israel and his right-wing government. I am also concerned by the hawkish nature of her record on foreign policy issues, and I am unsure that she will feel any inclination, still less obligation to protect the legacy of President Obama, from some of whose policies she has sought to distance herself,” Jenkins said.

The realization is probably growing on the mullahs that no matter who gets elected in November, the U.S. policy of appeasing the regime may be coming to an end which is spurring their frantic efforts to unlock the billions in cash they so desperately need.

It is a point former president Bill Clinton reinforced in his speech during Tuesday’s nomination of his wife at the Democratic National Convention, where he emphasized her role as Secretary of State in getting the toughest sanctions placed on Iran during her tenure.

“As secretary of state, (Hillary Clinton) worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program” and “got Russia and China to support them,” Bill Clinton said.

We can only hope as president, should she prevail, she continue on that same path.

By Michale Tomlinson

Tensions Mount and Iran Lobby Stays Deaf and Mute

May 26, 2015 by admin

To say relations between the U.S. and the Iran regime are growing testier by the day would be an understatement of classic proportions.

In swift moving developments, an Iranian judge overseeing the espionage trial of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian has barred everyone except the defendant and his lawyer from being present. Even Rezaian’s mother and wife would not be permitted to be in the courtroom in a glaring example of the opaque nature of the regime’s justice system.

The fact that mullah’s regime in Iran would move swiftly towards what appears to be a sham trial while at the same time negotiating with the P5+1 nations on a nuclear deal has led to rampant speculation about the regime’s endgame.

According to the New York Times: “Political analysts have said they believe that the outcome of the Rezaian case, as well as those of two other Americans imprisoned in Iran, are in some way dependent on the success or failure of the nuclear negotiations.”

In which case, the regime has opted to make Rezaian and other Americans held in Iranian prisons nothing more than bargaining chips.

In another verbal jab shot by Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iran regime’s Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force, denounced U.S. efforts against ISIS in what appeared to be a sharp rebuke of comments made by U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s comments that Iraqi forces supported by Iranian-backed Shiite militia “showed no will to fight” as ISIS overran the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

It is ironic that Soleimani would be denouncing the U.S. for what he called a lax effort against ISIS when it was his Quds force units that provided instruction and training to Iraqi insurgents using improvised explosive devices against U.S. and coalition forces during the Iraq war.

Both of these incidents come on the heels of an ongoing dispute with Iran at the nuclear bargaining table in which the regime’s top mullah Ali Khamenei publicly denounced any access to military facilities.

This was followed by a statement from France’s foreign minister who reported a demand from the regime to not allow access to any military sites by international inspectors unless 24 days’ worth of advanced notice was given.

Iran reportedly altered that red line in the sand by calling for “managed access” of sites, whatever that means. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s televised comments appeared to contradict comments by the Khamenei. Since Khamenei is indeed the regime’s supreme leader, we’re willing to believe his version of policy rather than the deputy foreign minister.

Meanwhile, as things continue to go badly between the U.S. and Iran regime, the regime’s biggest cheerleader in chief, the National Iranian American Council, has been strangely silent on all of these developments.

It has not issued a denunciation of Rezaiain’s closed trial. It has not tweeted anything about the apparent contradictions in Iranian statements on international inspection access. NIAC and its leadership have not even raised a single word of encouragement for the U.S. not to overreact to what Khamenei has been ranting about lately.

Oddly, its only official statement the last week came as an attack against Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in which it demanded an apology from him for what it called a “racist” attack in calling Iranians “liars” in regards to the regime’s ability to be trusted on any nuclear agreement.

So while Sen. Graham’s analogy involved an unfortunate choice of imagery, it certainly was accurate in regards to the regime’s lack of abiding to previous international agreements, including breaking promises on allowing inspections of nuclear facilities and still stonewalling questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Of course, the NIAC would never stoop to biting the hands of their masters from Tehran so we are left with the international news media to scrutinize and criticize Iran’s increasingly bizarre behavior.

By Michael Tomlinson