Official Asks People In Iran To Report On Neighbors Defying Hijab

According to reports on social media, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, Jafar Panahi, and Mohammad Rasoulof also inquired about Salehi's health condition during their visit.

The meeting comes as concerns are mounting over the rapper’s condition in prison with human rights organizations demanding his immediate access to medical treatment.

Salehi, 33, an artist mostly known for his protest songs about Iran's social issues and injustice by the government, was arrested in October after joining street protests that had erupted across the country in September after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.

His arrest came shortly after his interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, calling the regime “a mafia that is ready to kill the entire nation... in order to keep its power, money and weapons”.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) says the detained rapper needs urgent treatment, which cannot be provided in prison.

On Sunday, Iranian activists living in Montreal, Canada held a rally calling for support for the imprisoned protesters in Iran, including Toomaj Salehi.

The 33-year-old metalworker from Esfahan is one of dozens of members of the artistic and entertainment community who have been arrested since the protests began as the regime struggles to contain widespread discontent in the country.

This protest rally was staged two days after a group of medical staff in the northeastern religious city of Mashhad also held a gathering to protest their poor living condition chanting, "We fought against Corona, we didn't get any support".

According to the Free Union of Iranian Workers the staff of Mashhad Medical Emergency also gathered in front of the Razavi Khorasan Governorate.

On the same day, Mashhad taxi drivers also protested outside the Taxi Organization, while news from the central city of Esfahan said farmers held a rally in front of the Water Department due to not receiving their water share.

On April 4, two hospitals in Babol in the north and central city of Arak witnessed a protest gathering of nurses who were angry about unpaid salaries.

Earlier, Secretary General of the Nursing Home announced in an interview with Didehban website that every month about 200 nurses emigrate from Iran.

Rising prices and economic hardship have led to repeated labor strikes and nationwide protests in the past few days.

The national currency has halved in value since September pushing prices for food and other necessities higher on top of 40-50-percent inflation in the past three years.

Khabar Online, wrote in an April 9 report that the Jalili brothers are determined to go from where they are in positions of power to the Iranian parliament (Majles) next year. Khabar Online added that all those who were in charge of the state television before were also political activists linked to major political groups.

The state television's current chief, Payman Jebelli appointed Vahid Jalili as his acting deputy during the first days after he got his mandate from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who supervises the organization and keeps an eye on the hiring and firing of key officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), which is the main tool for propagating his hardline ideas.

Saeed Jalili is a key figure in the ultra-conservative Paydari Party, which has a solid majority in the current parliament, but does not control the Speaker’s seat, which is occupied by Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (Qalibaf), a relative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

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According to Khabar Online, it is not simply a matter of winning a majority in parliament, but Jalilis could be eying the Speaker's seat at the Majles, with the elder brother Saeed hoping to knock Ghalibaf out of the much-coveted seat.

Jalili, who had a dismal record as nuclear negotiator more than a decade ago, is squarely opposed to reviving the JCPOA nuclear deal with the West.

If they ever win the Majles, they would be determined to unseat nearly all of Iran's traditional conservatives from their positions of power and create some sort of monopoly for their likeminded ultraconservatives. In the process, it is clear that they would do their best to block any reformist or independent from getting elected.

Since several years before his appointment Vahid Jalili, better known as a vigilante group leader, tried to make his political views known by writing open letters to the heads of the IRIB and its political director Hossein Mohammadi, a confidant of Ayatollah Khamenei.

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In those letters, the young Jalili often criticized the state media's behavior and suggested more hardline policies to govern media outlets, particularly TV channels.

Saeed Jalili, is thought to be steering the Raisi administration from the passenger seat, while avoiding the driver's seat and the responsibilities that comes with it, not only has planted his brother as the IRIB's acting deputy chief, his niece Alireza Khodabakhshi, is IRIB's point of person for everything relating to elections.

This gives Jalili a unique opportunity to determine who is to be groomed and promoted on the national TV and who is to be introduced to the nation as a black sheep through public opinion engineering and news manipulation.

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Thanks to Jalili's lack of expertise, the IRIB has lost a lot of its audience during the past two years as Jebelli has admitted in his recent interviews. However, this does not affect Jalilis and likeminded politicians' electability because the minority who watch IRIB's political preaching are the same minority that have taken part in extremely low-turnout elections in 2020 and 2021, which brought an inefficient parliament and notoriously incompetent President Ebrahim Raisi to power.

The majority of Iranians who are not represented among the hand-picked candidates are unlikely to take part in any election. Even the power-hungry reformists have said that they would not take part if their conditions, including due representation, are not met.

Saeed Jalili is rumored to be running his shadow government, which is now mainly based at the IRIB and is determined to use the platform to catapult himself, his brother, and their political allies to take full control of the parliament (Majles) next March.

Khabar Online, opined that the Jalilis' upper hand at the state TV violates the rights of other likely election candidates and further narrows the voters' choices. However, the nation has made its choice during the 2022 nationwide protests and that is: Going their own separate ways and defying the rules of the game as defined by Iran's hardliners.

Moineddin Saeedi, a member of the Iranian Parliament from Chabahar in Sistan and Baluchistan Province, criticized the police’s move to use traffic cameras to identify women removing hijab. He said, "If these cameras can detect crimes to such an extent, why are we currently facing the poisoning of girls?"

He added that the use of modern technological capabilities should be prioritized on issues such as delinquency, theft, pickpocketing, extortion and poisoning of female students.

Multiple girls’ schools in the capital Tehran, Karaj, Khoy and Orumiyeh (Urmia) in the West Azarbaijan province, and Sanandaj in Kordestan province were attacked by poisonous chemicals Monday, a week after the schools reopened following New Year holidays.

On Sunday, people in the Kurdish majority city of Saqqez -- the hometown of Mahsa Amini whose death in the hands of hijab enforcers ignited the current uprising – held a rally with security forces reportedly opening fire to disperse the protesters.

The demonstrations occurred after at least six girls’ schools in the city were attacked by the mysterious gas. On Monday, shop owners refused to open their businesses in protest against the regime’s inaction or possible involvement in the poisonings.

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Since last week, scores of schoolgirls have been taken to hospital with symptoms of gas poisoning, such as difficulty in breathing, nausea, headache and muscle cramps.

Shocked by the news of the death of a Kurdish teenager, Karo Pashabadi, who died as a result of an attack on a Tehran school, innumerable social media users have started asking questions about the fate of those who are being hospitalized due to the phenomena.

Sixteen-year-old Karo, from the city of Kamyaran in Kordestan province, was laid to rest in Pashavah village about a month after inhaling poisonous gas in a chemical attack on a school in Tehran, where he was living.

At least one other child, 11-year-old Fatemeh Razaei, has died in the attacks which began on November 30 and have taken place in hundreds of schools nationwide.

Close to 300 schools were targeted in the past Iranian year ending on March 20 without any apparent effort by the government to seriously pursue the perpetrators or explain to terrified parents and students what was happening in so many schools. Thousands of students have been affected, mostly girls, with hundreds more hospitalized with symptoms including respiratory distress, numbness in their limbs, heart palpitations, headaches, nausea, and vomiting.

Ordinary Iranians have been suspicious of the involvement of the regime itself, or religious extremists protected by the regime, calling the attacks “state terrorism,” although the regime has denied responsibility and even staged arrests of suspects after widespread protests. Popular belief is that such large-scale and coordinated attacks cannot happen without the green light of the regime’s authorities.

Rasool Nafisi, a professor of sociology of development at Strayer University in Virginia, told Iran International on Sunday that the hardliners of the regime are the ones who benefit from the spread of such attacks as an intimidation tactic. "The government intends to use chemical attacks in the future to quash the uprising of the people, especially women and girls," he added.

Referring to a burglary case in which the CCTV cameras captured the faces of the thieves, Mahmoud Sadeghi, a reformist politician and former lawmaker, said in a tweet on Sunday that "It’s more than two years that they (police) have taken the complete video of the theft from the apartment, in which the faces of the thieves can be clearly identified from several angles. They have not yet provided any information about the burglars or the lost property. Now they want to use smart equipment to file legal cases for people in the streets and alleys.” 

National security chief Ali Shamkhani met with his Armenian counterpart, Armen Grigoryan on Sunday.

Ali Shamkhani called the situation in the Caucasus region "sensitive" urging the two warring nations to "manage and resolve tensions with restraint".

“Tension and conflict in the Caucasus region is not in the interest of any country”, he said, critical strategic borders and the flow of trade vital for Iran with both nations.

Armenians are the largest Christian community in Iran, and relations between the two countries have been growing as Iran plays power games across critical borders. Last year, Iran opened a consulate in Kapan, making Iran the first country to establish a diplomatic mission in the province that is sought by both Baku and Ankara.

The meeting with Azerbaijan’s archrival comes amidst a tense few months between Tehran and Baku, with relations souring following an armed attack on Azerbaijan’s embassy in Tehran in January.

Just last week, Azerbaijan expelled four Iranian diplomats over “provocative actions” which have yet to become clear, with Iran vowing to do the same. Six Azerbaijanis were arrested hours earlier accused of a Shi’ite coup plot, believed to have been led by Tehran.

After Iran called on Azerbaijan to show “Islamic solidarity” against Israeli actions in Al Aqsa Mosque last week, its foreign ministry spokesperson Aykhan Hajizada, highlighted Iranian hypocrisy in its failure to condemn what it calls occupation by Armenia. He said Iran “did not protest against the occupation of the lands of the Republic of Azerbaijan by Armenia for 30 years”.