Iran Gained Little From Deal With Saudi, Ex-Diplomat Says

As Nameh news in Tehran has reported, the Reform Front earlier this week named 15 reformist politicians as its "real persons" alongside several political entities as the "legal entities” under the umbrella organization. The development coincided with the anniversary of the 1997 presidential election which brought the country's first reformist government to power.

The members include former front chief Behzad Nabavi, former deputy foreign minister Mohsen Aminzadeh, media figure Mohammad Reza Jalaipour, religious-nationalist activist Emad Behavar, former Tehran city council chief Mohsen Hashemi and Fakhrolsadat Mohtashamipour the wife of jailed former deputy interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh.

According to Nameh News, former President Mohammad Khatami is still the pivot of the reform camp, but he is not likely to dictate anything to reformists. Nabavi is more likely to be elected once again as the leader of the reform front. During the past two days, several leading reformist figures wrote articles in the Tehran press to shed light on the status of the reformists who were barred from the last parliamentary and presidential elections in Iran in 2020 and 2021.

It was the Guardian Council, a constitutional body vetting candidates and controlled by Iran’s ruler Ali Khamenei that barred hundreds of candidates with adequate explanation.

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In a commentary in Etemad Online, Hamidreza Jalaipour made it clear that the protesters in Iran have shunned both reformists and conservatives in their slogans, but said: "To save the country, we need reforms rather than a regime change." He said, "The call for regime change has empowered Iran's authoritarian hardliners."

Jalaipour further explained that "The government needs to embrace reformists in order to save the country." He added that the reforms started by Khatami in 1997 have remained incomplete and it is time to revive the reformist ideas as the authoritarian hardliners have been cornered by the people. 

Reformist theoretician Mohammad Reza Tajik said, "Reformists can no longer hope in change of policy through preaching and offering advice." He added that aiming to seize political power, Iran's reformists should seek to return the element of expediency to the Iranian political frameworks. 

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Tajik further pointed out that from a philosophical standpoint, the ideal of the Sharia is to observe the Muslims' expediency and to want what is most reasonable for them. The aim is in a nutshell to satisfy the citizens rather than seeking to serve the interests of the rulers. 

Meanwhile, explaining matters in a more down to earth style, reformist activist Fayzopllah Arabsorkhi said in an interview that the government's behavior has instilled despair in the Iranian society. He added that there is no sign to indicate the government has any interest in changing its approach.

He added that there are at least ten parallel institutions that interfere with the legislative function of the parliament. Members of the parliament do not have any political power while the heads of the three government branches and numerous councils make all the decisions for the country and the people. 

Arabsorkhi added that all conservative leaders are saying is that you might want other things, but what you want will not make any change in the elections. This attitude makes elections meaningless, he said. 

In a report on the situation, Rouydad24 wrote that reformists are likely to become more active as we get closer to the election date in March and a list of candidates is most likely to come out of the left wing, The Islamic Revolution's Mojahedin Organization (IRMO), a party where Arabsorkhi, Nabavi and Tajzadeh come from. According to Rouydad24, IRMO the most influential reformist political organization and can be the driving force behind the reform camp's strategy for the next parliamentary and presidential elections.

The group calling itself Moneybird allegedly deployed the ransomware against Israeli organizations, CheckPoint's Incident Response Team investigated.

Researchers found that it resembled Agrius, a hacker group that has been around since 2020 and disguised itself with aliases like BlackShadow.

In late 2020, the group released ransomware on Shirbit, an Israeli insurance company. It also released wiper attacks on Bar-Ilan University in 2021.

Researchers at CheckPoint report that Moneybird is a new product for the group. Previous attacks were mostly carried out using ransomware known as Apostle.

Though the researchers didn't specify what types of organizations were targeted, they emphasized that the techniques used were Agrius-approved.

Threat actors gained entry via public-facing web servers and “unique variants of ASPXSPY” -- a malicious script hidden inside a “Certificate” text file.

It then moved laterally within networks, conducting reconnaissance and exfiltrating data. CheckPoint reports that the group uses "targeted paths," which allow the ransomware to disregard most files within targeted networks.

“Moneybird, like many other ransomwares, is a grim reminder of the importance of good network hygiene, as significant parts of the activity could have been prevented early on,” the researchers said.

According to Microsoft Threat Intelligence, the Iranian government is increasingly combining influence operations with cyberattacks.

Last year, they identified 24 "cyber-enabled operations" linked to the Iranian government, compared to seven the year before, and found a decline in the types of ransomware and wiper attacks Agrius usually employs.

Human rights sources reported that Mohammad Daraie, Mehdi Salari, Majid Jafari, Ali Tayyeb, Ali Piri, Qaderbakhsh Dehani, and Abdol-Rasool Jamshidi were executed in Jiroft, Isfahan, Kerman, and Urmia prisons in the early hours of Thursday.

The number of executions has exceeded 110 in the last month.

Meanwhile, the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) called on world leaders to increase pressure on the Iranian regime to end the flagrantly unlawful executions of protesters and others that are on the rise.

“The Islamic Republic is hanging young protesters—after torturing them into making 'confessions' and convicting them in sham trials—and targeting minorities for executions for lesser crimes, in order to cow its restive population into silence,” said the group in a letter delivered to 75 governments around the world on Wednesday.

“Unless world leaders join forces to raise the cost to the authorities in Iran of these state-sanctioned killings, which severely violate international laws governing the death penalty, the Islamic Republic’s killing machine will gather steam and more people will unjustly die on the gallows in Iran,” said Hadi Ghaemi, CHRI Executive Director.

Over 500 protesters, including 71 children, have been killed by state security forces since the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in September. Untold others have been maimed and blinded, 22,000 people have been arrested, and raped, and many have been tortured. A UN expert on Iran has described these atrocities as crimes against humanity.

Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, part of a government deemed one of the harshest dictatorships in the world, stated that the Taliban is only part of the reality in Afghanistan not all of it.

In spite of Iran's oppression of women which has led to months of uprisings since September, when Mahsa Amini was killed in morality police custody for the wrong wearing of her hijab, the minister said: “We are unhappy with the ban on Afghan women and girls to study because this is against the teachings of the Prophet of Islam."

Iran had good relations with the Taliban before the tensions over the Islamic Republic’s water share from the Hirmand river.

Due to Taliban damming to halt the flow of water from Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of civilians' lives have been badly affected in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan.

While Afghanistan says it needs dams to store water for agriculture or to produce electricity, which it imports from neighboring countries including Iran, many environmentalists are critical of large-scale water engineering projects.

“We have had negotiations with the Afghan authorities, and we believe that according to the 1351 treaty, the issue must be resolved through legal channels,” said Amir-Abdollahian.

Afghanistan’s embassy in Tehran was “formally” handed over to the Taliban after the fall of President Ashraf Ghani in 2021.

Iran was the third country after Pakistan and Russia that handed the Afghan embassy to the Taliban.

"A short while ago, IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers identified and downed a drone crossing from Lebanese territory into Israeli territory towards the town of Zar'it," the military said.

It did not immediately identify who had sent the drone from Lebanon and released a photo of a UAV lying in a thicket of thorns. "The IDF will continue to prevent any attempt to violate Israeli sovereignty," the military said.

Iran-backed Hezbollah controls a wide strip of land along Israel's borders, with fighters, weapons and military installations covering southern Lebanon to Israel's northern border. Hezbollah is financed and armed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Last month, Israel said Lebanese armed group Hezbollah was behind a rare roadside bomb attack that wounded a motorist in northern Israel in March, and in the past has said it shot down the group's drones.

In April, rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel during Palestinian Israeli clashes. Lebanon claimed that Palestinians on its territory had fired the rockets, and not the Hezbollah, creating a convenient ambiguity to relieve Israel of the pressure to retaliate against Hezbollah.

Iran has been encouraging all its proxy forces in the region to intensify attacks against Israel this year.

Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel fought a month-long war in 2006 and have traded fire on several occasions since, but have avoided a large-scale confrontation.