A New Appointment Heralds 'Pakistanization' Of Iran's Regime

Abbasali Kadkhodai, adviser to the Iranian foreign minister, claimed it is possible to bring Trump and other American officials who ordered the killing of the former commander of the IRGC's Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, to court.

“According to international documents, governments are committed to confronting terrorist groups, and based on these commitments, Iran, under the leadership of Soleimani, confronted ISIS terrorists,” added the Head of the Follow-up Committee on the killing of Qassem Soleimani on Tuesday.

On January 3, 2020, the US military, on the order of President Donald Trump, killed Soleimani in a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport, saying that he had been "actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region."

Earlier, the Iranian regime claimed that Washington conducted the killing of Soleimani with "false claims and pretexts, including under the guise of counter-terrorism" and in "naked violation of the tenets and principles of international law."

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in January that nearly 60 US officials have been blacklisted by Tehran for their involvement in the assassination of Soleimani.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have time and again vowed revenge for the killing of Soleimani, and the pair are now emboldened by legal proceedings against the former president underway in the US.

Soleimani, who was Iran’s top military and intelligence operator outside its borders, was in charge of supporting and organizing militant proxy forces, including the Lebanese Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militia groups that have repeatedly attacked US forces.

While the Tehran Water and Sewage Company recently promised the water issue in the capital would be solved, it spread to new neighborhoods with many communities having no access to drinking water.

According to citizens, it’s been over 72 hours since the residents of Motahari, Sattar Khan, Vanak and other neighborhoods have been complaining about frequent water cuts.

Mohammadreza Bakhtiari, the former CEO of Tehran Water and Sewerage Company has spoken out against the supply issues, claiming about one-fifth of the city's drinking water is wasted due to the worn-out water supply network.

However, in a bid to divert blame, the regime advises the population to be responsible, urging that a more frugal use of water is the way to resolve the issue.

In recent years, many cities across the country witnessed scenes of massive protests against the authorities’ mismanagement of water resources or harmful dam building and politically motivated diversion of rivers that have devastated agriculture and drinking water sources.

Iran has been suffering from drought for at least a decade and officials have been warning of a further decrease in precipitation.

Jaber Rezaei was chased on Monday by a man who had picked him out on the subway and attacked him when leaving the Rudaki metro station.

He was rushed to hospital where medical examinations found that he had a slash of around 10 centimeters on his neck near the artery. He is currently receiving treatment after being admitted to the trauma department.

Last month another cleric was stabbed in central Markazi province and taken to hospital after being wounded by his assailant, a young man in his twenties.

In late April, a former Khamenei aide associated with the mass executions of the 1980s was assassinated in a bank in the northern city of Babolsar.

Since the 1979 revolution, the clergy have gained increasing power, but discontent has risen in recent years, particularly amid waves of protests over economic, political, and civil rights issues.

In a show of unity with the regime allies who also share the anti-US animosity, a raft of so-called economic agreements were announced as a show of force as Iran rattles its saber.

IRNA, the Iranian government official news agency, published an article on the eve of Raisi’s visit, titled “Why Iran's president is welcomed with open arms in America's backyard?”, a celebration of what it hailed as a diplomatic coup de force.

“The political atmosphere and political attitude of the people of this geographical area can be defined in opposition to the US,” read the article, citing Raisi as saying: “The common position between us and these three countries is standing against the regime of domination and unilateralism."

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Although Iran and Venezuela signed over two dozen memoranda of understanding during Raisi’s extravagant visit to his comrade Nicolas Maduro’s land and voiced willingness to increase bilateral trade to $20 billion, up from a self-proclaimed figure of $3 billion, both countries are so broke that can hardly keep themselves afloat.

“The level of economic cooperation was at a level of $600 million two years ago but today this has increased trade and economic cooperation to more than $3 billion,” Raisi said in Caracas.

During the signing ceremony, Maduro said the countries had signed a whopping 25 agreements “during this historic visit of President Raisi” stating there was more to come with investments in the pipeline across industries from oil and gas to gold and iron, though no details were provided regarding the agreements.

In a hopeful spirit, he said: “We are signing an agreement to establish a joint shipping company Iran-Venezuela that allows us to raise trade to the levels that President Raisi is pointing out.”

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On a more serious note, there is concern over The Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy position that states any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers is considered a potentially hostile act against the United States.

Raisi’s two-day visit to Venezuela this week along with a huge entourage and scheduled trips to Cuba and Nicaragua -- all sanctioned by Washington – seems like an effort to encroach on the region, especially following similar inroads by Tehran’s allies China and Russia.

Over almost two centuries, the Monroe doctrine has protected the US from unwanted foreign influence in the region. Most recently, it was invoked in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Kennedy gave an ultimatum to the Soviets to pull out their missiles. The last time the doctrine made headlines was in March, when two Islamic Republic’s warships docked in Brazil.

Experts wonder if such a historic foreign policy principle could be the answer to the threat of Iranian encroachment.

In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal this week, Walter Russell Mead, a fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, said that Raisi’s visit is also a chance for Latin American politicians to gain solace from fellow opponents to the US, blaming capitalism and the US for the otherwise inexplicable failure of their policies, and roll out the red carpet for America’s opponents.

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He pointed out that ties with Russia and China are booming, as Moscow has resumed its Cold War efforts to subsidize a Cuban economy and China is offering Cuba billions of dollars in exchange for the construction of a sophisticated intelligence facility to be used against the US.

“But Moscow’s efforts are dwarfed by Beijing’s. Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean rocketed from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion 20 years later and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2035,” he said.

“The steady incursions of US rivals into the Western Hemisphere would have touched off a political firestorm at any time since James Monroe issued his famous doctrine,” Mead argued, adding: “But Latin America and the Caribbean are the last remaining places where the American foreign-policy establishment appears to cling to post-Cold War complacency about America’s rivals.”

Research released by Iran’s parliament claims that as many as half of the postgraduate theses produced between 2019 and 2022 have been fraudulently written.

Etemad daily presented the details of the report on Monday, saying that a total of 72,0057 doctoral dissertations were submitted during the mentioned years, out of which 21,264 (29%) had more than 30% similarities with other scientific texts.

In the same period, 675,713 master's theses were uploaded, out of them 311,648 (46%) were copied with more than 30 percent similarity.

Previously, in January 2016, it was reported that the Dutch Elsevier publishing house removed 26 papers by Iranian authors who were affiliated with Azad University due to fraud in the referencing of the outsourced journals.

Even though various experts in Iran have repeatedly emphasized the need to raise the quality of scientific production in Iran instead of mass production of articles and dissertations, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, has always boasted of the high number of productions of scientific papers in Iran, calling it a sign of power.

Last week, the results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test showed that Iranian students are among the weakest in the world in terms of educational abilities.