Iran Digest Week of October 18 - October 25
/Iran Digest Week of October 18 - October 25
AIC’s Iran digest project covers the latest developments and news stories published in Iranian and international media outlets. This weekly digest is compiled by Communications Associate Zaynab Siddiqui and Seamus Ryan. Please note that the news and views expressed in the articles below do not necessarily reflect those of AIC.
US-Iran Relations
Facebook discloses operations by Russia and Iran to meddle in 2020 election
Facebook on Monday disclosed it had taken down four new foreign interference operations originating from Iran and Russia, including one targeting the US 2020 presidential elections that appears to be linked to the Russian troll agency, the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
The suspected IRA campaign “had the hallmarks of a well-resourced operation that took consistent operational security steps to conceal their identity and location”, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a blogpost.
The campaign used 50 Instagram accounts and one Facebook account with about 246,000 followers to publish nearly 75,000 posts, according to Graphika, a social network analysis company that reviewed the campaign for Facebook.
(Guardian)
Iranian students barred from US: lost money, broken dreams, no answers
On 9 September, Milad Aghajohari and much of his extended family piled into cars and drove six hours from Isfahan to Tehran’s international airport. The 22-year-old was on his way to California, set to start a PhD program at Stanford University.
After wishing everyone goodbye, Aghajohari rolled his suitcases into the terminal. He handed his passport to a Turkish Airlines officer and placed his luggage on a scale. A moment later, a senior airline official pulled Aghajohari aside and showed him an email, which said it was “strictly advised” Aghajohari not board the flight. The initials of US Customs and Border Protection were written beneath the message. “In a few seconds,” Aghajohari said, “I went from being a Stanford student to being seen as a potentially dangerous person.”
(Guardian)
Ohio Man Sentenced To Prison For Evading Iran Sanctions
A 64-year resident of Central Ohio was sentenced to a 20-month sentence for violating U.S. sanction by supplying industrial and oil technology to Iran, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The statement issued on October 24 says Behrooz Behroozian who was born in Iran in 1955 and entered the United States in 1976 and for over a decade knowingly engaged in supplying technology that violated U.S. sanctions. He had become a U.S. citizen in 1987.
“For years, this defendant deliberately sought to defeat and evade the Iranian sanctions for personal gain while supplying critical equipment to the Iranian industrial complex. As this case demonstrates, the desire for specialized American technology and the willingness to illegally supply it to hostile countries are very real and ever present,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers.
Economy
Iran economy to shrink 9.5% this year amid tighter U.S. sanctions, says IMF
Iran’s economy is expected to shrink by 9.5% this year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said, down from a previous estimate of a 6% contraction, as the country feels the impact of tighter U.S. sanctions.
The IMF forecasts, published on Tuesday in the fund’s World Economic Outlook report, are not far from estimates given last week by the World Bank, which said the Iranian economy by the end of the 2019/20 financial year would be 90% of its size just two years ago.
Iran, a large oil producer, saw its oil revenues surge after a 2015 nuclear pact agreed with six major powers that ended a sanctions regime imposed three years earlier over its disputed nuclear program.
(Reuters)
Woman of Iran
This Iranian Music Streaming Site is Photoshopping Women Out of Their Own Album Covers
Iranian music streaming website Melovaz is under fire today after it was discovered that, in accordance with the country’s strict censorship policies, the site is forced to Photoshop out women out of album cover art. The policy means that women are being scrubbed—often very poorly—out of their own cover art, resulting in some very strange, almost comical album covers.
As reported by Insider, the music site was first “exposed” on Twitter by user @IzzRaifHarz. “If you are bored then you can try checking this music streaming site from Iran,” writes the Twitter user, “they censored every female on music artwork like they don’t even existed.”
The extent of the censorship staggering. Every single woman in every album cover—even if a woman is all there is on the album cover—has been scrubbed. Some of the world’s most popular female artists like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande and Beyoncé have all been unceremoniously removed from their own album art, leaving behind terrible Content Aware Fill artifacts in most cases.
Iran Through the Eyes of Female Photographers
Behind the “veil of daily newspapers,” there are real faces of women—as revealed in the exhibition “My Iran: Six Women Photographers” at the Sackler Gallery. The photographs of their persistence in facing personal and political realities offer a female perspective over 40 years from the beginning of the Iranian Revolution to the present.
In Newsha Tavakolian’s life-sized looped projection, “Somayeh,” a teacher of English at an all girl’s school is posed amid dead tree branches, her blue head scarf blowing in the wind, clear plastic garbage bags around her feet. This is in dramatic contrast to the background of urban Tehran and the distant natural landscape. Resolute in defining her life, she is enveloped by her surroundings, not swallowed up in it.
In the series “Witness,” Hengameh Golestan is one of the few photographers to document the protests in 1979 Islamic Revolution when women were ordered to wear the chador or veil in public. She is part of the crowd, not an outside onlooker as she shares their short-lived optimism in the early months of the revolution.
(MSM)
Iran Through the Eyes of Female Photographers
A former Miss Iran has spent a week in a Philippines airport as she fights to claim asylum in the south-east Asian country, saying she fears execution in Iran on politically motivated charges.
Bahareh Zare Bahari was accused of assault by an Iranian national in the Philippines, a charge she said was false, and made because she had showed support for Tehran’s critics in the past. Iranian authorities put out a red notice about her to Interpol, resulting in her being held in Ninoy Aquino international airport in Manila when she tried to enter the country on 17 October.
She now fears Iran may seek to extradite her to Tehran then have her killed or jailed. She has shown support for activists opposing Iran’s government in the past, notably at last year’s Miss Intercontinental beauty pageant in Manila, at which she competed. At the event she waved a poster of Reza Pahlavi, an Iranian former crown prince who has criticised the Iranian regime.
(Guardian)
Inside Iran
Man has fingers cut off by Iran authorities as punishment for theft
A man has had his fingers cut off by Iranian authorities for stealing, in a punishment condemned by human rights advocates.
Amnesty International branded the amputation, carried out at a prison in Sari, in the northern province of Mazandaran, as “an abhorrent form of torture”.
The local justice department said the unnamed man had committed 28 cases of theft in a public announcement on Wednesday.
According to Iran’s Islamic penal code, theft “on the first occasion” is punishable by amputation of the “full length of four fingers of the right hand in such a manner that the thumb and palm of the hand remain”.
UN Expert: Iran Executes Minors In Violation Of Rights Law
An UN independent expert charged with monitoring human rights in Iran has found it “distressing” that Tehran continues using the death penalty, including executing minors, in a report he presented to the UN General Assembly on October 23.
Iran executed seven child offenders last year and two so far this year although it is prohibited to apply the death penalty to anyone under age 18, according to human rights law, Javaid Rehman told the UN’s human rights committee.
Currently, there are 90 individuals on death row who are under age 18 at the time of their offenses, Rehman said, and that as of mid-July, at least 173 executions were carried out, including two 17-year-olds, based on “conservative estimates.”
Regional Politics
A Shiite Holiday Turns Into a Test of Iranian Power in Iraq
The annual ceremony commemorating a founding figure of Shiite Islam is one of the most important religious celebrations in the Shiite world, drawing millions of pilgrims to the holy city of Karbala, Iraq.
This year, the Arbaeen ceremony was also a political skirmish — the latest test of Iran’s power in Iraq and of Iraq’s increasing desire for independence from its powerful neighbor.
Iran, the largest Shiite Muslim country in the world and a regional powerhouse in the Middle East, saw the pilgrimage that ended Saturday as an opportunity to assert its role in Iraq and send a message about its regional reach.
(NYT)
Analysis
Is Iran’s Information Minister the Islamic Republic’s Emmanuel Macron?
By: Esfandyar Batmanghelidj
I'm active on Twitter to state that I don’t believe in putting limitations on social media,” Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran’s information and communications technology (ICT) minister, told me as he offered me tea and Iranian sweets on Aug. 22.
Azari Jahromi, 37, is the only minister in Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet who was born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Known in Iranian media as the “young minister,” he is in constant and direct contact with Iranian social media users.
That’s unusual in Iran, where a number of social networks—including Facebook and Twitter—are banned. But these constraints haven’t caused people to leave these platforms, especially Twitter, which is becoming increasingly popular. Iranians use virtual private networks and download anti-proxy applications on their phones to bypass the blocking, making VPN apps a lucrative business.
