Iran Digest Week of June 21- June 28
/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 associate Samuel Howell. Please note that the news and views expressed in the articles below do not necessarily reflect those of AIC.
Nuclear Program
US imposes fresh sanctions on Iran over apparent nuclear escalations
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has announced fresh sanctions against Iran’s petroleum sector in response to what he described as an expansion of the country’s nuclear programme which has provoked renewed fears that it is preparing to build an atomic bomb.
The embargoes – on three unnamed entities involved in the transport of Iranian petroleum or petrochemical products – were announced amid a chorus of warnings of a renewed conflict in the Middle East between Israel and Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, the powerful Shia group that dominates Lebanon.
In a statement on Thursday, Blinken said Iran had expanded its uranium enrichment programme in the past month “in ways that have no credible peaceful purpose”.
(The Guardian)
Women of Iran
Iran renews headscarf crackdown as presidential vote looms
Seemingly every afternoon in Iran’s capital, police vans rush to major Tehran squares and intersections to search for women with loose headscarves and those who dare not to wear them at all.
The renewed crackdown comes not quite two years since mass protests over the death Mahsa Amini after she was detained for not wearing a scarf to the authorities’ liking. A United Nations panel has found that the 22-year-old died as a result of “physical violence” wrought upon her by the state.
Amini’s death set off months of unrest that ended in a bloody crackdown, and for a time morality police disappeared from the streets. But now videos are emerging of women being physically forced into vans by police as lawmakers continue to push for harsher penalties. Meanwhile, authorities have seized thousands of cars over women having their hair uncovered while also targeting businesses that serve them.
(PBS)
Economy
Iran in charts: The ‘coffin’ car and other signs of economic pain as vote looms
Iran’s cheapest domestic car model, the Pride, has long been criticised for its poor quality and safety defects — Iranians refer to it as a “coffin on the go”.
Yet the vehicle’s position within the country’s economy has become an indicator of the financial pain facing Iranians, and the challenges for their leaders, as they vote in a June 28 emergency election after President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash.
Iranians often compare the price of the Pride, a budget vehicle that carmaker Saipa began making in 1993, with the minimum wage to highlight their worsening finances. Production of what was once Iran’s most popular car ceased in 2020, but stocks remain on sale.
Inside Iran
Reformist Reaches Runoff in Iran’s Presidential Election
A reformist candidate critical of many of the Iranian government’s policies, including the mandatory head scarf law, will compete next week against a hard-line conservative in a runoff election for the country’s presidency, Iran’s interior ministry announced on Saturday. The runoff follows a special vote called after the death last month of the previous leader, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash.
A second round of voting, which will pit the reformist, Masoud Pezeshkian, against Saeed Jalili, an ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator, will take place on July 5. The runoff was in part the result of low voter turnout and a field of three main candidates, two of whom competed for the conservative vote. Iranian law requires a winner to receive more than 50 percent of all votes cast.
The majority of Iranians, 60 percent, according to the interior ministry, did not vote on Friday, in what analysts and aides to the candidates said was largely an act of protest against the government for ignoring their demands for meaningful change.
Iran’s Generation Z Rejects the Clerics’ Ballot Box
One of the more telling features of the election campaign in Iran was that no candidate seemed to appeal to Generation Z first-time voters. Perhaps they assumed it was a lost cause, believing Gen Z wouldn't vote.
To understand why, we must look back to the fall of 2022, when widespread protests shook the Islamic Republic like never before. No one expected teenagers, some as young as 15, to become the heart and soul of that uprising. Generation Z was thought to be apolitical—and perhaps they were. But their rebellious spirit and desire to live freely proved far more powerful and inspiring than any ideology or political inclination.
The Zs took to the streets across Iran and became the change they wanted to see –as Gandhi would say –unlike their previous generation who asked for change from those in power. They had little time for their parents’ good old haggling with the regime. They were ready to fight for the ‘basics’ they believed were their right. And fight they did –leading chants, removing and burning headscarves, tearing down state banners and symbols, and of course, popping turbans off the mullahs’ head. They crushed political taboos and paid dearly for it. Young souls like Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh were killed protesting before their 17th birthday. The idea that they would have voted for this or that ‘approved’ candidate tomorrow is laughable.
Two candidates drop out of Iran presidential election, due to take place Friday amid voter apathy
Two candidates in Iran’s presidential election withdrew from the race as the country on Thursday prepared for the upcoming vote, an effort by hard-liners to coalesce around a unity candidate in the polls to replace the late President Ebrahim Raisi.
Amirhossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, 53, dropped his candidacy and urged other candidates to do the same “so that the front of the revolution will be strengthened,” the state-run IRNA news agency reported late Wednesday night.
Ghazizadeh Hashemi served as one of Raisi’s vice presidents and as the head of the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs. He ran in the 2021 presidential election and received some 1 million votes, coming in last place.
(AP News)
Regional Politics
Iran warns Israel of ‘obliterating war’ if it attacks Lebanon
Iran has warned Israel against “full-scale military aggression” in Lebanon and said it would lead to an “obliterating war”, the Islamic republic’s United Nations mission said.
“All options, [including] the full involvement of all Resistance Fronts, are on the table,” the mission wrote in a post on X late on Friday, referring to Iran-aligned armed groups across the region.
It called Israel’s threats to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon “psychological warfare” and “propaganda”.
Global Relations
Iran’s election may change the direction of its relations with Russia
Iran’s presidential election on 28 June has underlined the uncertainty surrounding the future shape of relations between Tehran and Moscow. The two main supporters of rapprochement with Russia were the president Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who were both killed in a helicopter crash in May.
Their deaths came before the two countries had managed to institutionalize relations in the form of a new long-term partnership agreement. Whether the next president will be equally interested in developing Iran’s relationship with Russia is a key question.
For now, the current vector of Iranian–Russian relations appears unchanged. Both the acting president Mohammad Mokhber and acting foreign minister Ali Bagheri talk about the long-term and strategic nature of relations between the two countries.
Analysis
Iran’s New Nuclear Threat
By: Eric Brewer
In April, the simmering war in the Middle East nearly took a nuclear turn when Tehran launched more than 300 missiles and suicide drones at Israel in retaliation for its strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria. This was Iran’s first direct attack on Israel, and international inspectors stayed away from Iran’s nuclear facilities for fear of a retaliatory response. As the world waited, the Iranian military commander in charge of defending the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites publicly warned that if Israel attacked the sites, Tehran could revise its nuclear doctrine. This was a thinly veiled threat that Iran might build nuclear weapons in response.
Tehran has long used threats of nuclear expansion to reduce international pressure. But the military commander’s statement highlights a new and dangerous evolution in Iran’s strategy, which is to use the country’s enhanced ability to build a nuclear weapon as a deterrent. Most evidence suggests that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has so far put off building them because he sees the risks as outweighing the rewards. But in recent years, Iran has gradually acquired many of the key capabilities necessary to build a nuclear weapon, becoming a so-called threshold state. Iran can now, in a matter of days, produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb. By highlighting its bomb-making potential and responding to specific provocations by threatening to take the final steps to build nuclear weapons, Tehran hopes it can prevent international sanctions and a strike against its nuclear program.
But this strategy is not risk free, and Tehran remains sensitive to the potential security costs of developing nuclear weapons. Stopping Iran from producing a bomb will not be easy, but reducing Tehran’s nuclear capabilities will be even harder. Washington should make Iran a priority and bring U.S. diplomatic and economic might to bear, to prevent the catastrophe of Iran as a permanent threshold state, or one armed with nuclear weapons.
Iran’s supreme leader is terrified of people power
By: The Economist
Ahead of the first round of Iran’s presidential election on June 28th, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, said that any vote was a vote for his Islamic Republic. By that test the poll raises deep questions about the decaying regime’s legitimacy. Some 60% of the country’s 61m-strong electorate have withheld their vote, resulting in the lowest turnout on record. The streets of Tehran, the capital, were uncannily quiet on polling day with many people dismissing the exercise as a farce in a country being ruined by dictatorship. Instead of queues outside polling stations, election monitors slept at their desks in empty mosques.
Don’t mistake calm for stability, however. The system is still reeling from the mysterious death of the presidential incumbent, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash on May 19th. And the surprise results mean a second round will take place on July 5th, which could further expose the fissures in Iranian society and the fragility of the regime.
Iran’s political system is a hybrid that mixes elements of democracy, military rule and religious authority. The clerics and military commanders who dominate the system had looked to Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf as their candidate. He is a stalwart of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the clerical authorities’ praetorian guard. Yet he came in third place and is now out of the race.
