Iran Digest Week of November 22- November 29
/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.
US-Iran Relations
With Trump Returning and Hezbollah Weakened, Iran Strikes a Conciliatory Tone
In mid-November, Iran dispatched a top official to Beirut to urge Hezbollah to accept a cease-fire with Israel. Around the same time, Iran’s U.N. ambassador met with Elon Musk, an overture to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inner circle. And on Friday, it will hold talks in Geneva with European countries on a range of issues, including its nuclear program.
All this recent diplomacy marks a sharp change in tone from late October, when Iran was preparing to launch a large retaliatory attack on Israel, with a deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warning, “We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years.”
Iran’s swing from tough talk to a more conciliatory tone in just a few weeks’ time has its roots in developments at home and abroad.
Nuclear Program
Iran to begin enriching uranium with thousands of advanced centrifuges, UN watchdog says
Iran will begin enriching uranium with thousands of advanced centrifuges at its two main nuclear facilities at Fordo and Natanz, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Friday, further raising tensions over Tehran’s program as it enriches at near weapons-grade levels.
The notice from the International Atomic Energy Agency only mentioned Iran enriching uranium with new centrifuges to 5% purity, far lower than the 60% it currently does — likely signaling that it still wants to negotiate with the West and the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
However, it remains unclear how Trump will approach Iran once he enters office, particularly as it continues to threaten to attack Israel amid its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip and just after a ceasefire started in its campaign in Lebanon. Trump withdrew America from the accord in 2018, setting in motion a series of attacks and incidents across the wider Mideast.
(AP News)
Women of Iran
Rage Against the Regime: Iran review – these stories of resistance are utterly astonishing
Meytham Ale Mahdi was working for the National Steel Group in 2018 when Iran’s economy collapsed and unemployment reached 60%. As wages went unpaid for months and life became increasingly impossible, Mahdi did what so many Iranians have done during 45 years of authoritarian rule: he took to the streets. The protests spread across the country and expanded into an organised strike movement. The hunger for change in Iran was, once again, insatiable.
Then came the crackdown. Mahdi was arrested, interrogated and forced to confess that he was a separatist leading the riots. He was ordered to tell the workers to stop striking. But when he returned to the protests, the fear he had experienced in the interrogation room evaporated. Mahdi smiles as he recalls the speech he made that day: “Together we can stand against all the powers. We are like raindrops, but together we turn into the sea.” After he spoke those words, he never went home again. In exile, he scrolls through photos of his children, who were seven and nine when he fled Iran five years ago. “Is there any suffering greater than this?” he asks.
We Are Like Raindrops is the title of the first episode of Rage Against the Regime: Iran, an extraordinary, spare and harrowing two-part documentary telling some of the individual stories behind the mass anti-government protests in the country. It moves from the contested election of 2009, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected and, as the former BBC Persian journalist Rana Rahimpour puts it, “the hope many Iranians had was killed”, to Bloody November in 2019, the most brutal crackdown by security forces in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “It was a massacre,” says the activist and former political prisoner Adnan Hassanpour. “There is no going back to before November 2019.”
Iranian Authorities Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Journalist
Prison officers allegedly sexually assaulted and harassed Vida Rabbani, an Iranian journalist and activist, during a body search at Evin Prison in Tehran on October 3, an informed source told Human Rights Watch in late November.
Security forces arrested Rabbani in September 2022, during the nationwide protests sparked by Mahsa Jina Amini’s death while detained by morality police. In December 2022, Tehran’s revolutionary court sentenced Rabbani to six years in prison on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security” and an additional fifteen months for “propaganda against the state.”
Rabbani had previously been arrested and convicted due to her activism. In another case in 2022, Tehran’s revolutionary court sentenced her to 10 years in prison. Due to a 2023 general amnesty order, part of her sentence was pardoned.
Inside Iran
Iran’s vast collection of Western art, much long hidden, re-emerges despite high tensions with US
As Iran faces increasing tensions with the West and turmoil at home, a new exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is displaying Western artwork including pieces not seen by the public in at least a decade.
The unveiling of the exhibition “Eye to Eye” has drawn numerous women, their hair uncovered, to the underground galleries of the museum in Tehran’s Laleh Park. Their presence, while unacknowledged by authorities, shows the way life has changed inside Iran just in the last few years even as the country’s theocracy presses forward with enriching uranium to near-weapons grade levels and launching attacks on Israel during the ongoing Mideast wars.
“The first feeling that came to me, and I told my parents, was that I can’t believe I’m seeing these works, which have always been kept far from our eyes,” said Aida Zarrin, a young woman at the museum.
(AP News)
Environment
Air Pollution in Iran Causes 50,000 Deaths Per Year
Mohammad Sadegh Hassanvand, head of the Air Pollution Research Center at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, stated that approximately 450,000 deaths occur annually in Iran due to various causes, with “about 50,000” of these being related to air pollution.
This means nearly 12% of all deaths in the country are linked to air pollution.On Saturday, November 23, Hassanvand emphasized that air pollution is “one of the serious risk factors and the most significant environmental pollutant” and told IRNA, the state-run news agency: “The most critical pollutant currently present in the country, which contributes to the number of unhealthy days, is particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5).”
Hassanvand noted that this pollutant, recognized as a carcinogenic compound, has been measured since 2011. He added that between 2011 and 2018, the levels of this pollutant decreased due to “atmospheric instability and adequate rainfall in the country.”
Global Relations
Daniel Khalife found guilty of spying for Iran
Former British army soldier Daniel Khalife has been found guilty of spying for Iran.
Khalife, who escaped prison while awaiting trial, collected information and passed it to Tehran and was found to have gathered the names of special forces soldiers. He was cleared of a charge of perpetrating a bomb hoax at his army barracks.
The 23-year-old admitted breaking out of Wandsworth prison in London in September 2023 by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery lorry during his Woolwich Crown Court trial.
(BBC News)
Iran's military vows retaliation as Lebanon ceasefire talks advance
A senior Islamic Republic military commander has vowed to Retaliate against Israel's attack last month, even as ceasefire talks between Israel and Lebanon gather momentum.
"The response to Israel's recent aggression has been devised beyond what the regime's [Israeli] leaders can imagine," Chief of Staff of Iran's Armed Forces, Mohammad Bagheri, said on Tuesday. He added, "The Zionists have crossed the Islamic Republic's red lines. Iran will not tolerate any aggression against its territory and will ensure it does not go unanswered."
While Tehran has yet to take action, Israeli and US officials report that Israeli airstrikes on October 26 neutralized Iran's last three Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems, significantly weakening its defensive capabilities. Israeli officials have asserted that Iran is now defenseless against further airstrikes, if it attacks Israel.
(Iran International)
Analysis
Iranian commander's killing, Aleppo advance shake up Syria conflict
By: Omar Abu Laila
Armed opposition factions in Syria including the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) killed a top Iranian military commander and pierced the outskirts of Aleppo in recent days, jolting the stalemated fight against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
These movements have highlighted an unexpected strength within the opposition, placing pressure on the Iranian-backed Syrian authorities amid an already complex political and military landscape.
These developments come at a critical time for the Syrian government, which is grappling with deep internal pressures due to a deteriorating economy and growing public discontent. Externally, Assad faces diminishing Russian support as Moscow remains preoccupied with the conflict in Ukraine, alongside mounting battlefield losses among Iranian-backed allies.
Trump’s chance for a major breakthrough in Iran-West relations
By: Seyed Hossein Mousavian
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) adopted a resolution put forward by the UK, France, and Germany (the “EU3”). The resolution requires the IAEA’s director general to produce a “comprehensive and updated assessment” of Iran’s nuclear activities by spring 2025, to provide a basis for the EU3 to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, thereby triggering a reimposition of Security Council sanctions before October 2025, when the original 2015 Iran nuclear deal will expire.
In response, Iran has put a collection of new and advanced centrifuges into operation, expanding its ability to enrich uranium. This move was accompanied by an official reassurance that, “technical and safeguards cooperation with the IAEA will continue, as in the past, within the framework of the Safeguards Agreement”—that is, Iran is not exiting the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nevertheless, Iran and the EU3 agreed to hold talks on Friday in Geneva, seeking a possible solution to the nuclear impasse over Iran’s nuclear program. (The United States declined to participate.) These new negotiations offer the incoming Trump administration a golden opportunity to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program and perhaps improve relations throughout the Middle East.
Two decades ago, I was the spokesperson for Iran’s first negotiations on its nuclear program, beginning in October 2003 with the EU3. By the spring of 2005, the negotiations were close to a final agreement, but the George W. Bush administration, through the UK, vetoed the agreement, because it would have allowed Iran to continue with a limited uranium enrichment program. Without that interference, “we could have actually settled the whole Iran nuclear dossier back in 2005, and we probably wouldn’t have had President Ahmadinejad as a consequence of the failure as well,” Jack Straw, the UK foreign minister at the time, later said. President Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner, was elected after President Khatami, a reformer, was discredited by the failure of his negotiations with the West.
