Iran

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s former foreign minister, has blamed US sanctions on aviation parts for the helicopter crash that killed the Islamic Republic’s president.

Mr Zarif suggested on Monday that the punitive measures had compromised Tehran’s access to modern aircraft and inhibited repairs to its ageing fleet of American-made aircraft.

The helicopter carrying Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president, as well as Hossein Amirabdollahian, the foreign minister, on the fatal flight was a US-made Bell 212 helicopter, likely to be more than 40 years old, according to Iranian state media.

Awww…

The hardline Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, has died in a helicopter crash in foggy weather in the mountains near the border with Azerbaijan.

The charred wreckage of the aircraft, which crashed on Sunday carrying Raisi, as well as the foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and six other passengers and crew, was found early on Monday after an overnight search in blizzard conditions.

Fears had been growing for Raisi, a 63-year-old ultraconservative, after contact was lost with the helicopter on Sunday as it navigated fog-covered mountains in north-west Iran.

The evasions of US sanctions by Iran and its allies – largely thanks to the Biden administrations’ sanctions waivers — mark a new chapter in America’s history. Never before have sanctions been so ostentatiously disregarded without any seeming awareness by those violating them of the possible consequences.

If attempts by Western leaders to impose further sanctions against Iran in retaliation for its direct attack against Israel are to have any validity, they will need to be a great deal more effective than those implemented in recent decades.

For decades, the US and its allies have been imposing sanctions against Tehran in an attempt to restrain its malign support for terror organisations, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Maybe start with paint.

In Tehran’s Revolution Square, two women clad in long black full hijab approach another woman, dressed in jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and a hijab, or head scarf.

She tries to walk away, but one of the women in full hijab grabs her by her sleeve and pulls her back, yanking her onto the ground. She is surrounded, wrapped in a blanket and bundled into a white van.

'We're now seeing women being targeted by women as part of this crackdown by morality police [in Iran]' – @SkyYaldaHakim

'These women call themselves the Ambassadors of Kindness. They are the most brutal alliance of the Islamic Republic' – @AlinejadMasihhttps://t.co/4iUo4Yk1KL pic.twitter.com/MfuyTDWpOT

— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 30, 2024

An Iranian court’s decision to pass the death sentence against Toomaj Salehi, a popular Iranian rapper and regime opponent, has led to international protests and damaged Iran’s fledgling efforts to exploit crackdowns on unrest in US university campuses over Gaza as an abuse of human rights.

Crowds gathered in the US, Europe and Canada on Sunday to support Salehi, while dozens of political prisoners in Iran’s Ghezel Hesar prison issued a statement condemning the death sentence, calling it “the culmination of gross human rights violations in Iran”. Salehi has also won the support of major US rappers, as well as human rights groups.

The theocracy of Iran has been the world’s arch-embassy attacker over the last half century.

So it has zero credibility in crying foul over Israel’s April 1 attacks on its “consulate” in Damascus and the killing of Iran’s kingpin terrorists of the Revolutionary Guard Corps there.

Remember, the world was first introduced to the Iranian ayatollahs by their violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980.