Iran

Forces in the Iranian revolutionary guards are beginning to feel “doubt and confusion” after almost five months of anti-regime demonstrations, senior officers have admitted.

Compounding this sense of frustration is their pay. The salaries of IRGC soldiers are a quarter of their counterparts in Lebanon’s Hezbollah forces, Iran’s most powerful Middle East proxy, according to sources.

The 125,000-strong IRGC has carried out a brutal crackdown against protesters across the country, killing at least 528 civilians and imprisoning tens of thousands more, rights groups say. Seventy IRGC soldiers are believed to have died.

What does an autocrat do when his support base is shaken by popular protests?

The standard answer is: he tries to reassure supporters by increasing their privileges, thus giving them a bigger stake in the preservation of the status quo.

This is what Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is trying to do with an edict for the largest privatization scheme in Iran’s history.

Unveiled last week, the scheme is the seventh of its kind since the first was launched 23 years ago.

An Iranian court has handed jail sentences of more than 10 years each to a young couple who danced in front of one of Tehran’s main landmarks in a video seen as a symbol of defiance against the regime, activists have said.

Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiance, Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, both in their early 20s, were arrested in early November after a video went viral showing them dancing romantically in front of the Azadi Tower.

Haghighi was not wearing a headscarf, in defiance of Iran’s strict rules. Women are also not allowed to dance in public, let alone with a man.

A court in #Iran sentenced a couple to 10.5 years in prison for dancing in the street, the Al Arabiya newspaper reported.

They were accused of conspiring to undermine national security and engaging in anti-regime propaganda. pic.twitter.com/EWrsSgohQs

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) January 31, 2023

Since 1979, when the mullahs seized power, Iran has topped the list of countries hit by “brain drain”. However, what was a sectoral hemorrhage may now become a general bleeding affecting other sectors of the population.

A feature in the official news agency IRNA was headlined, “It’s not only the elite who emigrate.”

The daily Javan, an organ of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) also warns that Iran is losing some if its best-educated people and claims that mass-emigration by “elite elements” is costing the nation millions of dollars. Emigration is now attracting Iranians with lower skills or no skills.

Iran has charged 16 people, including several teenagers, in the northwestern Iranian city of Urmia for planning demonstrations and accusing them of espionage amid reports those detained gave confessions after being beaten.

In November, 25 people were arrested for allegedly having connections with “spy organizations” and “attempted to deceive and incite youth and teenagers through social networks to join protests” against the government after the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody in September.

The Arab countries are still extremely anxious about the possibility that the Biden administration will return to the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA — signed in 2015 between Tehran and several world powers, including the US — promises Iran’s regime, after a short time, the ability to possess as many nuclear weapons as it likes, the missiles to deliver them, and no constraints on its terrorism or “revolutionary” expansionism.

In 2018, then US President Donald J. Trump withdrew from the JCPOA after realizing that it failed to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program, missile program or regional aggression and terrorism.

Some Iranian Canadians say they are taking efforts into their own hands to investigate and track down Iranian regime members and affiliates who are now in Canada — saying the Canadian government is not doing enough.

One group even made the extraordinary move of publicly shaming a recent arrival at Toronto’s Pearson airport, who they claimed was a regime affiliate, asking how she got a visa.

The issue has ramped up since protests erupted across Iran last fall after the in-custody death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police in Tehran for allegedly violating Iran’s strict rules requiring women to cover their hair with a hijab, or headscarf.