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U.S. Identifies Nine Training Camps in Iran for Afghans

Afghan fighters used in Syria by Tehran as proxies

IRGC graduation  ceremon

U.S. intelligence agencies recently identified nine training camps inside Iran where jihadists from Afghanistan are being schooled for fighting in Syria, according to U.S. defense officials.

The camps are part of a large-scale paramilitary training program run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Islamic shock troops, to battle Syrian rebels opposing the regime of Bashar al Assad that Tehran is backing.

The camps were identified in satellite photographs located in areas of northeastern Iran close to the Iraqi border, said officials familiar with intelligence reports of the training.

Iran is predominantly Shiite Islam and the Afghan fighters are mostly Shiite refugees who settled in Iran over the past several years.

A State Department official said he was aware of the reports. “If true, it would be a cruel exploitation of a group of vulnerable people already living in a precarious situation as refugees,” the official said. “And it would be another unfortunate reminder of the depths to which Iran is willing to go to continue to prop up the Assad regime.”

Few details were available on the Afghan fighters’ training that is said to include practice in the use of weapons and explosives, and basic military training techniques.

Rep. Mike Pompeo, (R.-Kan.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Iran has been expanding military operations using cash obtained under the Obama administration’s nuclear deal.

“After the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a wave of cash flooded into the Islamic Republic of Iran, allowing the regime to dramatically increase its military budget,” Pompeo said.

“As a result, Iran’s malign influence in the region is growing quickly,” he added. “The IRGC is increasingly the most powerful force in many Middle Eastern capitals, including Damascus.”

Pompeo said the Iranian people “would be better served if their leaders spent funds on domestic improvement, instead of supporting international terrorist groups.”

Security affairs analysts said the camps are part of an Iranian program to promote its brand of Islamic jihad, or holy war, toward creation of an Iran-dominated Islamic region or caliphate.

Sebastian Gorka, Horner professor of military theory at Marine Corps University, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accurately described the Middle East today in a recent address to Congress as a two-way “Game of Thrones” in creating an Islamic caliphate.

“The murder and mayhem is not simply about Sunni jihadis like al Qaeda or the Islamic State,” Gorka said. “It is also about the competing Shia vision of their own expanding caliphate which has succeeded and is now gaining ground in Syria.”

If reports of the training camps for Afghans in Iran are confirmed, “then the mullahs have upped their game,” Gorka said.

“It is no longer about deploying Quds Force operators or IRGC units into the battlespace, but also sponsoring proxies and now actually training deniable force-multipliers such as these Afghan jihadis,” he said.

“The war for theocratic hegemony in the Middle East is escalating and America is conspicuously absent.”

Bill Roggio, editor of the online Long War Journal, said Iran has a history of providing direct support to both the Taliban and al Qaeda. “In this case, Iran is training Shia Afghans to fight in Syria and Iraq,” he said, noting that his journal has documented the deaths of some of the fighters.

Tehran is leveraging Shiites throughout the Middle East and South Asia to wage proxy wars in Iraq and Syria. “In the process it is indoctrinating the vanguard of Iranian power in these countries,” Roggio said. “The repercussions of Iran’s expansion of influence via the militias will be felt for generations.”

Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official now with the American Enterprise Institute, said Iran’s Qods Force last year posted an online notice of the death of a Hazara commander, as Afghan Shiites are called.

The use of Afghans is a troubling development because Iran is home to around 1 million Afghan refugees.

“Should they become indoctrinated and fodder for Qods Force recruitment, this would expand Iran’s ability to fight by proxy not only in battlegrounds like Syria, but also in Afghanistan itself,” he said.

Iran is using non-Iranian Shiites because they view the Syrian conflict as a religious, sectarian war that is not just about Syria but defeating Sunni Muslims.

“Second, Iran has been taking far greater casualties than it expected and so it is supplementing its fight with Shiite recruits from outside Iran,” Rubin said. “From the Iranian point of view, why not fight in Syria to the last Afghan or Iraqi?”

Earlier this month, the Iranian exile group National Council of Resistance of Iran posted online a video clip used by Iran to recruit Afghans to fight in Syria. It includes images of Afghans who have died in Syria.

The Iranian exile group People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, known as MEK, estimates Tehran has dispatched more than 70,000 fighters, including both Iranians and foreign fighters, to the conflict.

They include between 15,000 and 20,000 fighters of a group called the Fatemiyoun, an Afghan militia set up by IRGC Quds Force.

The plight of the estimated 1.5 million Afghan refugees in Iran is said to include lack of personal or legal identity and poverty.

The MEK stated that Qods Force training for the Afghans includes two to four weeks of basic military training. Upon completion of the training, the Afghans are paid the equivalent of $500 and sent to Syria in groups of 200 fighters.

Transport aircraft send the Afghans to Damascus and missions typically last for 60 days. All commanders and trainers are IRGC members.

The group Human Rights Watch reported in January that Iran is sending thousands of Afghans to Syria.

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Iran Nuclear Deal— Regional Instability, Unknown Compliance, and the Way Forward

Lawmakers working-to force full disclosure about US

The Hidden Fact Presents Terrorism

The Town Hall, June 30, 2016 - Agreed to on July 14, 2015, we are fast approaching the first year anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the world powers. The next couple of weeks are an ideal time to evaluate what changes have occurred in the interim.
Regional Instability
According to Matthew McGinnis, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, about a year after the nuclear deal with Iran, it is embroiled in several major regional conflicts. Two are “hot” ones: against opposition and Islamist groups in Syria and Islamic State in Iraq. The more are “colder” ones: a regional feud with Saudi Arabia and efforts against Israel in southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights, which are shaped by the Syrian Civil War.
On Apr. 3, 2016, United Arab Emirates Ambassador Yousef al Otaiba stated in the Wall Street Journal that, “One Year after the Iran Nuclear Deal—don’t be fooled. The Iran we have long known—hostile, expansionist, violent—is alive and well.” On June 29, he was on a panel I attended in Washington and elaborated on the argument in the WSJ. In October, November and in early March, Tehran conducted ballistic-missile tests in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
Regarding March fighting in Yemen, the French navy seized a large cache of weapons en route from Iran to the Houthis in rebellion against the UN-backed legitimate government. In late February, Australia intercepted a ship off the coast of Oman with thousands of rocket-propelled grenades. In December, Tehran fired rockets dangerously close to a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Strait of Hormuz, a few weeks before detaining a group of American sailors.
Unknown Compliance
What about an International Atomic Energy Agency May 27, 2016 report on Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal? Seeing the best in the nuclear agreement requires ignoring the obvious weaknesses in the IAEA report, which does not even specify how much low-enriched uranium the Islamic Republic has stockpiled, how many centrifuges are running at the Natanz enrichment site or whether enrichment activities have actually stopped at Fordow. That’s because under the terms of the nuclear deal, Iran only needs to demonstrate minimum openness. The head of the UN watchdog nuclear agency says that although Iran seems to be adhering to the letter of the deal, “his inspectors are stretched thin by the task of monitoring compliance across a country the size of Alaska.”
The Way Forward
Considering lack of real compromise from Iran and its posture toward the rest of the world, the forthcoming anniversary is a fine time to admit that it is time to consider removal of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship and establishment of a popularly-elected democratic government.
Mid-July will be doubly fortuitous. Even before we mark the anniversary of the nuclear deal, the world will have an opportunity to hear from the resistance against the unelected Iranian theocracy and a plan of the oppositionists for a democratic alternative: There is to be a rally of supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ( NCRI ), called “Iran Freedom” rally in Paris on July 9. Last year’s event drew over 100,000 people.
One path forward is to recognize that a core argument of the Obama administration’s case for marketing the Iran nuclear deal is the narrative that the election of Hassan Rouhani and other Iranian “moderates” made the deal possible. White House Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes admitted, that such a story was “the center of the arc” of a false narrative that was “largely manufactured” for the purpose of selling the deal.
The NCRI rejects the idea that the nuclear deal will lead to a more moderate Iran, or strengthen the role of “moderates” in Tehran. Moreover, Iranian dissidents do not accept the conventional wisdom that the regime is immune to regime change from within. The trend of events in Iran since last year lends credence to view that regime change by Iranians is within reach.
In view of regional instability and unknown compliance in the aftermath of the nuclear deal with Iran, anyone who is still on the fence about the way forward for U.S. policy toward Iran would be well-advised to listen to what the NCRI and its American, European and Middle Eastern allies have to say at their rally. Once their voices have been heard, the international community should have a clearer idea how to bring about regime change from within. In this regard, my research suggests supporting the democratic alternative to the Iranian regime is the road to regional stability and nuclear compliance.

 

Raymond Tanter, former National security advisor to the White House and currently professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC

Obama Admin withholding Info from Congress 
On $1.7B ‘Ransom Payment’ to Iranian regime

Lawmakers working to-force full disclosure about US 

Lawmakers working to force full disclosure about US taxpayer cash for Tehran

The Obama administration is withholding from congressional leaders documents and information related to a $1.7 billion U.S. taxpayer funded payout to Iran earlier this year, furthering accusations the cash was part of a “ransom payment” to free U.S. hostages from Iranian custody, according to communications obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and conversations with lawmakers.
The controversy over this payment—which arose from the settlement of a longstanding legal dispute with Iran—has deepened in recent weeks after Iranian officials disclosed that nearly all of the U.S. money had been spent to strengthen Iran’s military.
Congressional efforts to compel the Obama administration to come clean about the payment have yet to yield results, prompting a separate effort to determine whether the White House overpaid Iran and is now withholding information that would prove this claim, according to documents obtained by the Free Beacon.
Lawmakers suspect that key records relating to the $1.7 billion payout were not properly maintained over the years and are now seeking to force the Obama administration to hand over the evidence.
The timing of the March legal settlement has raised questions on Capitol Hill among lawmakers who view it as part of the Obama administration’s effort to free 10 U.S. sailors who had been abducted by Iran. It also is suspected that the payout was another byproduct of last summer’s nuclear agreement with Iran.
“Earlier this year, the administration announced a $1.7 billion settlement to a case that had been pending for 35 years before the [International Claims] Tribunal, claiming it was in the American public’s best interest to settle,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R., Fla.), one of the lawmakers spearheading the disclosure effort, told the Free Beacon. “But we’ve never seen the documents and we don’t know why a settlement was announced, conveniently, the day after restrictions were lifted on Iran’s Central Bank.”
The Obama administration denies all charges that the payment was related to Iran’s release of the U.S. hostages. The settlement, the administration maintains, was part of an effort to resolve decades-old legal disputes with Iran over several arms deals that were canceled in 1979, following the installation of Iran’s hardline Islamic government.
One congressional adviser who has worked on the issue told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration continues to hide information about the source of the $1.7 billion payout, which was taken from a taxpayer-funded legal account maintained by the Treasury Department.
“The entire payment has been shrouded in mystery from the beginning,” the source said. “The administration had to be badgered into even revealing where the money was coming from, and only now we’re finding out why they were so reluctant to reveal details: half of what they’re claiming contradicts the other half. But they can’t admit they paid a ransom to Iranian hostage-takers, because that would undermine their claims about how diplomacy with Iran works.”

US Rep. Juan Vargas (D., Calif.)

Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Juan Vargas (D., Calif.) are now pushing the administration to produce all government documents detailing the legal dispute, which sat open before the claims tribunal for more than 30 years.
“It’s important to conduct proper oversight and get to the bottom of this because the results could help inform future claims before the tribunal that Iran continues to pursue,” Ros-Lehtinen said, referencing a slew of other legal claims by Iran against the United States that still remain outstanding.
“We want to make sure the taxpayers are not on the hook for any false claims and that we are not inadvertently helping to fund any more of Iran’s illicit behavior—as we saw this $1.7 billion is going to boost Iran’s military, according to the regime,” she said.
“For the case to have been before the tribunal for so long, it must have been the position of the United States government that we do not owe Iran this money as the regime claimed,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “We know that the Foreign Military Sales program for decades was riddled with accounting and management errors and we also know that Iran cancelled at least $10 billion in undelivered foreign military sales orders after the revolution, leaving the United States potentially liable for termination costs and lawsuits from contractors.”
Ros-Lehtinen and Vargas, in a letter sent last week to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, are requesting information about how Iran received the $1.7 billion and how the payment was calculated.
“How was the settlement paid out, was it in U.S. dollars and which U.S. bank was it transferred to and to which Iranian financial institution?” the lawmakers asked, according to a copy of the letterobtained by the Free Beacon.
The issue of U.S. dollar access for Iran remains another hot button topic, as Congress works to stop the administration from opening up the U.S. financial system to Iran.
The lawmakers also seek information about the timing of the settlement, asking if it was necessary for the deal to be implemented “in order for the settlement to be finalized.”
Other government documents could help the lawmakers determine if the United States overpaid Iran as part of the settlement.

Source: The Washington Free Beacon,30 June 2016

Ex-Iran ambassador supports rally for a ‘Free Iran’ On July 9 in Paris

 Perviz Khazaii says I will travel to Paris to

Perviz Khazaii says, I will travel to Paris to take part in the organization’s “Free Iran” rally on 9 July 2016, which is expected to over 100,000 people.

The former Iranian ambassador to Sweden and Norway, and representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ( NCRI ) in Nordic countries, Perviz Khazaii, states that “Throughout the three years of Hassan Rouhani ’s presidency, some in the West have maintained hope that it would herald an era of moderation and reform in Iran.”But in fact, the human rights situation is deteriorating at a fast pace.  There have been over 2,400 executions in Iran in just under three years. Victims include political dissidents, most notably the activists of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran.In a shocking act of violence, the Iranian regime carried out at least 21 hangings in a 48-hour period in the second week of May.  Amnesty International underscored in its annual report that Iran has the highest number of executions per capita. Those who are not put to death may be subject to other cruel punishments.  More information about these atrocities may be found in Perviz Khazaii's article in The Diplomat. “Despite the persistent danger, I remain active in the NCRI to this day.” says Khazaii.  “I am no stranger to diplomatic relations. I was one of three senior Iranian diplomats who resigned from our ambassadorships in protest against an unbridled wave of executions in Iran in the early 1980s and joined the National Council of Resistance of Iran, led by Mrs. Maryam Rajavi . Doing so came at great personal cost. Two of us were gunned down in broad daylight in Geneva and in Rome by terrorists dispatched from Tehran, the first in 1990 and the second in 1993. I am the sole survivor.”On July 9, I will travel to Paris to take part in the organization’s “Free Iran” rally, which is expected to over 100,000 people, comprised not only of Iranian exiles but also their supporters, including hundreds of senior political dignitaries, parliamentarians, human rights and women's rights activists, as well as religious leaders from the United States, Europe, and Islamic activist communities, to highlight Tehran’s nefarious conduct at home and abroad, calling for a new policy that sides with the Iranian people and their desire for freedom.Source:  stop Fundamentalism, 30 June 2016

Tags:Iranian Resistance rally in Paris

UNLAWFUL, SOMETIMES FATAL INTERROGATION METHODS TPERSIST HROUGHOUT IRAN

Nazanin-Zaghari-Ratcliffe700

 By INU Staff
Sunday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran reported upon the death of Nader Sharifi-Fard, a young Iranian who was summoned for police questioning in the city of Abadan, and apparently died as a result of torture inflicted on him as part of the interrogations. The report indicates that local authorities have denied that such torture took place, and have even gone so far as to order mass arrests of individuals who reported upon Sharifi-Fard’s death and helped to make his case go viral on social networks and among human rights advocates.

On Wednesday, IranWire published a report that contradicted the denials that have been repeated by the authorities involved with Sahrifi-Fard and other similar cases. It pointed out that torture during police interrogation is notably commonplace in the Islamic Republic, especially during political crackdowns like those seen at the end of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, and after massive protests against the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

Many observers have noted that Iran appears to currently be in the midst of another crackdown that is similar to, albeit more gradual than, the 2009 repression of dissent. Journalists and persons with foreign connections have been arrested en masse over the past several months, in what is widely regarded as a preemptive attack on any individuals or social trends that might suggest cooperation and reconciliation with Western governments in the wake of last summer’s nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers including the US.

The IranWire report quoted some observers as saying that the laws regarding interrogation have been improving, at least in theory, by barring figures like Intelligence Ministry agents from conducting them on their own. But the same report emphasizes that these sorts of alterations are unlikely to create meaningful change in practice, especially considering that Iranian officials frequently violate the law, and with impunity.

Since 2003, the law has technically considered confessions to be invalid which are extracted under coercion. And yet reports continue to emerge from within Iranian jails describing torturous interrogations and forced confessions, which are not only embraced by the Iranian judiciary but also broadcast on Iranian state media as supposed proof of guilt, or of broader narratives like the claim of Western infiltration.

In some cases, arrestees report being forced to sign confessions even before criminal charges have been brought against them. This has been the case in multiple recent, high-profile cases involving dual nationals. Among the most recent such incidents, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman and project coordinator for the Thomson Reuters foundation, was reportedly forced to confess to interrogators while being held without charge, after she was separated from her two-year-old child and arrested at the airport while trying to return home from a visit to her Iranian parents.

As well as illustrating that forced confessions are apparently still commonplace in instances of apparently political arrest, the accounts of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s treatment also highlight the fact that such confessions may be elicited not only through physical but also through psychological torture.

The IranWire report details how many former political prisoners had observed similar tactics whereby one interrogator would seek to secure a confession through physical violence and threats, and if unsuccessful would be followed by another interrogator who would try “to make the accused co-operate by giving him false hope.”

It seems likely that these tactics were at play in an incident in which Zaghari-Ratcliffe was informed on June 9 that she was going to be released from prison, and conveyed that information to her family before the decision was reversed, leading to her remaining in custody to the present date. Still, no charges have been levied against the woman, although she has vaguely been accused of being a leading member of an infiltration network involved in attempts at “soft overthrow” of the Islamic Republic.

The International Campaign reports that Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been systematically denied access to a lawyer, even after presenting choices of representation to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for approval. It also notes that her case is conspicuously similar to those of several other dual nationals, including Iranian-Canadian anthropology professor Homa Hoodfar and French Foreign Ministry staffer Nazak Afshar, both of whom have also apparently been subject to coercive and technically unlawful interrogation.