Iran: "Ahmadinejad arrested, quizzed and released”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to have been arrested and held for questioning for seven hours this week by order of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Ahmadinejad was quizzed about his campaign to promote his favored candidate in the much-anticipated June 14 election of the Islamic Republic’s seventh president.

I have collated these two reports, one detailing news of his arrest and questioning and the other shedding light on Ahmadinejad’s campaign for his chosen successor.

The arrest

By Reza Kahlili, writing for World Net Daily (WND) under the title “Iran source: President Ahmadinejad arrested”:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was arrested and held for seven hours Monday and warned to keep his mouth shut about matters detrimental to the Islamic regime before he was released, according to a source within the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence unit.

After his visit to Tehran’s 26th international book fair Monday (April 29), the source said the head of Ahmadinejad’s security team informed the Iranian president that he had been asked to appear at the supreme leader’s office for an urgent matter.

On the way to the meeting, contact between the security team within the president’s convoy was disconnected while three other cars joined the convoy, instructing the lead car to take a different direction. Ahmadinejad, instead of being taken to the supreme leader’s office, was taken to a secret location in one of the buildings belonging to the Foreign Ministry, which is under the control of the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit.

As soon as Ahmadinejad exited the car, he and his security team were involved in an altercation with Guards’ members in which his team was disarmed and communications equipment confiscated. Ahmadinejad was then forced to enter an office belonging to Hossein Taeb, the head of the Guards’ intelligence, located underneath the building.

As this was happening, the source said, hundreds of other Guards’ members from the intelligence unit sought out Ahmadinejad’s associates throughout Tehran and questioned them on the existence of documents detrimental to the regime.

Ahmadinejad was questioned for hours in a meeting with Taeb; Asghar Hejazi, the head of intelligence at the supreme leader’s office; Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader’s son; and Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, the attorney general. He was warned to back down from his claims against regime officials and given an ultimatum. The source added that Ahmadinejad was released back to his security team at 11:45 p.m. Monday, Tehran time.

Earlier, the regime’s media outlet Baztab reported that with just days remaining for the registration of presidential candidates, Ahmadinejad warned associates that if his hand-picked candidate to succeed him, a close confidant and a top adviser, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, was rejected as a candidate, then he would reveal tapes that will show the regime defrauded the voters in the 2009 presidential election.

One tape reportedly quotes officials as telling Ahmadinejad in 2009 that they will announce his total winning tally as 24 million votes where the real number was 16 million. In the same tape, Ahmadinejad insisted that the officials not do that. The Baztab site was immediately taken down by the regime’s security forces and is still offline.

Millions of Iranians took to the streets after the 2009 election results were reported, calling Ahmadinejad’s 62 percent tally of voters a fraud and demanding a free election. Thousands were arrested, with many tortured and executed. Ahmadinejad’s opponents, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have been under house arrest ever since.

Under the constitution of the Islamic Republic, the 12-member Guardian Council decides the eligibility of who can run for office in the country, and anyone with any history of opposing the regime is barred from participation. The council is made up of six Islamic faqihs (experts in Islamic law) appointed by the supreme leader and six jurists nominated by the head of the Judiciary (who is himself appointed by the supreme leader), and then approved by parliament.

Ahmadinejad had previously warned that he would release documents not only on high-ranking Guards officers but also on leading members of parliament and the Justice Department that prove financial fraud.

The source added that it will be interesting to see if Ahmadinejad takes the warning or if he creates more problems with the regime, but one thing is sure: He could end up dead if he doesn’t.

The public relations office of the Iranian president subsequently issued a press release rejecting the existence of such a tape that points to fraud in the 2009 elections. In its release, it stated that publishing such news, by the regime’s media Baztab, is only with the intention of creating instability before the upcoming elections.

The UK DailyMail reporting on this WND story added that U.S. and British diplomats in the area are said to be aware of the reports and are viewing them “with interest.”

“It is potentially of considerable significance given the on-going internal political struggles as the election approaches,” one diplomatic source said.

The campaign

By Saeed Kamali Dehghan, writing for The Guardian of May 1 under the title “Who’s afraid of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”:

As the countdown begins for elections that will usher in Iran's first new president in eight years, all eyes are still on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the unpredictable and mercurial man who looks unlikely to go quietly.

Shortly after the 14 June poll, he will have to relinquish his office in Tehran's Pastor street and hand over the keys to his successor. Given the tight timetable for Iranian elections, it is almost impossible to guess who that person will be.

With just six weeks to go, registrations for presidential candidates are only due next week. A number of hopefuls have already announced plans to run but their candidacies will not be valid until the powerful Guardian Council vets their competence and loyalty to the Islamic republic. In 2009, out of 476 registered nominees, only four candidates were allowed to stand – two of them, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, are under house arrest for refusing to accept the results and for alleging fraud.

The final list of this year's candidates is expected on 23 May and a three-week campaign period will follow.

Despite this, Ahmadinejad has embarked on an extensive schedule of provincial visits in what is suspected to be part of an election strategy designed to promote his favoured candidate. On Wednesday, he was visiting Rasht, the capital of northwestern Gilan province, situated on the coast of the Caspian Sea. At the weekend, he went to Tabriz in the East Azerbaijan province. Previously, he visited a number of other provinces, such as Isfahan, Khuzestan and Semnan. He is not alone; other nominees are following his footsteps.

Under Iranian law, the president cannot run for a third term but all the signs indicate that the 57-year-old Ahmadinejad, a relatively young politician in the Iranian hierarchy, has no plans for retirement. On the contrary, he is accused of planning a Putin/Medvedev-style reshuffle by grooming his chief of staff and close confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei.

In the eyes of loyalists to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, today's Ahmadinejad bears no resemblance to the young revolutionary and later Tehran mayor who rose to become president in 2005. Back then, he quickly became the ayatollah's protégé, enjoying an unprecedented influence over Iranian politics. Now, Ahmadinejad is at odds with his erstwhile patrons in the Revolutionary Guards and widely seen as a lame duck.

Ahmadinejad has fallen foul of the loyalists because of his unwavering support for Mashaei, who is accused of leading a deviant current in the inner circle of the president, loathed for their advocacy of greater cultural openness and nationalism.

Many are already counting down Ahmadinejad's dying days in office, believing they are his final days in power. Others think he still has a chance and, in case Mashaei is disqualified from running, is issuing challenges to the establishment by threatening to go out all guns blazing and pulling down the edifice of the political system that championed him.

But who is afraid of Ahmadinejad? In February, the president played a secretly filmed tape in the Iranian parliament - to the astonishment of millions of Iranians listening on national radio - that revealed the speaker's brother was allegedly trading on his sibling's influence for financial gain.

Many fear that the president's team have many more secret tapes and videos that could pose serious challenges to the Islamic republic; others say that is a bluff. "They have installed hidden cameras, listening devices in order to collect information and release them in public," Mohammed Ali Montazeri, a judicial official, warned this week.

Baztab, a conservative news website critical of the government, said in a report that Ahmadinejad was rumored to possess a tape that shows he received a phone call from the authorities right after the 2009 elections telling him they planned to announce that he had won millions more votes than the real tally. This was denied by the president's office this week and Baztab was taken offline on Wednesday.

"There are things to say..." Ahmadinejad said on a recent visit to the holy city of Qom, promising to reveal them at a future date. The president's menacing language has infuriated his rivals and, as elections approach, everyone is watching for any unexpected movements that may embarrass the supreme leader.

Damascus 2013 is more sinister than Baghdad 2003

By Ghassan Charbel*

“What is taking place in Syria,” he said, “is much more alarming than what was taking place in Iraq 10 years ago. The nature of the struggle is different and more complex. The area is more vulnerable than it was prior to the removal of Saddam Hussein. In Baghdad, America was spontaneous and determined. In Damascus, America is listless, hesitant and soft. In Baghdad, Tehran wanted to see Saddam removed and was preparing to reap the benefits of his eclipse. In Damascus, Tehran is so involved in the confrontation, as though it is defending its project and the fringes of its role and its prestige. Region change is dawning from Damascus, not Baghdad.”

He went on, “Arab safety valves are nowhere to be found. Morsi’s Egypt is sinking in unrest. Maliki’s Iraq is drowning again in a crisis of its components. Assad’s Syria is the theater of a brutal battle mixing together revolution, internecine strife, regional faceoff and international emasculation. With such givens, you can’t but expect the worst.”

I was startled by the Arab official’s words and asked him to elaborate further.

He said the most dangerous thing regarding Syria is the foreclosing of retreat. The opposition cannot backtrack after the fall of nearly 100,000 dead and material damages estimated at $100 billion. The regime too cannot do an about face after what it did. The regime also hinges on Bashar al-Assad. That’s why Lakhdar Brahimi returned frustrated from Damascus because he broached the taboo subject.

My interlocutor felt Brahimi’s last trip convinced Assad’s enemies at home and abroad that change was needed in the balance of forces on the ground. This simply means a new round of funding and arming. Damascus is heading to a major showdown liable to produce additional victims, ruin and refugee waves.

He said Russia, which went too far in its support of the Syrian regime, finds it difficult to backpedal.  Besides, the door key is in Tehran, which acts as though the Syrian regime’s fall is a catastrophe, not a loss. That’s why it is putting its full weight in the ongoing conflict. It believes its exit from Syria will perturb its presence in Iraq and Lebanon and dent its image at home. Ties with Assad are the biggest, longest and most costly Iranian investment in the region. Cutting the Syrian stretch of the line running from Tehran to Beirut via Baghdad means Iran losing its mission. And the mission is more important than the bomb that could defend a bigger undertaking.

Hezbollah too cannot go into reverse. Fall of the regime would downgrade Hezbollah from regional to local player and rub out the word “steadfastness” from its vocabulary.

The official drew my attention to a very precarious development. The chief of staff of the Free Syrian Army said the FSA would henceforth deal with Hezbollah fighters in Homs as “mercenaries, not prisoners of war.” Whoever looks at the map would appreciate the implications of such words i.e. that Syrian-Lebanese and Sunni-Shiite relations are likely to be severely tested once the regime falls.

The official said the “more difficult episode” of the Syria crisis is approaching.

If the regime survives in part of Syria, it means moving from regime risks to map risks. Fall of the regime by knockout means an unstable Syria for years. Al-Qaeda sinking root in Syria is very dangerous. All scenarios confirm Damascus is more treacherous than Baghdad was.

The official did not miss asking me about events in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley town of Arsal.

*Ghassan Charbel is the Lebanese editor-in-chief of the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. The original Arabic wording of his editorial appears in today’s edition of al-Hayat.

Iran point man killed heading from Syria to Lebanon

Hassan Shateri (top) and AFP photo of his portrait on the coffin carried by Tehran mourners

Iran has lost its point man in Lebanon and Syria.

He was presumably ambushed and killed by Syrian opposition forces while travelling overland to Beirut from Damascus.

Prominent Iranian clerics, military commanders and politicians led mourners at his mid-day funeral at a mosque in north Tehran today.

They included Hojatoleslam Ali Saidi, representing Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Revolutionary Guards chief Ali Jaafari, Quds Force commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi.

The semiofficial Fars news agency identified the slain Revolutionary Guards commanding officer as Hassan Shateri.

Footage of the service broadcast on state TV showed mourners carrying aloft a coffin with his portrait.

Fars said Shateri was a veteran of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, and served in Afghanistan before going to Lebanon. He is to be buried Friday in his hometown of Semnan, some 150 kilometers east of Tehran.

In Lebanon, Shateri posed as “Hessam Khoshnevis,” head of an Iranian agency set up to help rebuild Hezbollah-controlled areas devastated by the 2006 war with Israel.

A commander of Syrian opposition forces battling President Bashar al-Assad said the rebel fighters carried out the attack near the Syrian town of Zabadani, a few miles from the Lebanese border.

Damascus receives extended military and intelligence assistance from Iran and Hezbollah as part of the effort to keep Assad in power.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Shateri was shot dead by rebels while heading to Lebanon from the Syrian capital.

"We do not know exactly where he was shot, but we do know that a rebel group ambushed his vehicle while en route from Damascus to Beirut," Britain-based Observatory director Rami Abdel-Rahman told AFP.

Syrian tanker trucks ferrying Lebanese fuel to Assad forces

The Iranian embassy in Beirut said "armed terrorists" killed a man it identified as “Hessam Khoshnevis,” adding that he had been involved in reconstruction work in Lebanon.

The embassy named him as "Hassan Shateri, also known as Hessam Khoshnevis".

It said he was in charge of the Iranian Committee for the Reconstruction of Lebanon set up after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

Protesters in Lebanon are meanwhile continuing to block the northern border crossing with Syria to stop diesel fuel shipments they say are being used to resupply Assad’s military.

Around 30 tanker trucks carrying fuel from refineries in Tripoli and Zahrani were forced to stop on the Lebanese side of the Arida border crossing between the two countries.

A written statement by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) Wednesday appealed to Lebanese President Michel Suleiman to stop fuel shipments to Assad forces.

FSA spokesperson Louay al-Mokdad later told MTV channel the Unified Judicial Council of the Revolution in Damascus has issued an arrest warrant against Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, his brother Taha and his nephew Azmi for their alleged role in resupplying Assad’s military with Lebanese fuel.

From Tehran to Grozny to Damascus

I was disheartened to read what a Syrian activist wrote today in Arabic on his Twitter page, which translates as:

“Don’t read a word of the Arabs’ scripts. Their warfare is hearsay. Their sword is timber-made. Their love is betrayal. And their pledge is a lie.”

But reading shortly after an overnight Agence France Presse (AFP) dispatch filed by Dominique Soguel from Aleppo soothed my heartache.

The dispatch, which is very widely quoted today in the regional media, reads:

ALEPPO, Syria — Veteran war surgeon Jacques Bérès has his own compelling reasons for urging that a no-fly zone be imposed over Syria -- one bomb dropped by the regime leaves more wounded than doctors can fix in a day.

Working under cover in the northern city of Aleppo, which has been pounded for weeks as President Bashar al-Assad’s forces seek to overrun rebel bastions, Bérès insists the death toll in the Syrian conflict is higher than what is reported.

“At least 50,000 people have been killed without counting the disappeared,” Bérès, a French surgeon who daily patches up dozens of people in a hospital near the frontlines of Aleppo, told AFP in an interview.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists on the ground across Syria, has given a latest toll of at least 26,283 people killed in Syria since the revolt began in March last year -- 18,695 civilians, 1,079 defectors and 6,509 troops.

But Bérès said watchdogs such as the Britain-based Observatory are unable to paint a full picture of the losses because many deaths are documented “only with ink and paper.”

“I am sure that the dead that I have here are not tallied in London,” said Bérès.

In the past two weeks, he said, he has treated a daily average of 20 to 45 wounded people, the majority of them fighters with the opposition Free Syria Army, including “quite a few jihadists.”

Fatalities in rebel ranks range between two and six each day, he said.

But those are just the figures collected in one small hospital within a massive commercial city, which is now almost evenly divided between rebel and army-controlled areas.

Many grey zones lie between both camps and the security situation remains fluid: shops open and pedestrian traffic has resumed in some neighborhoods while tank shells and mortar hit others.

“It is shameful that a no-fly zone hasn’t been set up,” said the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, setting aside a cup of tea to review X-rays and offer a Syrian colleague advice on how best to dislodge a bullet from a man's leg.

“It is an incredible massacre. Even if now it is a civil war, it is a very asymmetric conflict: light weapons against tanks and aerial bombardment,” said Bérès, whose experience on the field covers almost every major war from Vietnam in the sixties to Libya last year.

“All this because they asked for a little bit of freedom and said that they had enough of Bashar.”

This is the third humanitarian mission that Bérès has undertaken to Syria this year, backed variously by organizations such as France Syrie Democracie, UAM93, Doctors Without Borders, and AAVS (Association d'Aide aux Victimes en Syrie).

He was in the central city of Homs in February when the neighborhood of Baba Amr was decimated by Assad forces.

In May he roamed around Idlib province where he says pro-regime soldiers destroyed pharmacies and burned a clinic down to the ground.

Bérès, in his seventies, has been smuggling himself into the country at great risk, armed only with the firm belief that he has a “humanitarian duty to heal” even though “in one second a bomb leaves more people wounded than a surgeon can fix in a day.”

Compare the above with:

(1) The futile attempts made last February by a group of Jordanian, Egyptian, Tunisian and Gulf Arab physicians affiliated with the Arab Doctors Union to enter Syria. They gathered at Jordan's northern border with Syria, demanding that they either be allowed inside to treat Syrians wounded or that those injured be permitted to seek medical care outside the country. Damascus turned down their request three times on both counts.

(2) The shocking remark made by Assad last June, when he compared his security forces to surgeons working to save the life of their patients. Speaking before his newly selected parliament, he said: “When a surgeon ... cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him your hands are stained with blood? Or do we thank him for saving the patient?”

Separately, prominent Lebanese novelist playwright, critic and public intellectual Elias Khoury comments today on what he describes as the journey “From Tehran to Grozny to Damascus.”

Writing for the London-based pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi, Khoury says the Assad regime’s crackdown on the Syrian opposition “has gone through two stages: the Iranian phase stretching from the onset of the uprising in March 2011 to the blitzing of Baba Amr in March 2012, followed by the second phase that I would call the Chechen phase.”

Khoury continues:

In the first phase, the Assad regime sought to implement the plan Tehran used to stifle the 2009-2010 Green Revolution that erupted in Iran after the so-called “re-election” of Mahmud Ahmadinejad as president.

The Iranian template proved inapplicable in Syria because it was unrelated to Syrian reality.

The Green Revolution had its roots in the major cities, chiefly Tehran. It failed to take off in the rural areas. The latter remained loyal to the concept of Wilayat al Faqih advanced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Moreover, the political legitimacy of the Iranian command derived from its doctrinal and religious legitimacy as enunciated by Khomeini.

The Syrian Revolution in contrast broke out first in cities a long way from the country’s political capital Damascus and its economic heart Aleppo.

Brutal repression of protests in the rural cities incited the Syrian countryside to join the revolution. Suppression of the insurgency by the classical measures used in Iran proved unworkable.

The failed attempt simply triggered defections from army ranks, the rise of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the public’s recourse to arms. Instead of their revolt being stifled, Syria’s rural areas inflamed the insurgency in the two centers of political and economic gravity, Damascus and Aleppo.

This is not to mention also that the Syrian regime draws neither social nor political nor religious legitimacy.

When the Iranian template proved ill suited, the Syrian regime fell back on another mold for its second phase of repression: the Chechnya template featuring the destruction of Grozny.

The Chechnya-Grozny blueprint is the brainchild of “Russian mini tsar Vladimir Putin.” It allowed the Russian Federation to use the massive firepower of its artillery, tanks and warplanes to systematically obliterate Grozny.

The Assad regime’s recourse to the Chechnya model is shortsighted:

1. Because Chechnya has a population of about one million and forms part of the Russian Federation, which surrounds it on all sides. It sought to break away from Russia and become independent. This is nothing like the Syrian Revolution, which is a revolution by a majority of citizens against a tyrant, instead of foreign rule.
2. Because the “mini Tsar sitting in Moscow fought his war against a weak and dispossessed ethnic minority under the banner of protecting Russia. But the “mini Mamlouk” sitting in Damascus is not fighting a small town of 400,000 people like Grozny but all Syrian cities.

The Chechen solution for Syria is collapsing, much like the Iranian solution before it, Khoury concludes.

(Interestingly, Russia state news agency RIA Novosti reports today: “Simultaneously with the threat of attacks on civil airports [by the FSA], the Foreign Ministry [in Moscow] advised Russians not to travel to Syria and advised Russians already in Syria to find the safest available routes out of the country.”) 

Syria: It’s payback time for Iran

Ahmadinejad with Assad and Nasrallah in Damascus and Maliki in Baghdad

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, penned this op-ed in Arabic

Iran bagged several gold medals without participating in any games throughout the past decade.

It won its first gold after the 9/11 attacks that triggered Great Satan’s war on al-Qaeda.

It clinched its second when U.S. forces rooted out the Taliban who made no secret of their hostility to the Iranian regime.

Iran won its third when U.S. forces brought down the regime of its nemesis, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq.

It secured its fourth gold medal by way of the 2006 Lebanon War.

The great Iranian program’s future looked rosy. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Baghdad (in 2008), he was fully confident that U.S. troops there were looking for an opportunity to leave. (Two years later) he went to Damascus, where posters of him with Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah consolidated the rejectionist crescent. He seized the occasion of his (October 2010) visit to Beirut and South Lebanon to put the region and the world on notice that his country’s missiles were beached on Mediterranean shores.

Iran won the gold medals and stepped up its quest for the ultimate prize: the bomb, or the ability to produce it and thus threaten the security of oil routes and Israel at the same time.

On the outbreak of the Arab Spring, Iran tried claiming parenthood. It was elated by the downfall of the West’s friends. But when the Arab Spring enveloped Syria, it stumbled into a ruinous trap.

Iran cannot let go of its strong and close alliance with the Syrian regime. Remaining neutral is implausible and keeping out is impossible.

Syria is not only a corridor to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is much more than that. The relationship with Syria is the most important triumph of the 1979 Khomeini revolution. Iran’s presence in Damascus means its presence in Beirut and South Lebanon, in the Arab-Israeli dispute and in the Palestinian issue. Iran’s presence in Damascus also preempts any serious attempt to hem in the Iranian surge across the region.

Iran cannot accept losing Syria. But it can’t salvage the Syrian regime either. The regime is severely damaged at the core. The (Baath) party is on life support. The (Syrian) army’s image is badly blemished.

FSA guarding Iranians abducted Saturday in Damascus 

The Syria crisis lured Iran into a blatant and horrific clash with Syria and the region’s majority. The clash has some sectarian overtones as evidenced by the repeated abduction of Iranians in Syria. The isolation gripping the Syrian regime is afflicting Iran as well, notwithstanding Russia’s objections.

Iran is roasting on the Syrian fire. It can’t opt out or distance itself. Nor can it change the course of events. It is hurting because of developments in Syria and the sanctions. Not since the start of its (1980-1988) war with Iraq did it face such difficult circumstances.

Escaping forward from the Syria crisis by initiating armed hostilities in South Lebanon or instigating a major crisis in the Gulf seems fraught with dangers.

Sending volunteers to Syria would mean touching off a sectarian regional war.

Gambling on keeping hold of a slice of Syria would open the way to a reconfiguration of maps. That would open the doors of hell and require the consent of Vladimir Putin, who is exploiting the Syrians’ blood to reinforce his country’s status.

Iran is twisting and turning on the Syrian fire.

It is test firing new versions of missiles much as an anxious boxer tries reminding the world of his muscles.

The time of collecting gold medals has lapsed.

The time of losing out has dawned.