JEDDAH: The United States believes that Russian officials visited an airfield in Iran recently to view attack-capable drones, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Saturday. The United States earlier this week said it has information that shows Iran is preparing to provide Russia with up to several hundred drones, including some that are weapons capable, and that Tehran is preparing to train Russian forces to use them. Iran’s foreign minister denied that. “We assess an official Russian delegation recently received a showcase of Iranian attack-capable UAVs....To our knowledge, this is the first time a Russian delegation has visited this airfield for such a showcase,” Sullivan said in a statement. The statement included satellite imagery dated June 8 showing Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) “that the Russian government delegation saw that day.” It said similar equipment was showcased for a second Russian visit to the airfield on July 5. On Friday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, in a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, rejected as baseless US accusations about Iranian drones being sent to Russia for use in the war against the Ukraine. Iran, which has supplied UAVs to its allies in the Middle East, on Friday announced its first naval drone-carrying division in the Indian Ocean as US President Joe Biden visits the Middle East. Biden is expected to meet with Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia on Saturday and discuss integrating missile and defense capabilities in the region to combat Iranian drone and missile attacks in the Middle East. “Russia is effectively making a bet on Iran and we are making a bet on a more integrated, more stable, more peaceful and prosperous Middle East region,” a senior US administration official told reporters on Saturday.
IRBIL: Two bomb-laden drones targeting a Turkish military base in northern Iraq were shot down Friday, a local mayor said, amid heightened tensions days after nine Iraqi civilians died in shelling blamed on Turkey. The Turkish army has maintained dozens of outposts over the past 25 years across northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region as part of its campaign against rebels. “Two bomb-laden drones that attacked the Turkish base in the village of Bamerne this morning were shot down without causing any casualties,” the village’s mayor, Miran Ismail, told AFP. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but a pro-Iran Telegram channel popular among pro-Tehran armed factions in Iraq praised an action of “the Iraqi resistance.” On Wednesday, artillery strikes on a recreation area in Kurdistan killed nine civilians, including women and children, and wounded another 23. Most of the casualties were tourists from southern or central Iraq who took to mountainous northern regions of the country to escape the summer heat. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhemi blamed Turkey for the attack and warned that Baghdad reserves the “right to retaliate.” But Turkey denied responsibility and instead accused rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The tragedy, condemned by much of Iraq’s political class, provoked public indignation and sparked angry demonstrations.
TRIPOLI: At least nine people were killed overnight Thursday-Friday in heavy clashes between militias in the Libyan capital Tripoli, emergency services said. Updating an earlier toll, emergency services told Al-Ahrar television a child was among the nine dead and that 25 other people — including civilians — were wounded, several of them seriously. Tensions have been rising for months as two prime ministers vie for power in the North African country, raising fears of renewed conflict two years after a landmark truce ended a ruinous attempt by eastern military chief Khalifa Haftar to seize Tripoli by force. The latest fighting started with a gunbattle late Thursday in Ain Zara, a densely populated neighborhood of eastern Tripoli, between the Al-Radaa force and the Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade, media reports said. It later spread into other areas, trapping 60 students in university dormitories until they were rescued, Osama Ali of the ambulance service told Al-Ahrar, a news channel. Hundreds of women attending wedding ceremonies in the Fornaj district were also trapped. “We spent the night in the basement. Our children were terrified,” one resident, Mokhtar Al-Mahmoudi, told AFP. Both groups involved in the fighting are nominally loyal to Abdulhamid Dbeibah’s Government of National Accord, appointed last year as part of a United Nations-backed peace process to end more than a decade of violence in oil-rich Libya. Dbeibah has refused to cede power to Fathi Bashagha, named in February as prime minister by a parliament based in Libya’s east after he made a pact with Haftar. In mid-May Bashagha tried to take up office in the capital but sparked clashes between armed groups supporting him and those backing Dbeibah. In early July he told AFP that he still intended to enter Tripoli “in the coming days.” Clashes on June 10, involving different militias than this time, left one person dead, a security source said. But the latest fighting was the first in months to cause civilian casualties in the capital. Images posted on social media showed dozens of vehicles abandoned, their doors open in the middle of the road, by drivers fleeing the violence. The unrest forced flights by Libyan Airlines and another carrier, Alamia, to be diverted from Tripoli’s Mitiga airport to Misrata, around 200 kilometers (125 miles) east of the capital. Libya has been gripped by insecurity since a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 toppled and killed dictator Muammar Qaddafi, leaving a power vacuum armed groups have been wrangling for years to fill.
LONDON: The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is failing to sanction Iranians linked to the regime who are responsible for arresting and intimidating British nationals, MPs have said.
Labour MP Chris Bryant, a member of the foreign affairs select committee, said that those responsible for the arrest of British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe have not faced sanctions from the FCDO despite being named in September.
Bryant listed broadcaster Ameneh Sadat Zabihpour and Hossein Taeb, who has led the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, among a group of 10 Iranians who should face sanctions for hostage taking and intimidation.
He told the British Parliament’s House of Commons that Zabihpour “is known for eliciting false confessions from prisoners in front of camera during interrogations,” adding that the broadcaster was present at the airport just before Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released.
Bryant said the state TV journalist was seen filming Zaghari-Ratcliffe as Iranian officials attempted to force a confession from her.
Taeb ran the political prisoner department at Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where the mass arrests and torture of hundreds of prisoners had taken place, The Guardian reported.
Bryant said that Taeb was the driving force behind hostage operations within the IRGC.
He added that Taeb had blocked the release of hundreds of dual nationals who had been kept confined in Iran and was responsible for extracting Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s false confession.
Bryant said: “If the UK had taken action against these individuals in September or in December, they may have thought twice about abusing British hostages. Government inaction always has a price.”
DUBAI: The government of Japan on Friday strongly condemned the deadly attack in the city of Zakho, Duhok province (Kurdistan region), northern Iraq.
According to a statement by Press Secretary Hikariko Ono, Japan will continue to support the efforts of the Iraqi government to ensure peace and stability in Iraq, including in the Kurdistan region.
The Turkish artillery attack occurred on July 20, killing nine civilians, including three children, while many others with injured.
The attack prompted an unusually strong rebuke from Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhemi.
“Turkish forces have perpetrated once more a flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty,” Kadhemi said. He condemned the harm caused to “the life and security of Iraqi citizens,” and said Iraq may hit back.
• This article originally appeared in Arab News Japan
MADRID: Iran’s nuclear program is “galloping ahead” and the International Atomic Energy Agency has very limited visibility on what is happening, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told Spain’s El Pais newspaper in an interview published on Friday. In June, Iran began removing essentially all the agency’s monitoring equipment, installed under its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Grossi said at the time it could be a “fatal blow” to chances of reviving the deal following 2018’s pullout by the United States. “The bottom line is that for almost five weeks I have had very limited visibility, with a nuclear program that is galloping ahead and, therefore, if there is an agreement, it is going to be very difficult for me to reconstruct the puzzle of this whole period of forced blindness,” he told El Pais. Grossi had said in June there was a window of just three to four weeks to restore at least some of the monitoring that was being scrapped before the IAEA lost the ability to piece together Iran’s most important nuclear activities. Since then-US President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the deal and re-imposed sanctions against Tehran in 2018, Iran has breached many of the deal’s limits on its nuclear activities. It is enriching uranium to close to weapons-grade. Western powers warn it is getting closer to being able to sprint toward making a nuclear bomb. Iran denies wanting to. “It is not impossible (to reconstruct the puzzle), but it is going to require a very complex task and perhaps some specific agreements,” Grossi, who was visiting Madrid, said in his interview with El Pais. Indirect talks between Iran and the United States on reviving the 2015 deal have been stalled since March. Grossi said he was concerned and worried about these weeks with no visibility. “The agency needed to reconstruct a database, without which any agreement will rest on a very fragile basis, because if we don’t know what’s there, how can we determine how much material to export, how many centrifuges to leave unused?” he said. Asked about a Reuters report that Iran is escalating its uranium enrichment further with the use of advanced machines at its underground Fordow plant, Grossi said “the technical progress of the Iranian program is steady.”