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

U.S. intelligence agencies recently identified nine training camps inside Iran where jihadists fromAfghanistan 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.

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-identifies-nine-training-camps-iran-afghans/

       Iran’s empty condemnation of terrorism

Tom Ridge 

Rouhani

By; First US Homeland Secretary, Tom Ridge

Washington Times, June 29, 2016 - About two days after an Orlando gunman carried out the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the Iranian foreign ministry issued a statement purporting to decry the incident. Speaking via the state-run IRNA, a spokesperson said the Iranian regime “condemns” the attack “based on its principled policy of condemning terrorism and its strong will to seriously confront this evil phenomenon.”
It’s hard to imagine an expression of sympathy more disingenuous. Tehran’s comments must be viewed against a backdrop of its status as the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism, its steady propaganda against the United States, and its own brand of homophobia that has its origins in Islamic extremism.
Iran is not all talk. The rhetoric about Western “arrogance” and “hostility” has been backed up by the arrests of numerous people who hold both Iranian and Western citizenships. The same goes for journalists, artists and professionals who have any meaningful connections with the West, and for activists the regime deems pro-Western.
More significant is the regime’s long and brutal history of institutionalized homophobia. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once famously declared during a visit to the United States that Iran “does not have any homosexuals.” His laughable bluster was typical of his macho regime.
By contrast, the Orlando condemnation was issued by the administration of President Hassan Rouhani , known to wear a much friendlier face in public than its predecessor. This was most obvious during the nuclear negotiations last July. But neither the nuclear deal nor any subsequent statements justify claims that Mr. Rouhani and his colleagues represent a trend toward moderation.
Indeed, just last week, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that traces of man-made uranium were found at the Parchin facility, southeast of Tehran, indicating that Tehran was pursuing a weapons program.
Mr. Rouhani himself has contributed to a recent surge in propaganda, declaring at the end of May, for instance, that the nuclear negotiations represented an “historic turning point,” specifically because they constituted the defeat of “the plots of Zionism and [Western] arrogance.”
More illustrative is what the regime has not done since Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2013.
Mr. Rouhani came to power amidst promises of not only a new opening with the international community, but also of domestic reforms, the release of political prisoners, and a generally freer Iranian society. Three years later, and one year prior to his re-election bid, none of these has come to pass. Quite the contrary, the situation has only gotten worse in several crucial ways, according to experts, such as the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Iran.
The rate of executions has skyrocketed. Some 2,600 people have been executed since Mr. Rouhani took office, in a country that already held the record for the highest number of executions per capita in the world. Meanwhile, restrictions on the rights of women have tightened, and authorities recently dispatched thousands of undercover morality police to identify women violating the state-mandated dress code. The regime has also grown more intolerant of the LGBT community in Iran.
And yet, it is sadly possible that those not paying attention to circumstances inside the Islamic Republic might be lulled by the Orlando statement into more wishful thinking that domestic reform is still just around the corner. Some Western policymakers embraced that sentiment after Mr. Rouhani’s election, and then again after the conclusion of the nuclear negotiations.
Such predictions have been proven false at every turn. It would be ridiculous to allow the Rouhani administration’s latest hollow statements to renew that optimism. At this point, we should know better than to pay any mind to disingenuous comments from Tehran. We would be better served to pay attention to the voice of the Iranian people, like the tens of thousands of Iranian dissidents who will gather in Paris on July 9 for a major international rally in support of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
In contrast to Tehran’s attempts at masking ongoing abuses under an outpouring of empty sentiment, the gathering will highlight an array of concrete examples of the Iranian regime’s human rights violations, terrorist acts, its continued support of the Assad regime that has killed a quarter-million people, and expressions of the very same poisonous ideology that apparently motivated the Orlando shooter.
All of this will serve to emphasize a point that the National Council of Resistance of Iran has expressed repeatedly as Western policymakers sought openings with Iran: We cannot hope to defeat Islamic extremism on a global scale until and unless we confront it everywhere, whether in the cold-blooded murders of a lone gunman or the deceptive smiles of a terrorist state.

http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/iran-world/20601-while-denouncing-the-orlando-shooter-iran-regime-leads-the-world-in-attacks-gov-tom-ridge

Gérard Deprez MEP: Human rights deteriorate in Iran despite European optimism

Gérard Deprez

No amount of trade and economic growth can make up for the suffering and loss of life caused by Iran’s brutal regime. The West must demand change before deepening relations with Tehran, writes Gérard Deprez, a veteran member of the European Parliament.

Mr. Deprez is vice-president of the Belgian Liberal Mouvement Reformateur Party and chairs the Friends of a Free Iran group in the European Parliament.

Writing for Euractiv on Friday, July 1, he said:                                                  

Last week I, together with 270 of my colleagues in the European Parliament from all political groups, including six vice-presidents of the Parliament, signed a joint statement decrying the human rights situation in Iran. We called on European governments to require improvements to that situation before further expanding relations with Tehran and expressed our concern for the rising number of executions in Iran since the so-called “moderate” president Hassan Rouhani took office three years ago.

In his latest reports to the UN Human Rights Commission, Dr Ahmed Shaheed, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, pointed out that nearly 1,000 people were put to death in Iranian jails during the year 2015 alone. He has clarified that this represents the worst period of executions in 27 years, in a nation that consistently executes more people per capita than any other.

The trend continues to this day, even in the wake of the implementation of the Iranian Nuclear Deal. It continues even as some European politicians insist on regarding the Rouhani administration as moderate, and as a potential source of internal reforms in the months and years to come.

Iranian opposition sources have added to Shaheed’s statistics by noting that President Rouhani has overseen a total of approximately 2,500 executions during his three years in office. Various Iran-focused human rights organisations have continued to report executions in recent weeks and have pointed out, for instance, that at least 73 people were hanged in May, some even in front of public crowds that included young children.

Such brutal spectacles are only one of the ways in which the Iranian regime maintains its commitment to plainly medieval values, regardless of whether Western observers keep up scrutiny and pressure on Tehran’s behavior, or praise it for its “moderation”. Repressive measures against women and religious minorities have continued to increase. The joint statement by the European lawmakers highlights not only the overall scope of executions, but also the fact that Iran leads the world in executions of juvenile offenders. Victims of Iranian hangings include political prisoners convicted of “crimes” like “enmity against God”, which may consist of nothing more than donating money to media outlets linked to the opposition PMOI, or otherwise speaking out against the regime’s abuses.

Even those who avoid the noose may be punished with either excessively long prison sentences or forms of legally mandated violence that would be shocking to any civilized person. According to the last report from Amnesty International, the country’s fundamentalist leadership continues to cling to the literal doctrine of “an eye for an eye”, and has very recently carried out punishments that involve blinding prisoners or removing their limbs.

Sentences of flogging are not only eagerly meted out by Iran’s revolutionary courts; they appear to be increasingly popular as ways of attempting to “correct” the behavior of a restive population, particularly women, who are thoroughly fed up with forced Islamic dress codes, comprehensive media censorship, and the criminalisation of anything resembling Western society. Near the end of May, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned “the outrageous flogging of up to 35 young men and women in Iran” who had been rounded up at a graduation party and almost immediately subjected to 99 lashes each for removing headscarves and dancing with the opposite gender.

For those who have been waiting for signs of reforms from inside the Iranian regime, surely that wait has gone on long enough. Former claims of moderation have been thoroughly contradicted in both word and deed by the regime in general, and by the Rouhani administration in particular. The laws leading to the above-mentioned executions and physical violence have all been eagerly embraced by the Iranian president, who has described them as “the law of God” and “the laws of the parliament, which belongs to the people”.

In reality, the Iranian parliament belongs to no one other than the ruling theocracy. The recent political victories for Rouhani’s faction were nothing other than victories of one hardline wing over another. All genuine reformists were ousted from the race long before the Iranian people had any opportunity to weigh in on the future of the country. And more than that, many of the staunch opponents of repressive theocracy and fundamentalism were ousted from the country altogether, years ago.

On 9 July, many lawmakers from Europe, the United States, and throughout the world will join in theinternational rally of the Iranian opposition in Paris under the leadership of Maryam Rajavi to emphasise our commitment to supporting the Iranian people’s aspiration for democratic change.

Our message is that the Iranian people cannot afford European and American policies that continue to avoid putting pressure on the regime over the human rights situation. No amount of economic growth or trade with Iran can make up for the pain and loss of life that will persist if the regime is allowed to commit its newfound wealth to the same old human rights abuses.
http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/iran-resistance/20605-gerard-deprez-mep-human-rights-deteriorate-in-iran-despite-european-optimism