Region

TEHRAN — Iran on Tuesday approved seven hopefuls to run in next month’s presidential poll, a list dominated by ultraconservatives and deemed “indefensible” by one senior official.

The election-vetting Guardian Council disqualified moderate conservative Ali Larijani, in a surprise move that could clear the way for a strong run by ultraconservative judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi in the June 18 election.

The announcement comes with Iran engaged in talks with world powers aimed at reviving a nuclear deal that has been on life support since former US president Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from it in 2018.

Raisi won 38 per cent of the vote in the 2017 presidential election but was defeated by Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who is constitutionally barred from holding office for three consecutive terms.

“I have never found the council’s decisions to be so indefensible, whether in approvals or disqualifications,” said Ayatollah Sadegh Amoli Larijani, a former judiciary chief, current member of the 12-man body and brother to Ali.

The cleric took to Twitter to accuse “security bodies” of increasingly influencing the vetting body through “false reports”.

The remarks by Amoli Larijani, also a member of the Assembly of Experts and the head of the powerful Expediency Council, who was replaced by Raisi at the helm of the judiciary in 2019, amount to rare criticism from a high-ranking establishment figure.

The Guardian Council also barred firebrand former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as it did when he registered to be a candidate in 2017.

Ahmadinejad has yet to comment on his disqualification.

He had said before that if not approved, he would “not participate” in the election, either by backing a candidate or voting.

The list announced by the interior ministry sparked criticism from reformists and even conservatives.

“I have never seen the Guardian Council criticised and blasted so much from the far right to the far left,” said reformist journalist Mostafa Faghihi on Twitter.

‘Threat’ to competition 

The press had widely predicted a showdown between Raisi and Larijani, who is currently an adviser to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Reformists had pinned their hopes on Eshaq Jahangiri, first-vice president to incumbent Rouhani, but he was also barred.

Jahangiri said the disqualifications posed “a serious threat to public participation and fair competition”, especially for reformists.

Kian Abdollahi, editor-in-chief of ultraconservative Tasnim news agency, said the council’s decision was not “justifiable to the public” and that “a major part” of conservatives opposed it.

A record 57 per cent of Iranians stayed away from legislative elections in February last year in which thousands of candidates, many of them moderates and reformists, were disqualified.

Turnout is still a concern this year, with officials including the supreme leader urging Iranians to vote.

The Guardian Council’s decision was criticised by members of the public.

The move turned the election into a mere formality, said an engineer in Tehran who only identified himself as Majid.

“It used to be disguised, but it’s not even disguised anymore,” he told AFP.

“For me, it doesn’t really matter who’s going to be [president], because whoever it is, nothing will change,” said fitness instructor Farnoosh.

The government deflected reports that Rouhani had called on Khamenei to intervene by bringing some candidates back in.

“I don’t have the latest information,” its spokesman said.

The leader had in 2005 reversed the council’s decision to bar two reformist figures, Mostafa Moein and Mohsen Mehralizadeh, with the latter an approved candidate this year.

‘God’s will’ 

The final list announcement comes as global powers meet in Vienna in efforts to bring Washington back into a deal over Iran’s nuclear programme, which the US left in 2018.

The withdrawal under Trump and reimposition of US sanctions led to Iran stepping up its nuclear activities.

Larijani, who was a key domestic backer of the 2015 deal, conceded his disqualification on Tuesday.

“Dear nation of Iran; now that the election was decided to be so, I have fulfilled my duty,” he wrote on Twitter.

“I am content with God’s will,” he wrote.

Many political figures and analysts said there was hardly a competition any more, as the disqualification of Raisi’s main rivals should allow him an easy victory.

They include ex-Revolutionary Guard chief Major General Mohsen Rezai, ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, and ultraconservative MPs Alireza Zakani and Amirhossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi.

The list also includes reformist ex-vice president Mehralizadeh, and central bank governor Abdolnasser Hemmati, deemed close to the left.

VIENNA — The UN nuclear watchdog and Iran have agreed to extend an understanding to monitor Tehran's activities by one month, the agency said on Monday, while talks in Vienna try to save the 2015 nuclear deal.

"The equipment and the verification and the monitoring activities that we agreed will continue as they are now for one month expiring on June 24th, 2021," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi told a news conference.

Iran in late February limited the IAEA's access to nuclear sites it has been monitoring as part of the 2015 landmark deal.

An agreement, reached on February 21 for a duration of three months, allowed some inspections to continue.

Grossi said that besides extending that understanding, Tehran had also agreed that information collected so far by agency equipment in Iran would not be erased.

He said the outcome of this "long discussion" was "important" but the situation was "not ideal".

"We should all be reminded that the temporary understanding is a sort of stop-gap measure. It is to avoid flying completely blind," he said.

The 2015 accord, which had Iran curtail its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief, started to unravel in 2018 when the US withdrew and reimposed sanctions.

Current talks between world powers are aiming to bring the US back into the deal and lift sanctions in exchange for Iran reversing nuclear activities it stepped up after Washington pulled out.

Iran said Monday that talks in Vienna depend on a “political decision” by the US, after Washington questioned Tehran’s readiness to return to compliance with the accord.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had said it remains unclear whether Iran is “ready and willing” to take the necessary steps to return to compliance with the multination nuclear agreement.

BEIRUT — President Bashar Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for over half a century, faces an election on Wednesday meant to cement his image as the only hope for recovery in the war-battered country, analysts say.

His campaign slogan, "Hope through Work", evokes the reconstruction of a country ravaged by a decade-long conflict that has claimed more than 388,000 lives and displaced half of Syria's pre-war population.

In the capital Damascus, Assad's portraits line roads and inundate main squares, outnumbering those of his two little-known challengers.

"Syrians will vote to pledge allegiance to Assad and to the system," said analyst Fabrice Balanche.

By holding elections on a regular basis, Assad is attempting to prove "that Syrian institutions are functioning", he said.

The poll, the second since the war started in 2011, is all but certain to deliver a fourth term for a president already in power for 21 years.

Western countries opposed to Assad say the vote is a sham and neither free nor fair — in part because it will be held exclusively in the two thirds of the country under regime control.

Assad, a 55-year-old ophthalmologist by training, was first elected by referendum in 2000 after the death of his father Hafez, who had ruled Syria for 30 years.

In the May 26 ballot, he will run against two other challengers approved by an Assad-appointed constitutional court, out of a total of 51 applicants.

Electoral law stipulates that candidates need to have lived in Syria continuously for at least the past decade, ruling out all exiled opposition figures.

The two other contenders are former state minister Abdallah Salloum Abdallah and Mahmoud Merhi — a member of the so-called "tolerated opposition" long described by exiled opposition leaders as an extension of the regime.

'Only choice' 

Assad issued a general amnesty for thousands of prisoners earlier this month, on top of a series of decrees that aim to improve economic conditions.

He has refrained from holding campaign media events and interviews, but his team has released a widely shared promotional video ahead of the polls.

It opens with footage of explosions and people fleeing devastated neighbourhoods, but then shifts to portray scenes of hope: Inside a classroom, a schoolteacher repairs a hole blown into the wall by artillery fire. A farmer tends to his land. A timber mill is back in service.

“Bashar’s election campaign emphasises his role as the man who won a war [and] has big ideas for Syria’s reconstruction,” said Nicholas Heras of the Newlines Institute in Washington.

It presents him as “the only person who can manage the resumption of order and reconstruction from the chaos of the Syrian conflict”.

With more than 80 per cent of Syria’s population living in poverty, according to the UN, the country today is a far cry from the vision Assad projected when he was first propelled to the presidency.

According to Heras, Assad’s campaign targets international donors more than Syrian voters.

He is “running a long infomercial for potential foreign backers that he is their only choice for stability after Syria’s war”, Heras said.

‘Major setback’

Syria has lost its status as a regional heavyweight under Assad’s watch and is now widely seen as heavily dependent on Russia, Iran and an assortment of Tehran-backed militias, including the Lebanese Hizbollah movement.

It remains to be seen whether Western countries led by Washington will shift course on Damascus by lifting sanctions that have crippled Syria’s economy.

But they are unlikely to make concessions without an internationally brokered peace settlement, which they accuse Assad of sabotaging.

According to experts, the May 26 vote undermines a UN-sponsored committee set up in late 2019 to draft a new constitution for Syria ahead of elections.

Representatives from the regime, the opposition and civil society groups failed to clinch an agreement before the vote, derailing any progress.

According to Syria expert Samuel Ramani, the election “will be a major setback for the constitutional process”.

It “will reaffirm to the international community, Russia and Iran included, just how difficult a settlement will be”.

In a country fragmented by war, Syria’s Kurds have carved out a de facto autonomous zone in the northeast, where voting will be extremely limited.

More than three million people live in Syria’s rebelheld northwest, where the fighters say the election is illegitimate.

In the last multi-candidate poll in 2014, Assad won with 88 per cent of the vote.

This time around, “Assad is running the risk of being the only certainty in a country in ruins,” said a European diplomat following Syrian affairs.

But Assad will have a lot to prove, more so to his closest allies than his foes, according to the diplomat.

“Without reform and without opening up the regime,” he has few chances of success, the diplomat said.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli forces shot dead a knife attacker in Jerusalem on Monday, police said, as a ceasefire holds in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza ahead of a visit by Washington’s top diplomat.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken left Washington around noon local time and is due to arrive in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning, days after an Egypt-brokered truce halted the conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip’s Islamist rulers Hamas.

US President Joe Biden said his top envoy will meet “with Israeli leaders about our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security”, as well as seeking to rebuild ties with the Palestinians.

While Gaza remained calm on Monday, Israeli police said an attacker stabbed two young Israeli men in Jerusalem before police shot him dead.

Palestinian news agency WAFA said that Israeli forces had shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian high school student from occupied East Jerusalem.

Hadassah medical centre in Jerusalem said it was treating two men in their twenties for stab wounds. Both were in a stable condition and one was identified by the army as a soldier.

The 11-day conflict with Hamas in Gaza sparked inter-communal tensions in Israel itself between Jewish and Arab citizens of Palestinian descent, and amplified protests across the occupied West Bank.

Overnight Israeli forces rounded up 43 Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, including 27 in the latter, the Palestinian Prisoners Club rights group said.

Israeli police, who operate in East Jerusalem, said late Sunday that they had arrested 1,550 suspects and had charged 150 over the past two weeks over “violent events”.

Sheikh Jarrah flashpoint 

Monday’s fatal altercation took place a short distance from the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the site of regular protests against the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in favour of Jewish settlers.

Tensions there built earlier this month to culminate in repeated clashes between Palestinian worshippers and Israeli forces inside the flashpoint Al Aqsa Mosque compound, triggering initial volleys of rocket fire from Gaza on May 10.

Subsequent Israeli air strikes and artillery fire on Gaza killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, and wounded over 1,900 people, the Gaza health ministry says.

Rocket and other fire from Gaza claimed 12 lives in Israel, including one child and an Arab-Israeli teenager, an Israeli soldier, one Indian, and two Thai nationals, medics say. Some 357 people in Israel have been wounded.

There is controversy about how many of those killed in Gaza were combatants, and how many were civilians.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the bombing campaign had killed “more than 200 terrorists” in Gaza.

‘Years of neglect’ 

Alongside meeting Israeli leaders, Biden said his secretary of state would also engage with the Palestinians.

Relations between Washington and the Palestinian Authority fell apart under Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, who recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — a move that broke with decades of international consensus.

Blinken “will continue our administration’s efforts to rebuild ties to, and support for, the Palestinian people and leaders, after years of neglect,” the US president said.

Biden said last week his country was committed to helping provide humanitarian relief and supporting reconstruction in Gaza “in a manner that does not permit Hamas to simply restock its military arsenal”.

The office of Israel’s defence minister announced on Monday Israeli authorities had seized various materials bound for Gaza before the latest war.

“Their suspected destination was a Hamas military wing’s manufacturing site,” Benny Gantz’s office said in a statement.

It added that he had also signed orders to seize millions of shekels in gold discovered in foiled smuggling attempts from Gaza to the West Bank, amid suspicions Hamas was using it to fund “terrorism” there.

Israel’s air campaign has ravaged Gaza’s infrastructure, as well as made at least 6,000 people homeless, the UN’s humanitarian agency says.

Up to 800,000 are without access to clean water in the coastal enclave, which has been under blockade since 2007.

In Gaza city on Monday, several men helped Nazmi Al Dahdouh set up a tent on the mounds of rubble where his home stood before it was hit by an Israeli air strike.

“Where else should I go?” said the elderly man in a long robe and white skull cap.

“I will live here. I will either die, or live, or they will bombard me again.”

By Ammar Karim
Agence France-Presse

BAGHDAD — A wave of deadly attacks on pro-democracy activists and journalists in Iraq have sparked mounting calls to boycott October parliamentary elections, as perpetrators go unpunished.

Killings, attempted murder and abductions have targeted more than 70 activists since a protest movement erupted against government corruption and incompetence in 2019.

Elections were set in response to a central demand of the protracted protest movement that lasted from October to June 2020, and during which demonstrators also railed against Iran’s influence in Iraq.

But as attacks continue with impunity, more voices have joined a call to boycott the vote.

Former lawmaker Faeq Al Sheikh Ali resigned after anti-government campaigner Ihab Al Wazni was shot dead in an ambush in the central holy Shiite shrine city of Karbala on May 9.

“I announce my withdrawal from the legislative elections,” he said after Wazni’s killing.

He also called for other leaders of the protest movement to pull out of the race.

“Prepare... to continue the revolution in the coming months against Iran and its dirty militias,” Sheikh Ali said. “There is no other choice but to topple this criminal regime.”

Authorities have consistently failed to publicly identify or charge the perpetrators of the killings, which have not been claimed.

However, activists have repeatedly blamed Iran-linked armed groups that wield considerable influence in Iraq.

Wazni had for many years criticised Iraqi armed groups and Iran’s outsized influence in the country.

The day after he was killed, prominent journalist Ahmed Hassan was also shot in southern Iraq. He remains in a coma after undergoing brain surgery.

‘Who killed me?’ 

After Wazni’s murder, a movement born out of the anti-government protests called Al Beit Al Watani — the National Bloc — said it would boycott the October elections.

“We reject elections until the killers of the leaders of the October revolution are behind bars,” the bloc’s founder Hussein Al Gharabi told AFP, referring to the protest movement.

Since then, 17 groups have joined the call for a boycott.

They had presented lists for the elections, believing they had strong popular support to change the system through the ballot box.

But all that changed with the murder of Wazni and the attack on Hassan.

“We are firmly against holding elections, as long as weapons are freely available and killings continue,” the groups said in a joint statement on May 17.

Pro-democracy activists called for a protest on Tuesday in the capital Baghdad, to demand the government arrest those responsible for the killings.

They are convinced the perpetrators are known by security forces, but have not been arrested because of links with neighbouring Iran.

On Twitter, photos have circulated of prominent activists murdered in the country with the hashtag “Who killed me?”

However, analysts expressed doubt that calls for a boycott would stop the elections, saying traditional parties control political power in the country through pressure, vote buying and intimidation.

Renewed violence? 

Citing “chaos” in the country, analyst Ali Al Baidar said “it would be better to push back the elections until the security situation improves”.

“Money [to buy votes] flows freely, weapons circulate without any control and political parties impose their will on citizens. All this is an obstacle to transparent elections,” he said.

But he remained sceptical over the power of a boycott.

“There will be a media impact, and this will be a message to the international community, but it is the major parties that have the power and influence,” he added.

“Moreover, if there are demonstrations, they will not be on the scale of those in the past because the leaders have been killed, injured, fled the country or found refuge in autonomous Kurdistan.”

Analyst Ihsan Al Shamari echoed Baidar.

He said groups linked to the protest movement “recognised the error they made in wanting to participate in the elections”.

“They realised it was the traditional parties, backed by foreign states, in particular Iran, that control the state, power, money and weapons,” he said, adding that “they realise it is very difficult for them to enter the political scene”.

But communist leader Raid Fahmi, whose party has suspended its participation in elections, warned the situation could be volatile.

“The people are frustrated,” Fahmi said. “If the doors of democracy and free, transparent elections close, this could lead to a new wave of violence.”