In his article for the August 12 edition of The Washington Post, Brian Murphy talks about Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who once was the hand-picked successor to the revolution’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
After Iran’s Islamic revolution, in 1988, the country’s leader-in-waiting faced a decision. Montazeri could stand by while Iran stepped up a campaign of mass executions, torture and gulag-style imprisonment, or he could follow his conscience and speak out.
Iran Focus
London, 11 Aug – A leading Syrian opposition official has stated that the key to ending the Syrian crisis is evicting Iran.
Suheir Atassi, a member of the High Negotiations Committee of the Syrian opposition, said that the civil war in Syria and the human loss, as a result, would not have continued if it wasn’t for the Iranian regime’s support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and their besiegement of Aleppo and Daraya.
An audio recording of Iranian Regime members acknowledging the 1988 massacre, has been published for the first time.
The recording, obtained by theNational Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), features Hossein-Ali Montazeri, former heir-apparent to the supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini, discussing the 1988 slaughter of political activists from the opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK).
In an interview with Al-Arabiya, a leading Iranian activist has decried the executions in Iran as a form of “terrorism” designed to “silence [it’s] citizens”.
Hashem Khastar, a former political prisoner and member of the teachers’ union, said: “I condemn these mass executions which happened against our brothers from the Sunni sect and everyone condemns these executions that happened in mock courts that resemble dark rooms”.
Iran Focus
London, 11 Aug – Last week, Iran confirmed the execution of a nuclear expert who passed “confidential and vital” intelligence to the United States regarding Iran’s nuclear programme.
Shahram Amiri defected to the US in 2009 but returned one year later after his family had been taken hostage by the regime.
Iran Focus
London, 10 Aug – Tom Ridge wrote an op-ed on the subject for The Philadelphia Inquirer just one week after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei accused the USA of reneging on pledges made in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Khamenei distanced himself from the deal that he’d previously been in full support of, citing “the futility of negotiations with the Americans”, just weeks after the one-year anniversary.
Ridge wrote that this power play by the Iranian Regime served as a reminder to him, that the gains promised by the nuclear deal will never come to pass for anyone outside of the Regime and he had evidence to back it up.
Iran Focus
The Hague, 10 Aug – Members of the Dutch-Iranian community and supporters of the Iranian Resistance staged a protest in front of Dutch Parliament in The Hague to show solidarity with political prisoners in Iran and especially those excecuted in the past few weeks.
Iran Focus
London, 10 Aug – A group of protesters in the UK staged a three-day protest and hunger strike last weekend, to show solidarity with the political prisoners currently held in Iran and to commemorate those murdered by the Iranian regime in early August.
The relatives of the victims were told they could have one final meeting with their loved ones and when they turned up, they were told that the executions had already happened.
Conservative MP: “horrific events in Iran”
The Independent, an influential British newspaper, today reported on the culmination of a series of demonstrations to mark the Iranian regime’s widespread and increasing use of execution against political protestors.
Protesters staged a mock execution as they entered the final day of their hunger strike outside Downing Street. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) is calling on the UK government to acknowledge the executions and human rights abuses in Iran, Caroline Mortimer reported.
By Struan Stevenson
For the Iranian opposition members trapped in Camp “Liberty”, near Baghdad Airport, the name of their tiny compound has become a sick joke. These refugees are the final remnants of a substantial community numbering almost 4000, that occupied a vast sprawling enclave called Camp Ashraf, 60 miles north of Baghdad in Diyala Province. They fled to Iraq following a vicious pogrom in the 1980’s which saw over 120,000 of their People’s Mojahedin’s Organisation of Iran (PMOI) movement executed by the theocratic Iranian regime. They built Camp Ashraf into a large, thriving city with parks, streets, factories, a library, museum, university and accommodation and they lived there in harmony with the local Iraqi population.
