Iran

Iran has taken a major step towards acquiring a nuclear weapon, it emerged on Sunday, after Western diplomats revealed that it has enriched uranium to its highest levels so far, standing just short of the threshold for a bomb.

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] found enrichment levels of 84 per cent at Iran’s nuclear sites, the highest levels recorded so far and just six per cent shy of the threshold for acquiring a nuclear weapon.

… It also increases the risk of a major confrontation between Iran and Israel, its arch foe which regards the nuclear programme as an existential threat. Israel is suspected of carrying out a series of surgical strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in recent years to slow down the Iranian weapons programme.

The government of Iran marked the 44th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on Saturday with demonstrations around the country.

The state-organized rallies differ markedly from the widespread protests that erupted after 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the controversial morality police last year.

Human rights organizations estimate thousands of Iranians have been arrested and several protesters have been executed, but smaller acts of rebellion continue, such as an increasing number of women choosing to ignore the country’s mandatory headscarf rule.

Forces in the Iranian revolutionary guards are beginning to feel “doubt and confusion” after almost five months of anti-regime demonstrations, senior officers have admitted.

Compounding this sense of frustration is their pay. The salaries of IRGC soldiers are a quarter of their counterparts in Lebanon’s Hezbollah forces, Iran’s most powerful Middle East proxy, according to sources.

The 125,000-strong IRGC has carried out a brutal crackdown against protesters across the country, killing at least 528 civilians and imprisoning tens of thousands more, rights groups say. Seventy IRGC soldiers are believed to have died.

What does an autocrat do when his support base is shaken by popular protests?

The standard answer is: he tries to reassure supporters by increasing their privileges, thus giving them a bigger stake in the preservation of the status quo.

This is what Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is trying to do with an edict for the largest privatization scheme in Iran’s history.

Unveiled last week, the scheme is the seventh of its kind since the first was launched 23 years ago.

An Iranian court has handed jail sentences of more than 10 years each to a young couple who danced in front of one of Tehran’s main landmarks in a video seen as a symbol of defiance against the regime, activists have said.

Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiance, Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, both in their early 20s, were arrested in early November after a video went viral showing them dancing romantically in front of the Azadi Tower.

Haghighi was not wearing a headscarf, in defiance of Iran’s strict rules. Women are also not allowed to dance in public, let alone with a man.

A court in #Iran sentenced a couple to 10.5 years in prison for dancing in the street, the Al Arabiya newspaper reported.

They were accused of conspiring to undermine national security and engaging in anti-regime propaganda. pic.twitter.com/EWrsSgohQs

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) January 31, 2023

Since 1979, when the mullahs seized power, Iran has topped the list of countries hit by “brain drain”. However, what was a sectoral hemorrhage may now become a general bleeding affecting other sectors of the population.

A feature in the official news agency IRNA was headlined, “It’s not only the elite who emigrate.”

The daily Javan, an organ of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) also warns that Iran is losing some if its best-educated people and claims that mass-emigration by “elite elements” is costing the nation millions of dollars. Emigration is now attracting Iranians with lower skills or no skills.