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Shafaq News
5 days ago
- Politics
- Shafaq News
Iran mourns 56 nationals killed in in conflict with Israel
Shafaq News – Tehran Funeral ceremonies began on Saturday in Iran for 56 military commanders and nuclear scientists killed during the recent 12-day Iranian-Israeli war, local media reported. Iran's state television aired the start of a "martyrs' tribute" ceremony, featuring footage from Tehran where crowds waved Iranian flags and held pictures of the deceased commanders as the nation observed a day of mourning. The funeral procession moved from the gate of Tehran University to Azadi Square, drawing a large crowd with widespread participation. Among those attending were Iran's judiciary chief, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, and President Masoud Pezeshkian. On Friday, the Iranian army confirmed the deaths of 56 personnel, including 30 security officials and 11 nuclear experts, during the clashes with Israel. The confrontation, which began on June 13, marked a significant escalation in regional hostilities, involving unprecedented direct strikes on nuclear facilities, military leaders, and strategic bases.


Atlantic
5 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Invisible City of Tehran
The 12-day war between Iran and Israel may not have transformed the opaque rule of the Islamic Republic, but it did make some things newly visible in Tehran. However briefly, a city within a city, long governed through layers of concealment and spectacle, lay exposed. I still recall returning to Tehran in 1998, after more than two decades spent in London and New York. As the plane descended, I pressed my forehead to the window and saw the city of my birth splayed beneath me, vast and unfamiliar. It had multiplied since I had last seen it, not only in size but in identity. Tehran was no longer just the capital of Iran. It was now the beating heart of the Islamic Republic—the world's first fully realized theocracy, the product of a revolution that had yielded not more freedom or material prosperity, but less. For several months in the late 1990s, I returned for both work and personal reasons. As I wandered the city, I felt a sense of both wonder and cautious belonging. I moved into a quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood in the north—unflashy, orderly, lived-in. My neighbors were professionals: engineers, doctors, artists, middle-tier bureaucrats. Most were secular, or observed religion privately and with restraint. They loathed the regime's imposed piety. Inside their homes, they drank wine, hosted mixed-gender gatherings (these were illegal in the Islamic Republic), and listened to banned music. Private spaces were sanctuaries, zones of quiet resistance. But for Iranians they were part, I came to understand, of the visible city—the Tehran most people saw, most of the time. From the October 1906 issue: New York after Paris That visible city was more modern, more vibrant than I had expected. Parks and flower gardens, legacies of Persian landscaping genius, were scattered across the city—especially in the north. Unlike in New York, where I would never have entered Central Park after dark, Tehran's parks were well populated late into the night: families picnicking, children playing, couples strolling in the warm summer air. The streets were clean, well lit, and—traffic aside—surprisingly orderly. Tehran pulsed with activity. At first, it was easy to believe that this was the whole of the city's life. I soon learned otherwise. In the summer of 1999, during my second return visit to Tehran, I had my first encounter with what I now think of as the invisible city: a hidden infrastructure of control, secret spaces layered beneath the visible ones like the traces of ink on a palimpsest. That July, students protested the closure of a reformist newspaper—one of a few outlets that dared to openly criticize the hard-line clerical establishment. Students from Tehran University poured into the streets, demanding greater openness and accountability. This was the first serious political challenge to the regime since the revolution, and the response was swift and brutal. Riot police, plainclothes agents, and members of the Basij, a paramilitary militia, stormed the dormitories. Protesters were beaten, arrested, disappeared. The head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reportedly threatened to depose the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. The city vibrated with anxiety. One afternoon, I was standing with a recent acquaintance at a major downtown square, sipping fresh pomegranate juice, watching events unfold. Around us, people milled about—nervous, curious, suspended between ordinary life and political rupture. A minibus pulled up nearby, already half filled with arrested demonstrators. I made the mistake of looking too long. Within moments, I was yanked by the arm, shoved inside, blindfolded, and driven off. That night, those of us who had been in that minibus were held in a military compound—unmarked, unnamed—somewhere in the capital. My acquaintance who had witnessed the abduction, it turned out, worked for a marginalized reformist faction within the Ministry of Intelligence. Even with his connections, it took him several days and the intervention of senior military officers to locate us. We were eventually released into the custody of his superiors, who brought us to his office, on the third floor of a building I had passed dozens of times. It had always appeared to be a quiet academic institute. I now learned that this was a front: an office run by the Ministry of Intelligence, disguised as a historical-research center. That was my first initiation into the invisible city—the Tehran that doesn't show up on maps or official registries. It runs parallel to the ordinary one, yet wholly apart: embedded in unmarked buildings, accessed through back doors and side alleys, staffed by men with fake names, unsmiling and polite. It was the regime's city, hidden in plain sight. Every city has its secrets. But in Tehran, the secrets are not incidental—they are structural. After that first arrest, and in the years that followed, I began to understand just how extensive the invisible city really was. Some parts of it were what you might call 'visibly invisible': Everyone in Tehran knows about Evin Prison, perched on the edge of the Alborz foothills, its name spoken with dread and resignation. But almost no one knows what happens inside. I spent long months there as a political prisoner, detained for my work on democracy and civil society. I was held in solitary confinement—23 hours a day in a small white cell, alone but for my jailer and my interrogator. Once a week, I was permitted a family visit. My wife, Bahar, and our 2-year-old daughter, Hasti, would meet me in a room arranged like a reception lounge—carpeted, with sofas, a potted plant or two, and cameras discreetly embedded in the walls. A performance of normalcy, under surveillance. Evin was the regime's theater of control, which it carefully lit and dimmed. Only after my release in 2010 did the full topology of the invisible city begin to reveal itself to me—slowly, then all at once. Like Alice through the looking glass, I was ushered ever deeper into its passageways. I was no longer in Evin, but I was never quite free; I remained under watch, summoned to meetings, moved from place to place. The architecture of control was mundane on the surface. I would be told, with feigned casualness, 'Come on, pack up, let's go,' and soon find myself in an unmarked car, or on the back of a battered motorbike, taken to what they called a 'safe house'—not safe for me, of course, but shielded from view. These places were embedded in perfectly ordinary buildings: apartment complexes, office towers, mid-range hotels. Their doors bore no signs, or else misleading ones: for a travel agency, a translation bureau, a small think tank. Once, I was flown to another city, checked into a standard business hotel, and led to a room that had been converted into a studio—lights, cameras, a backdrop—where political detainees were brought to record 'confessions.' Another time, I was taken to a back alley in northern Tehran, up a narrow flight of stairs, and into an unremarkable flat where an intelligence officer waited behind a desk, ready to resume our conversations. The invisible city extended underground, metaphorically if not always literally. After the discovery of Hamas's extensive network of reinforced tunnels beneath Gaza—more than 350 miles long, nearly half the length of the New York City subway system, and built with extensive support from Iran—I couldn't help but imagine Tehran with its own network. Not of tunnels perhaps, but of whispered channels: mosques that doubled as surveillance nodes, schools and ministries laced with informants, entire office blocks that served the security state. A hidden circulatory system beneath the city's surface. Not everything in the invisible city was overtly sinister. Some moments blurred the line between menace and civility. Once, one of my interrogators, a man with an incongruously gentle demeanor, stopped to buy a cold drink on the way to a meeting. At a small café, he chose a table out of view of the surveillance camera. 'Pull your cap down,' he murmured. A gesture of protocol? Paranoia? Or some strange performance of care? I still don't know. The invisible city was not merely a place. It was a psychological condition, a way of moving through space in uncertainty and coded awareness. It was an alternate world with its own logic, rules, and rituals, always one breath beneath the surface of the city of ordinary life. In January 2016, a few days after Iran and the United States signed the nuclear deal that would become known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, I stood in Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, passport in hand, waiting to board my flight. It felt like the end of something: almost six years of surveillance, arrest, confinement, and conditional release. I was finally leaving. My phone rang. 'Look to your left.' There he was: one of the more polite and composed of the intelligence officers who had overseen my case. He had always struck me as thoughtful, almost sympathetic. I never learned his real name. That day, in plain clothes, he was unmistakable, his neat, collarless teal shirt peeking above his dark wool coat. He nodded and gestured for me to follow. We walked back past the passport-control barrier, through a narrow side corridor, into a long, low-lit room where uniformed airport police sat at terminals. As we passed, one officer half-rose to stop us—then hesitated, recognizing my escort. He sat back down. We returned to the terminal's public spaces, on the other side of the security barriers, which passengers aren't normally allowed to cross back through. There, another man waited on a bench: the most senior security officer I had encountered during my months under semi-carceral control. He told me he had come to personally supervise my departure. 'I hope,' he said evenly, 'you won't betray your country again.' Then he smiled. And just like that, I was back in the visible city, rolling down the runway, lifting off, seeing Tehran with my own eyes for what was likely the last time. In some sense, the past 30 years of Iran's history—its repressions and rebellions, its suffocations and flickers of hope—can be understood as the continuous conflict between these two realms: the visible one of ordinary life, and the invisible one of revolutionary power. One Tehran is filled with apartments and parks, evening picnics and bus rides, laughter and prayer and disappointment—the 'city of man,' in Augustine's sense, full of contradictions and grace. The other is cloaked in surveillance and menace, shaped by ideological certainty and fear, a city not of citizens but of instruments, organized for the will of their God. When the brave young women of the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement rose up in 2022, joined by young men willing to risk everything to stand beside them, they were demanding to live fully in a visible city: a city where women and girls could be present, not hidden, and where public space belonged to the living, not to the ghosts of revolution. The regime's response was immediate and categorical. It reasserted the dominance of its invisible, omnipresent apparatus with snipers, beatings, disappearances, and night raids. The invisible city, by definition, was designed to remain unseen. But over the past few weeks, the Israeli air strikes in and around Tehran have made it impossible to ignore. Whatever one thinks of their legality or strategy, the strikes illuminated something long denied: a lattice of military, intelligence, and weapons infrastructure embedded in the civilian fabric of the city and the country. The bombs were flares briefly lighting up the hidden architecture of power. In those flashes one could glimpse a parallel Tehran: IRGC commanders asleep in residential apartments; nuclear engineers moving discreetly across the city; weapons depots nested inside nondescript office blocks. Many of these men, knowing they might be hunted, rarely slept in the same apartment twice. They were shuttled from building to building, neighborhood to neighborhood, passing silently among unsuspecting neighbors, shadows in borrowed homes. For a few seconds, the invisible city was visible: not metaphorically, but with terrible literalness. Then the fireballs receded and the shadows reabsorbed the light. The palimpsest was back.


Saba Yemen
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Saba Yemen
Tehran pays farewell to leaders martyred in Zionist assault on Saturday
Tehran - Saba: Iranian media reported on Wednesday that the national funeral ceremony for the martyred commanders who were killed as a result of the brutal aggression of the Zionist entity will be held in Tehran on Saturday morning, June 28, 2025. The funeral ceremony will begin at 8:00 a.m. from the gate of Tehran University and proceed to Azadi Square, with a large crowd of Iranians in attendance. The Iranian Tasnim News Agency reported that the funerals for the martyred Major General Haj Hossein Salami, a prominent commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the martyred Brigadier General Haj Masoud Shanhai, his chief of staff, will be held on Thursday morning, June 26, 2025, in their hometown of Golpayegan. The agency also reported that the national Iranian funeral procession for these martyrs, along with the bodies of other leaders killed in the brutal aggression by the Zionist entity, will be held on Saturday morning in Tehran, starting at 8:00 AM from the gate of Tehran University toward Azadi Square, with widespread participation from the Iranian people. Whatsapp Telegram Email Print more of (International)


India Today
23-06-2025
- Politics
- India Today
Saviour to Satan: The seeds of Iran-US hostility
Tehran, November 4, 1979. The winter air burnt with rage, a smouldering fire of angry chants and angry fists pounding the sky. 'Death to America!' roared the crowd. 'Destroy the Big Satan,' fumed Iran's spiritual the chaos, a tidal wave of students crashed against the iron gates of the US Embassy. Inside, a young attache, hands trembling, clutched a phone, desperately trying to reach Washington: 'They're coming over the walls,' his voice to control the rising tide, the gates buckled. The mob surged forward, and a revolutionary flood engulfed the compound. For 444 days, 52 Americans would become pawns in a game of vengeance, their captivity a wound that would scar the souls of two nations, leading to almost five decades of animus. This is a story of two friends becoming bitter foes. A tale of the US turning from the saviour to the 'Big Satan.' To understand this rupture, we return to the post-World War II era, when oil and Cold War rivalries sowed discord.1949-1952: The Oil ConspiracyDuring the second great war, Iran was an ally of the Allied powers, its sovereignty guaranteed by the English, Americans and Soviets. In the aftermath of World War II, Iran's vast oil reserves had made it a pawn in a global chess game. By 1949, the great rivals of the Cold War, pro-Western and pro-Soviet, circled like vultures, each craving young Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sat uneasily on his Peacock Throne, his rule already scarred by violence. The battle for Iran's oil started with a winter of intrigues and February 5, 1949The faint echo of Pahlavi's footsteps on the ancient stones of Tehran was shattered by the sound of gunshots. Pahlavi escaped unhurt in the attempted assassination near Tehran University. According to The New York Times, the bid on the Shah's life, allegedly orchestrated by the Tudeh Party (Communists), was a stark warning: Iran was a battleground for pro-Soviet and pro-Western forces, each vying for control of its black June 1950, General Ali Razmara became Prime Minister in the midst of rising demands for wresting control of Iran's oil fields from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), later British Petroleum, which had long siphoned wealth to British coffers. Before Razmara could act, he was silenced on March 7, 1951, when an assassin's bullet felled him in a Tehran the breach stepped Mohammed Mossadegh, a nationalist, known for his ascetic life and emotional outbursts. 'The Iranian people will no longer be slaves to foreign interests,' Mossadegh declared. On April 28, 1951, he nationalised AIOC, igniting the ire of the between Mossadegh and the Shah over oil policy reached a breaking point. On July 17, 1952, Mossadegh resigned, and Ahmed Ghavam was sworn in as PM. Tehran erupted. For three days, rioting tore apart the city. Within five days, the Shah, under relentless pressure, bowed to the will of the people and reinstated Mossadegh. The nationalist leader returned, stronger than ever. The stage was set for more bloodbath, and anarchy.1953: The Sinister PlotAcross the seas, in the smoke-filled halls of Washington and London, a different plan was taking shape. MI6 agent Christopher Montague Woodhouse, a key player in the Iran saga, laid out the stakes. 'Mossadegh's nationalisation of Anglo-Iranian Oil is a direct threat to Britain's economy,' he argued. 'If he aligns with Moscow, we lose the Persian Gulf.' (All the Shah's Men: Stephen Kinzer, 2003).By March 1953, the CIA drafted a scheme to topple Mossadegh and install a government more pliable to Western interests. On April 16, a detailed study titled 'Factors Involved in the Overthrow of Mossadegh' concluded that a coup was feasible. In Nicosia, Cyprus, on May 13, CIA and British intelligence officers huddled in secret, sketching the outlines of a plot that would reshape Iran. By June 10, in Beirut, the final coup plan was reviewed, and on June 19, it was submitted to the US State Department and the British Foreign Office. (Based on a timeline published by The New York Times)advertisementCIA Director Allen Dulles approved the plan, codenamed TPAJAX, with a budget of $1 million—peanuts for a nation's fate and its vast reserves. 'We had to act,' Dulles wrote in a CIA memo, declassified in 2013, 'to secure Iran's oil and block communist inroads.' On July 1, Britain's Prime Minister gave his approval, followed by President Eisenhower on July 11. The die was AjaxThe plan was intricate: bribe politicians, sway clerics, organise thugs for street protests, and unleash propaganda. The CIA spent $100,000, buying 'loyalty in parliament, press, and streets,' according to one account. Newspapers, paid by the CIA, vilified Mossadegh as a Soviet stooge. Radio broadcasts, scripted by operatives, warned of godless communism. The West's propaganda machinery churned out lies and rumours, creating a facade of anarchy and July 25, Princess Ashraf, the Shah's twin sister, arrived in Tehran from France, tasked by the CIA with convincing the monarch to sign a decree dismissing Mossadegh and naming General Fazlollah Zahedi, a lifelong royalist, as premier. It came with a chilling warning from the CIA, revealed later in declassified documents: 'Should the Shah fail to go along Zahedi would be informed that the United States would be ready to go ahead without the Shah's active cooperation.'advertisementMossadegh, sensing the gathering storm, moved decisively. On August 4, he held a referendum to dissolve Parliament, consolidating power amid suspicions of British and American plotting. On August 13, the Shah, under intense CIA pressure, signed the decrees dismissing Mossadegh and appointing Zahedi.A Failed CoupTehran, August 15, 1953. Inside a CIA safehouse, Kermit Roosevelt Jr, the grandson of US President Theodore Roosevelt, and mastermind of Op Ajax, chain-smoked nervously, waiting for the radio to crackle. Disguised as a businessman in sharp linen suits, he had entered Iran a few days ago to oversee the plot to topple Mossadegh. 'We're on the edge of history,' he'd later recall, 'and it could all collapse in a heartbeat.'Colonel Nematollah Nassiri, a Shah loyalist, gripped a royal firman, ordering Mossadegh's dismissal, in his trembling hands. As his jeep halted near the PM's humble residence, a surprise was waiting. Tipped off in advance, Mossadegh had alerted his troops, who immediately arrested Nassiri. The Shah, nervous and indecisive, fled to Baghdad, leaving Tehran to burn. Zahedi also disappeared into a safehouse in the mountains on the Flees Iran After Move to Dismiss Mossadegh Fails,' The New York Times screamed on August 17. 'The attempt to remove the Premier was made at midnight. The 72-year-old Premier was clearly master of the situationThe Government-authorised story is that alert Army officers foiled a palace guard coup after the plotters had been betrayed by Colonel Muntaz.'But Roosevelt wasn't ready to give up. Ignoring orders to abort the mission, he shot back: 'I'm still in the game.' Within a few days, Roosevelt would roll the dice again.(Next: The Game Begins)
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘We weren't expecting it yet': US attack met with panic in Iran
Asal* had been expecting the US to bomb Iran, just not so soon. The 22-year-old Tehran University student had believed Donald Trump when his administration said on Thursday that it would wait up to two weeks before deciding whether to attack Iran, apparently to give diplomacy a chance. And so at 4am when the newscaster announced the bombing on TV, Asal was in disbelief. She rushed to wake her father and the rest of the family, who huddled together in front of the set as the sounds of the news blended with those of bombings elsewhere in the city. 'We weren't expecting it yet. But we knew one way or another the US would take part in it,' Asal told the Guardian from Tehran. 'We are dead worried. You know, sleep doesn't come so easy these past few days.' Iranians woke to the news on Sunday morning that the unthinkable had finally happened: the US had attacked Iran. In the early hours of the morning, American warplanes dropped so-called bunker busters weighing 13,500kg (30,000lb) on the nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. The news was met with panic in Iran. It prompted a renewed wave of displacement in Tehran as people feared a more intensified assault on the city now that the US was involved. The question of whether the US would join Israel in its military campaign in Iran had hung over the heads of Iranians since the first Israeli bomb fell nearly 10 days earlier. Iranians watched with worry as Trump played coy with reporters, telling them 'nobody knows what I'm going to do' about Iran. On 13 June, Israel had launched hundreds of airstrikes on Iran, an operation it said was aimed at preventing the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Iran quickly responded with a barrage of missiles and drones, kicking off an escalating tit-for-tat war. Israel asked the US to join its military campaign as it was the only country with the firepower necessary to penetrate the Fordow nuclear facility, buried up to 100 metres underground. On Sunday, the US granted its request. The Iranian government, incensed by the attacks, said it would do whatever was necessary to retaliate. The president, Masoud Pezeshkian, appeared in front of hundreds of protesters in a square in central Tehran, who raised their fists and chanted 'Revenge, revenge!'. Asal has little appetite for revenge, she just wants the war to be over. To her and her friends, the US attack felt like a betrayal. 'No one is rooting for either side to win. We just want peace. Not even those Iranians who wanted a regime change are happy. They expected Trump to take a different route or at least give us two weeks,' Asal said. Trump's administration has said the strikes were in line with his 'peace through strength' doctrine and has urged Iran not to retaliate but instead to return to the negotiating table. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, flatly rejected the request for talks, telling reporters in Istanbul on Sunday that now was not the time for diplomacy. To Navid*, Trump's claims that the US bombing of Iran was a peace initiative rang hollow. The 28-year-old business owner in Tehran had been following international developments closely over the last 10 days, appointed the unofficial source of news for his family. 'Who, exactly, cares about civilians?' he said. 'The Israelis? Have they ever shown concern for civilian lives in Beirut or Gaza? The Americans? Did they show any in Libya, Afghanistan or Iraq?' Instead, he suggested the attack was less about strategy, and more about Trump's ego. 'He always wants to swoop in like Superman and do the things he claims no one else can.' US officials insisted that the strikes were a one-off and that they had achieved their goals in crippling Iran's nuclear capabilities. Nonetheless, some Iranians feared that the apparent success of the US operation would inspire either Israel or the US to extend its aims and seek to change the regime in Iran – a fight they did not want to be caught up in, whether they support the government or not. Ava*, a 25-year-old accountant in Tehran, said: 'We are angry, scared and frankly disgusted by not only the regime but also each one of you outside Iran who is sitting in the comfort of your homes and calling for US war on us. Who are you to decide for us?' *Names have been changed.