Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said on Monday that the recent deadly unrest in Iran was orchestrated beforehand by the United States and Israel.
“I state it clearly that these developments were planned by America, the Zionist regime and their acolytes,” Ayatollah Khamenei told the graduation ceremony for the cadets of the Armed Forces.
Protests erupted in several Iranian cities following the death of a young Kurdish woman who had been arrested by the morality police in Tehran over improper hijab last month.
The Leader said that the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini “rent his heart”, calling it a “bitter incident”. But he sharply condemned the ensuing riots as a foreign plot to destabilize Iran.
Ayatollah Khamenei described as “unnatural” when groups of people caused insecurity on the streets, burnt copies of the Holy Qur’an, harassed veiled women, and set mosques, religious congregational halls and private cars on fire.
“If it were not for the young girl, they would have invented another excuse to create insecurity and trigger riots in the country on the first day of [the Persian calendar month of Mehr (September 23) this year,” he maintained, according to Press TV.
The Leader hailed security forces for confronting the unrest.
“The duty of our security forces, including the police, is to ensure the safety of the Iranian nation...The ones who attack the police are leaving Iranian citizens defenseless against thugs, robbers and extortionists,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.
He blasted U.S. support for the protests and riots in Iran while it keeps mum when such incidents happen elsewhere in the world.  
“Many riots broke out across the world, including in Europe. There are riots every now and then in Paris, France, in particular. But the question is: Has it ever been the case for the U.S. to support such rioters? Is there a case in which they have sent messages and stated that they are with the rioters? Is there a case in which the mass media affiliated with American capitalism and their mercenaries in the region, including the Saudis, have supported rioters in other countries? And is there a case in which Americans have announced that they would provide certain hardware or software to rioters so that they could communicate easily with each other?” the Leader added.
Ayatollah Khamenei went on to say that, on the contrary, such support has occurred several times in Iran, and clearly points to the fact that foreign powers are behind recent events in the country.
He underlined that Americans’ expression of regret for Amini’s death is artificial. “Their hearts do not go out for this young girl. They are happy about finding an excuse to foment insecurity.”
He emphasized that enemies are gravely mistaken in their calculations, and their plots will not yield any fruit.
Ayatollah Khamenei stressed that the U.S. is not only against the Islamic Republic but against a strong and independent Iran, even if the Islamic Republic did not exist.
“They do not want a powerful Iran. They are looking for the Iran of the Pahlavi era, which obeyed their orders and was a milking cow to them.”


 

The governor of the Central Bank of Iran said Monday progress had been made over the release of about $7 billion in funds frozen abroad.
“Good progress has been made about the release of Iranian assets thanks to the coordination of the Foreign Ministry,” said Ali Salehabadi as he refused to give more details, IRNA reported.
The top banker, however, added that “good news” would be announced in the coming days.
Salehabadi said Iran had suggested several bank accounts for depositing the money.  
Billions of dollars in Iranian funds have been frozen in a number of countries – notably China, South Korea and Japan – since the U.S. reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic in 2018 after unilaterally withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Iran has blasted South Korea of holding $7 billion of its funds “hostage”, repeatedly calling on Seoul authorities to release it.
Nournews, a website close to the Supreme National Security Council, said Monday the frozen funds in South Korea would be deposited in an agent bank in one of the countries of the region.
The development came as Iran lifted a travel ban on Baquer Namazi and granted a one-week renewable furlough to his imprisoned son Siamak Namazi.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani on Monday said that agreement on the release of the frozen assets had nothing to do with allowing Namazi to leave the country, a day after the U.S. State Department dismissed any such link.
 

Yemen’s Armed Forces put oil companies operating in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on notice, warning that they could be targeted as long as Riyadh and its allies fail to commit to a proper cease-fire.
Tweeting on Sunday, the Armed Forces’ spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree said Yemeni troops were providing the oil companies with a window of opportunity to leave the Saudi and Emirati soils “fast,” Press TV reported.
The Saudi kingdom and its allies, most notably the United Arab Emirates, have been waging a war against Yemen since March 2015, trying, in vain, to restore Yemen’s power to its former Riyadh-friendly officials. The military campaign, which has been enjoying unstinting arms, logistical, and political support from the United States, has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and turned the entire Yemen into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
A temporary United Nations-mediated cease-fire took effect in April and has been renewed twice ever since. The truce, however, expired on Sunday amid the invading coalition’s constant violations of the agreement and its refusal to properly lift a siege it has been enforcing against Yemen simultaneously with the war.

“The warning,” Saree said, “stands as long as the countries that make up the invading American-Saudi coalition refuse to adhere to a cease-fire that allows the Yemeni people to exploit their oil wealth....”
Also on Sunday, Hans Grundberg, the United Nations’ special envoy for Yemen, confirmed failure of efforts aimed at extending the truce.
“The UN special envoy regrets that an agreement has not been reached today, as an extended and expanded truce would provide additional critical benefits to the population,” a statement said.
“I urge [the warring parties] to fulfill their obligation to the Yemeni people to pursue every avenue for peace,” the Swedish diplomat was quoted as saying.

First Vice President of Iran Mohammad Mokhber will participate in the second Caspian Economic Forum.
President Deputy Chief of Staff for Political Affairs Mohammad Jamshidi said on Monday that the first vice president is scheduled to attend the forum in Moscow on Thursday at the invitation of Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Vladimirovich Mishustin, IRNA reported.
Jamshidi said Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Iran will negotiate on issues such as oil and gas, energy, transportation, science, environment, and agriculture bilaterally and multilaterally.
He said Mokhber will preside over the Iranian delegation at the event, adding that some ministers and other officials of the Executive Branch will accompany the first vice president to explore all avenues to expand economic interactions with other member states.
A sum of 12 specialized roundtables will be held in the forum in the presence of experts and officials of member states, the official said.
Jamshidi noted that exchanging economic and trade data, absorbing investments in oil, gas, petrochemical industries, developing transit routes, improving shipping lines, establishing electricity and gas export lines, enhancing cultural and historical cooperation and creating joint banks are planned to be discussed by the Iranian side.
Using national currencies, facilitating the issuance of visas for tradesmen and truck drivers, exporting agricultural products, cleaning Caspian Sea environment as well as expanding tourism collaborations are other topics that the Iranian delegation will put forward in the forum.
The second Caspian Economic Forum is an economic platform and part of the cooperation between the five littoral countries of Eurasia’s biggest inland water reservoir.
The forum’s main objective is to assist littoral states to overcome geographical obstacles in the way of investments in the member states.

After an inconclusive first round of presidential elections, Brazilians woke up Monday to another month of uncertainty in a deeply polarized political environment and with renewed fears of unrest.
Seeking to make a spectacular comeback, ex-president and frontrunner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 76, failed to garner the 50 percent of votes plus one needed to avoid an October 30 runoff against far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, 67, AFP reported.
Lula got 48.4 percent of the vote in Sunday’s first round, followed by Bolsonaro with a much closer-than-expected 43.2 percent that seemed to signal a high level of enthusiasm for his conservative brand of “God, country and family” politics.
Lula had gone into Sunday’s first round with 50 percent of polled voter intention, and Bolsonaro with 36 percent.
The divisive president’s surprise performance likely spells a difficult time ahead, analysts said.
“I think it will be a very stressful campaign,” Leonardo Paz, Brazil consultant for the International Crisis Group, told AFP.
“Bolsonaro and Lula will come... for each other, and I think Bolsonaro will double down on... saying that the system was against him.”
Bolsonaro has repeatedly sought to cast doubt on Brazil’s electronic voting system and has questioned the validity of opinion polls that have consistently placed him a distant second.
Now, with real-life results seeming to bear out his claims, “more people... may believe in what Bolsonaro is saying,” said Paz.
The incumbent president has repeatedly hinted that he would not accept a Lula victory, raising fears of a Brazilian version of the riots last year at the US Capitol after former president Donald Trump refused to accept his election loss. Late Sunday, Bolsonaro proclaimed to journalists: “We defeated the opinion polls’ lie.”
Passions will be high on both sides for the next four weeks.