Day: November 5, 2023

The only party enjoying the tragedy unfolding in Gaza is the mullahs’ regime in Iran, whose leaders cannot even hide their joy behind crocodile tears for the victims of this conflict. They believe that with the killings and destruction in Gaza, they have obtained a shield for themselves against the uprising of the Iranian people and can temporarily postpone their own downfall.

The speakers of Friday sermons, who reflect the views of Iranian regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei, openly talk about the “blessings” of this war for the regime, and some even say, “If today we don’t confront the Zionists at their borders, tomorrow they will come into our homes.”

Some of Khamenei’s associates depict the bombing of the people of Gaza in various ways as a normal and even necessary act.

On October 28, the official IRNA news agency quoted Kamal Kharrazi, former Foreign Minister and head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations of the regime, as saying, “Of course, Palestinians are accustomed to a life accompanied by the massacre and crimes of the regime… Therefore, they are prepared to pay such costs in exchange for a strategic victory.”

On October 18, state-run Jamaran website quoted Abbas Araghchi, the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Khamenei, as saying, “The strategy of the Resistance Axis is to ‘resist’ and ‘be prepared to pay the costs of resistance.’ This is exactly what Hamas and Jihad in Gaza expect.”

It is evident that the regime is sacrificing the people of Gaza and Palestine for its heinous goals. This reality is even acknowledged by some regime newspapers. On October 28th, the Ham-Mihan newspaper wrote, “Their issue is neither Palestine nor Israel. Their issue is the expansion of domestic power.”

“Expansion of domestic power” is another expression for the “preservation of power and the regime,” which Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the mullahs’ regime, defined as the “most important duty.”

Khomeini employed expressions regarding using people as shields that demonstrate his cruelty and inhumanity. In July 1981, during a public speech, he said, “If the infidels put a group of Muslims forward as shields, imagine that the corrupt Iraq places a group of Muslims as shields and stands behind them to attack and capture Iran. It is obligatory for us to kill both Muslims and the infidels. His Muslims become martyrs and go to paradise, and his infidels will go to Hell.”

Khomeini did not value human lives. However, beyond that, the actions of Khomeini and his associates during the Iran-Iraq War and their insistence on continuing it through criminal means are the clearest evidence of this inhuman logic.

During the Iran-Iraq War, when the people of Khuzestan were fleeing the war zone and seeking refuge in other cities and provinces, including Fars and Shiraz, the Friday Prayer leaders called them traitors and urged other people to spit on them.

With the logic of using human shields, the regime would send students to the war fronts, wrap them in blankets, and use them as mine sweepers. Mohsen Rezaei, then a senior military officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), also referred to these children as “disposable soldiers.”

Khamenei, following in the footsteps of Khomeini, continued the practice of using innocent human lives as shields. He did not hesitate to engage in the massacre of the Iraqi people with car bombings, nor did he hesitate to participate in the killing and displacement of people in Syria and Yemen. He did not show any hesitation in shooting down the Ukrainian passenger plane with 176 passengers on board, nor did he hesitate in the massacre of the Iranian people during the COVID-19 pandemic and the prohibition of the import of COVID-19 vaccines.

Indeed, the trajectory of events shows that the smoke of criminal warmongering will eventually dissipate, and it will not escape its overthrow by the people of Iran and their resistance movement.

This article was published by PMOI/MEK

(EurActiv) — US and European officials have spoken to the Ukrainian government about what possible peace negotiations with Russia might entail to end the war, NBC quoted an unidentified senior US official and one former US official as saying.

The war in Ukraine, now in its 21st month, has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands and destroyed swathes of the country. It has also triggered the deepest crisis in Moscow’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

NBC said the conversations had included very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal with Russia.

Some of the talks, which the NBC sources described as delicate, reportedly took place last month during a meeting of representatives from more than 50 nations supporting Ukraine, including NATO members, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, or ‘Ramstein meetings’, the latest of which took place in Brussels.

The conversations reported by the US television network could not be independently verified..

Asked on Saturday (4 November) about the NBC report, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reaffirmed his stance that this was not the time to negotiate with Russia, and he also denied that any Western leaders were pressuring him to do so.

“Everyone knows my attitude, which coincides with the attitude of Ukrainian society … Today no one is putting pressure (on me to negotiate), not one of the leaders of the EU or the United States,” he told a joint news conference with the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in Kyiv.

“For us now to sit down with Russia and talk and give it something – this will not happen.”

His comments came days after Ukraine’s Commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhnyi, said in an article the conflict was moving towards a new stage of static and attritional fighting, a phase that could allow Moscow to rebuild its military power.

“Today time has passed and people are tired. But this is not a stalemate,” Zelenskyy said

Ukraine has repeatedly said it aims to retake all the territory taken by Russia, including Crimea which was annexed in 2014, and that it will not rest until every Russian soldier has been driven from its lands.

NBC quoted the US officials as saying that the conversations with Ukraine came amid concerns in the United States and Europe that the war has reached a stalemate and worries about the West’s ability to continue providing aid to Kyiv.

Russia currently controls about 17.5% of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory.

Moscow says it had to launch what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine in response to what it sees as a hostile and aggressive West it says is using Kyiv to undermine Russia. Kyiv and its Western allies say this is nonsense and that Moscow’s actions are an imperial-style land grab.

The Kremlin says it will achieve all of its aims in Ukraine.

Ukrainian forces have made slow progress through vast Russian minefields in a counteroffensive that began in the east and south in early June, but Russia has hit back hard in the east. Russian troops were mounting numerous attacks near Avdiivka, Lyman and Mariinka in the eastern Donetsk region, the Ukrainian military said in its daily update.

Ukrainian forces were continuing their advance in the southeast towards the sea of Azov, the report added.

By Ani Avetisyan 

(Eurasianet) — Over the past week Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and other Armenian officials have been hinting that a peace deal with Azerbaijan could be imminent. 

They say the sides have reached agreement on three core principles of a deal while “details” remain to be settled.

Pashinyan told parliament on October 30 that a peace deal is “realistic” if the sides remain faithful to the principles of mutual recognition of territorial integrity, delimitation/demarcation of the shared border based on the 1991 Almaty declaration and the opening of transport links in a way that respects the two countries’ sovereignty and customs laws. 

Later, ruling party MP Gevorg Papoyan echoed the prime minister, saying that only the “details” of the agreement are left to be hammered out.

Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister, Elnur Mammadov, confirmed that “most points” of the peace agreement had been agreed with Yerevan. Mammadov said that reaching a deal had become “easier” thanks to Azerbaijan’s takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh after its September 19-20 lightning offensive. 

Following that offensive, several planned meetings between Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders failed to take place in a reflection of the sides’ differing preferences on who should mediate. 

Baku refused to take part in EU-led peace talks in Granada, Spain and in Brussels, while Armenia’s prime minister was a no-show at a CIS summit in Bishkek where he’d been expected to meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, Armenia was represented at a meeting in Tehran on October 23 that involved Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Azerbaijan.

Armenia’s lack of interest in Moscow-brokered peace talks comes as the country looks to the West for new strategic and security allies, signing an arms deal with France and intensifying diplomatic relations with a number of Western states. 

Prior to Azerbaijan’s September offensive, which triggered the exodus of the region’s entire Armenian population, the Karabakh Armenians’ fate had been the thorniest issue in the talks. Baku had rejected the prospect of granting the region autonomous status, as well as Yerevan’s calls for an international mechanism that would ensure the Karabakh Armenians’ rights and securities under Azerbaijani rule. 

During Azerbaijan’s attack on Karabakh on September 19, Pashinyan announced that Armenia’s priority was to ensure that Karabakh Armenians could remain in the region and live a “dignified” life there. But now that it has been emptied of Armenians, Yerevan seems to have abandoned this demand and instead started the process of granting them refugee statusor Armenian citizenship.

“Our policy is that if those displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh do not, objectively speaking, have the opportunity to return to Nagorno-Karabakh – our wish is that they all stay in Armenia, and live and work here,” Pashinyan told a cabinet meeting on November 2. 

Another critical issue is “the opening of transport links,” a provision of the 2020 ceasefire agreement that cemented Azerbaijan’s gains in the Second Karabakh War. 

Baku long discussed this provision in the context of its “Zangezur corridor” project, which for a time it insisted was to be a seamless corridor connecting mainland Azerbaijan with its exclave Nakhchivan through Armenian territory and beyond Armenian sovereignty. 

Azerbaijan stepped back from the maximalist version of this project in February, and, after the September offensive, began giving assurances that it would no longer insist on a corridor and would instead make do with an alternative route through Iran. 

But Armenians are wary of these assurances, particularly given Russia’s apparent interest in the Zangezur corridor project.

Fears persist in Armenia that Azerbaijan will use force to make the corridor a reality, and continued rhetoric from Baku about “Western Azerbaijan” is doing nothing to allay these fears. This is the notion that parts of Armenian territory rightfully belong to Azerbaijan, or that, at the very least, Azerbaijanis have the right to settle in formerly Azerbaijani-populated parts of Armenia. 

These concerns are shared by the EU, which has called on Azerbaijan to commit to respecting Armenian territory and by the U.S., where, according to Politico, Secretary of State Antony Blinken briefed members of Congress in early October on the risk of an Azerbaiajni invasion of Armenia. (The State Department rejected this report.) 

The Lemkin Genocide Prevention Institute issued a “red flag alert” on November 1 over a possible “invasion of Armenia by Azerbaijan in the coming days and weeks.” 

On November 2, the US State Department told the Voice of America’s Armenian service: “Any violation of Armenia’s territorial integrity will have serious consequences.”