Senior commander killed in Iran clashes
Last Sunday, agents of the State Security Forces opened fire on Shovan Qaderi and two of his friends in the town of Mahabad. The security forces then tied Qaderi’s body to a Toyota jeep and dragged him in the streets, according to eye-witnesses.
Since then, several hundred people in Mahabad have been arrested during numerous hit-and-run clashes and house-to-house raids.
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Jul. 17 – A senior paramilitary police commander was killed last night in the course of clashes between anti-government demonstrators and security forces in Iran’s Kurdish town of Mahabad, the state-run television reported on Sunday.
“In the wake of the unrest of the past few days, last night one of the commanders of the State Security Forces was stabbed to death in the town by an assailant”, Iran’s Channel 2 TV station reported this evening.
The report added that the provincial security council met today to study ways of bringing the situation under control.
“Government offices, homes and cars have been damaged in the course of the incidents that have occurred in Mahabad in the past few days”, the television said.
Labour discontent, protests spread across Iran
London, Jul. 18 – More than 50,000 workers took to the streets of cities across on Saturday to protest against the government’s labour policies.
The largest protest was in the western city of Ilam, where 17,000 workers took part in a rally.
At least 20,000 workers also rallied in two separate towns of Pakdasht and Varamin near Tehran.
Another 10,000 workers from the province of Golestan, northern Iran, 4,000 factory workers from the eastern province of Khorrasan Jonoubi, and at least 1,000 workers from Iran’s Pars Electric based in Tehran all went on strike.
Transportation facilities in the Iranian capital and the holy city of Qom, central Iran, also suffered a setback when employees joined fellow protesting workers.
Several thousand industrial workers from Bushehr, southwest Iran, Yazd, central Iran, and Shushahr, southern Iran also took part in the mass strikes.
Many protesters blamed the government for not ensuring that workers’ salaries were paid and for systematic deductions in insurance scheme benefits
Qods Force commander slain in Iran capital
Tehran, Iran, Jul. 18 – A colonel in the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was killed in a fashionable neighbourhood of Tehran on Thursday, according to the state-sponsored website Baztab.
Colonel Morteza Moinfar was a commander in the Qods Force, the extraterritorial arm of the Revolutionary Guards whose stated mission is to “export the Islamic revolution” to other Muslim countries.
The Qods Force has been responsible for some of the biggest terrorist attacks sponsored by Iran in the Middle East, Europe, and South America, including the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans.
The force has been the lead agency of the Iranian regime’s clandestine activities in Iraq and has a large network of operators and informants across the country.
Moinfar had been repeatedly stabbed, the report said. Authorities have launched a massive manhunt to find his killers.