Iran's two top intelligence organs issued a joint statement claiming that foreign intelligence, especially the CIA, have a significant role in popular protests,
Iran International reports.
The Islamic Republic’s Intelligence Ministry and the Intelligence Organization of the Revolutionary Guard issued the statement on Friday, alleging that a mission called “Iran’s Destruction Project” that was earlier implemented in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya has ended in a “humiliating defeat” in Iran.
The joint statement has introduced Niloufar Hamidi and Elahe Mohammadi, twp women journalists arrested days after protests began in September, as “foreign agents.”
They say that Niloufar Hamidi, who published the photo of the deceased Mahsa Amini on a hospital bed, was “among the people trained in special courses abroad.” Amini’s death from severe head trauma in police custody triggered the current popular protests across the country. The unrest has been the longest sustained movement against the Islamic Republic.
“Using the cover of a journalist, she was one of the first people who arrived at the hospital and provoked the relatives of the deceased and published targeted news,” adds the statement.
The statement has offered no evidence about the two journalists having travelled abroad, received training or having any ties with foreign organizations.
The ominous statement came as several Iranian hardliners Friday signaled that the government will resort to more force to crush the popular protests.
The IRGC and the Intelligence Ministry have also accused Elahe Mohammadi, another journalist of working for foreign services saying that “she instantly attended the funeral ceremony of Mahsa Amini in her birthplace Saqqez to provoke her relatives by circulating the news and images of the funeral ceremony, and burial.”
The two intelligence bodies also claimed that Mohammadi is “trained by the American mafia regime in foreign countries,” adding that together with Niloufar Hamedi, Mohammadi has “played the role of primary sources of news for foreign media.”
In this statement the Iranian intelligence organizations accused Washington of allocating billions of dollars every year to find elements in Iran and connect them to “Western networks under the cover of human rights activities and promotion of democracy.”
The statement claims that after the downing of a Ukrainian plane over Tehran in January 2020 and the collapse of Abadan’s Metropol building “incidents”, US agents “urged their media to use every challenge and problem to provoke an inefficiency crisis [in Iran] and focus on the illegitimacy of the Iranian establishment.”
The IRGC and Intelligence Ministry say the United States tried “to attribute the effect of sanctions on people’s lives to the inefficiency of the Islamic Republic through making false demands in cultural and social fields.”
The statement further claims that in the past years, US and Israeli intelligence services have made extensive efforts to “transfer money and arm criminals with weapons to enable them to carry out sabotage operations against important centers and facilities, and use violence against the civilians, police forces and the Basij [militia].”
