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Two more top Iranian officials have been killed this week in separate mysterious incidents, just days after a top Iranian commander was gunned down outside his home and an Iranian drone manufacturing site came under attack by suicide drones. Colonel Ali Esmailzadeh of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force reportedly died during an incident at his residence in the city of Karaj. Iranian media said that he died after falling from his roof. Opponents of the Islamic Republic, however, claimed that Esmailzadeh was killed by the state because they suspected him of being a spy involved in the death of...

Las Vegas police arrested a woman who allegedly stabbed her date she met online in retaliation for the US drone strike that killed an Iranian military leader in 2020. Henderson Police Department charged 21-year-old Nika Nikoubin with attempted murder last Saturday after she allegedly lured a man she met on the dating site Plenty of Fish in bed only to attack him with a knife, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Police said that on March 5, Nikoubin and her date, who has not been identified, rented out a room together at the Sunset Station Hotel where the 21-year-old turned off...

On January 22, 2022, videos were uploaded to several YouTube channels of demonstrations in Gaza in support of the Houthis in Yemen. The demonstrators waved Palestinian and Yemeni flags and posters with the images of IRGC Qods Force Commander General Qasem Soleimani, of Hizbullah Chief of Staff Imad Mughniyah, and Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. The demonstrators chanted: "Death to the Saud clan!... America is the Great Satan!" Leader: "Salutations from Gaza!" Crowd: "Salutations from Gaza!"

Editor’s Note: Lawfare’s Board of Directors has published a post regarding this article and our editorial standards here. In the United States, the latest Iranian protests have sparked a kind of debate in which we argue fervently about whether the U.S. should tweet its support or just shut up. At the risk of making the Trump administration look moderate, I think we can choose between more than waving our hands and sitting on them. Remember, when the Iranian regime decided it didn’t like U.S. activities in Iraq, it found considerably more direct ways to express its disapproval. It just started...

On January 5, a giant statue of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian regime's dead terrorist mastermind, was displayed in the city of Shahr-e Kord. The regime unveiled the statue with much noise and fanfare just ahead of the second anniversary of Soleimani's elimination in a US drone strike in 2020. Mere hours later, the statue was engulfed in flames by dissidents, dealing a major blow against state propaganda to bill the former commander of the terrorist Qods Force as a "hero." Just a couple of days prior, the regime’s President Ebrahim Raisi delivered a televised speech in which he promised revenge...

Last Thursday was the second anniversary of the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani; while the date passed virtually unnoticed in the United States, it was a major event in the Islamic Republic of Iran, featuring numerous threats of revenge from enraged Iranian leaders. One of these stood out from the others: Soleimani’s successor as Quds Force commander declared that the revenge would come from inside the United States. Iran’s state-controlled Tasnim News Agency reported that Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani was “delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad” for the anniversary...

The Biden administration is taking seriously a string of recent threats and sanctions from Iran against Trump administration officials around the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 3, 2020 strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Iran’s actions may indicate Iran is plotting to assassinate the officials. On Saturday, Iran announced sanctions against 51 Americans, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley as well as several individuals who worked with the Trump administration, like former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and private military contractor Erik Prince. While sanctions typically yield economic punishment, current and former U.S. officials...

During a speech on the occasion of Friday prayers in the Iranian city of Mashhad which commemorated this week’s second anniversary of the US killing of IRGC General Qassem Soleimani, the top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force (who was Soleimani’s replacement) vowed to take vengeance “from within the US”. Iranian state and other foreign regional media featured Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani’s ultra-provocative words, translating them as follows: “We will prepare ground for the hard revenge against the US from within their homes, as we do not need to be present as supervisors everywhere.” IRGC Quds...

Rabbi Hamnami Lalehzar tells PressTV that eliminated general "played key role ..."

Brig. Gen. Terryl Schwalier was stunned when he read the account of the June 25, 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that appeared in my recent book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. I was writing many years after the fact, drawing on sources from inside Iranian intelligence but also on published U.S. government reports. It was those U.S. reports that prompted General Schwalier to contact me a few months ago. “You paint a picture of significant government awareness that “Iran was up to something” in the months prior to the Khobar Towers attack,” he wrote...

The mastermind of the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist attack that killed 19 Americans has been captured, U.S. and Saudi officials said on Aug. 26. The arrest of Ahmed al-Mughassil, who was described by the FBI in 2001 as the leader of the armed wing of the Saudi Hizbullah group, was one of the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists. The arrest concluded a nearly two-decade manhunt.

Khobar Towers June 23, 2006 The Wall Street Journal Louis J. Freeh Ten years ago this Sunday, acting under direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the Saudi Hezbollah detonated a 25,000-pound TNT bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast wave destroyed Building 131 and grievously wounded hundreds of additional Air Force personnel. It also killed an unknown number of Saudi civilians in a nearby park. The 19 Americans murdered were members of the 4404th Wing, who were risking their lives to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq....

According to an inside source, the military collaborations between Iran's Revolutionary Guards and the Gaddafi government date back to 2006.In an interview today on the Al Arabyia news network, an informed source within the Revolutionary Guards Corps revealed that Iran has several military bases in Libya. The source, who requested anonymity due to his sensitive position within the Guards, elaborated further that the Iranian military bases are located mostly along Libya’s borders with the African countries of Chad and Niger. From there, he said, the Guards actively smuggle arms and supply logistical assistance to rebellious groups in the African countries.According...

Israel shared three cell phone numbers used by Qasem Soleimani with U.S. intelligence in the hours before American drones unleashed Hellfire missiles on the Iranian general last year, Yahoo News reported Saturday. The revelation sheds new light on the role that Israel played in the killing of Soleimani, who the State Department says was responsible for hundreds of U.S. troop deaths as the head of the Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force. The drone strike occurred shortly after midnight on Jan. 2, 2020, as Soleimani and his entourage were leaving Baghdad's international airport. As three Delta Force sniper teams monitored Soleimani...

The three sniper teams positioned themselves 600 to 900 yards away from the “kill zone,” the access road from the airfield, setting up to triangulate their target as he left the airport. One of the snipers had a spotting scope with a camera attached that livestreamed back to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where the Delta Ground Force commander was based with support staff. Long-range marksmanship involves contesting with a variety of environmental factors, including wind, but the Delta teams didn't rely on guesswork. A member of the Counter Terrorism Group (CTG), an elite Kurdish unit in northern Iraq with...

A new propaganda music video paying tribute to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Gen. Qassem Soleimani, depicts Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces destroying the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C. On Sunday, Kasra Aarabi, an Iran analyst for the Tony Blair Institue tweeted a clip of the video, depicting an explosion at the Capitol, which was aired on Iranian state tv ahead of a speech by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “Today pre-Khamenei talk, Iran state TV aired this clip depicting an IRGC attack on #Congress Yes, it’s propaganda. But it shows the anti-US ideology of #IRGC, which...

The raids took place after government spokesman Ali Rabiei had stated that Iran’s intelligence ministry was investigating the source of a recently-leaked interview with Zarif. The IRGC Intelligence Unit is a rival organisation to the Ministry of Intelligence, which is the country’s equivalent of the CIA and the FBI. In the recorded interview, which was leaked to Iran International last weekend, Zarif had told journalist and economist Saeed Leylaz that he believed Iranian diplomacy had been "sacrificed" to the regime's military interests. He described alleged efforts by former IRGC Quds Force commander Ghasem Soleimani and Russia to sabotage the Joint...

A linguist for the Department of Defense pleaded guilty on Friday to passing classified information about U.S. human intelligence sources to an individual with ties to Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist organization, the Department of Justice said. Mariam Taha Thompson began sending the information after the U.S. killed Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander, in an airstrike in early 2020, according to court documents. Thompson, who held a top secret security clearance, had been stationed at a Special Operations Task Force facility in Iraq from mid-December 2019 until her arrest a few months later. Years before she began passing classified...

Colin Kahl opposed sanctions on IRGC, condemned killing of Iranian terror chief Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee are meeting privately on Tuesday morning to discuss their growing policy concerns about Colin Kahl, President Joe Biden's nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, according to sources close to the committee. Kahl, a former Obama State Department official, was a key architect of the Iran deal and has been at the forefront of a number of controversial moves, including, reportedly, the decision to remove a statement affirming Jerusalem as Israel's capital from the 2012 Democratic National Convention...

President Joe Biden's administration is moving to revoke the designation of Yemen's Houthis as a terrorist group, citing the need to mitigate one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters.President Donald Trump's administration had branded the Iranian-backed Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization, a move that limited the provision of aid to the beleaguered Yemeni people, who have suffered under a yearslong civil war and famine.A senior State Department official confirmed the move Friday after members of Congress were notified of the administration’s plans. The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the removal...