Int’l Lawyers Launch Campaign Against IRGC Members In Canada
A group of Canadian, US and Iranian lawyers have launched a campaign to identify and take action against IRGC members and their affiliates living in Canada.
A group of Canadian, US and Iranian lawyers have launched a campaign to identify and take action against IRGC members and their affiliates living in Canada.
They have created a website called stopirgc.com to receive citizen reports and submit cases to government agencies and police to take action.
The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps or IRGC is the main branch of the Iranian military that defends the regime. It also controls most of the country’s military assets, including nuclear and missile programs.
Ramin Joubin, a Burnaby-based lawyer says over 100 cases in Canada are being investigated by the group.
“There are a lot of reports on family members of heads of state, or people who are high up in the current regime in Iran,” Joubin told Global News.
“They might be visiting, they might have a business, property, permanent residence or citizenship,” he added.
According to Joubin, they are also investigating cases of suspected money laundering, either from companies or individuals.
“A lot of the reports we’ve received are about business activities in Canada, but somehow bypassing sanctions and engaging in various types of money laundering.” said Joubin. “That is the biggest activity we are seeing by IRGC members and affiliates.”
In October, Ottawa barred some 10,000 IRGC members from entering Canada for life, as protests swept Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Joubin, however, said the lifelong ban does not address IRGC officials, their affiliates and close family members, who already live inside the country.
The documents are several reports prepared by the IRGC’s media arm, Fars news agency, which were marked “top secret” indicate that the author believed at least parts of Iran's several intelligence organizations had knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack but did not take any action to stop it.
The documents were acquired by the hactivist group Black Reward recently which provided them to the media. These include both hearsay and excerpts from various media outlets on important political issues.
One of the reports says information provided by a Syrian group, Iran’s intelligence ministry had arrested three Taliban members who were planning terrorist operations on Shiite shrines.
The date of the arrest is not mentioned in the report which was written in the aftermath of the attack on Shahcheragh shrine in Shiraz on October 26.
Hours after the attack, Reuters quoted a statement from an ISIS telegram channel saying that the group claimed responsibility. ISIS also released a statement through its affiliated Amaq news agency and said one of its members had targeted groups of Shiite “infidels inside the shrine.”
Many Iranians, however, have been very skeptical of the official account. They suspect the government of complicity with ISIS in the attack, to create its own narrative and martyrs to divert attention from fierce antigovernment protests.
The suspicion was partly due to the coincidence of the shooting with the 40th-day memorial for Mahsa Amini for which the opposition planned large widespread protests. Many also said this could be an excuse for blaming protesters for causing insecurity and justifying harsher suppression of their movement.
The author said some members of a terrorist group which was behind the Shiraz shooting had been arrested “several weeks before” with 18 kilos of explosives and recounted a rumor “in some political circles” about Salami’s decision to sack the IRGC commander of Shiraz.
He added, in different font, that the decision is believed to have been taken “because IRGC had prior knowledge of the attack on Shahcheragh”. The metadata of the document created November 11 indicates that this sentence was added by the author himself and was not a later addition by someone else.
The author of one of these secret documents wrote that the shooter, a citizen of Tajikistan, was taken down by an IRGC security agent who “happened to be present there for prayers.” The agent took his weapon from the lockers at the security gate, after hearing the shots, and rushed to encounter the shooter, he wrote, adding that the shooter had been to Afghanistan twice and taken the oath of loyalty to ISIS. He also wrote that even a police team that arrived at the shrine after the shooting had only been in the area for another operation.
According to the same document, the shooter was helped by an Afghan citizen residing in Tehran who stayed out of the shrine during the shooting and claims he was arrested in Tehran adding that the commander of the operation, a citizen of the Republic of Azerbaijan who had entered Iran legally on a visa, was also arrested on his way to Tehran.
According to another document also prepared for Salami’s attention, it has been claimed that the intelligence ministry had identified the Afghan member of the group who was arrested in Tehran “on the day of the incident” but did not announce the news “to gather more intelligence on the group.”
Moeineddin Saeedi, a member of the Iranian parliament representing Chabahar, in the underprivileged province of Sistan and Baluchestan, said Thursday that “it is preposterous to send some people to Qatar with the nation's money."
He added that some officials justify the expenditure as means to promote “the Islamic Revolution,” noting that even if the purpose of such a measure was just, the people who should have been chosen should wisely.
According to different reports, between 100 to 350 people were given free tickets and accommodation to accompany the country’s soccer squad in the World Cup in Qatar as journalists and reporters. But they were not sent to report about the team. Their sole mission was to populate the stadiums and events on the sidelines of the World Cup as representatives of the Islamic Republic and make sure that no voices of dissent or news about the current protests would be reflected by foreign media. Some estimates put the amount spent on these so-called “cultural agents” as over 630 billion Iranian rials, or about $2 million.
The MP also called on the parliament’s cultural committee and other relevant committees to investigate how such people were selected and what were the justification for such a measure considering the current situation in the country.
“At least those who know the English alphabet should have gone,” he quipped, in reference to a video of two Iranian women that went viral because of their embarrassingly low level of English proficiency when speaking with foreign media. One of the women, who later turned out to be the deputy director general for foreign media of the Islamic Republic Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, was asked by a foreign correspondent about developments inside Iran, in which she could only utter “because” and “in Iran” in English and continued to answer the reporter in ineloquent Persian. The other one, one of the managers of Fars News Agency – a media network affiliated with Revolutionary Guard – intervened to help her friend. She said, “We slow the problem,” while she meant to say "We solve the problems,” referring to the ongoing antigovernment protests.
People on social media immediately started to make fun of them naming them “Mrs. Because and Mrs. Slow,” and created numerous dubsmash videos or music remixes of the footage. Despite their sheer lies about equality between men and women in Iran, the thing that made the video to go viral was their level of English comprehension and conversation, irking some regime insiders that such people are chosen to represent them in an international arena such as the World Cup.
Islamic Republic’s Football Federation has said that in addition to the country’s officials and state media reporters, more than 22,000 free tickets -- about 7,000 per match -- have been provided for the country’s cherrypicked supporters to go to Qatar from Iran. Moreover, there are videos and photos of Bangladeshi and Pakistani citizens – reportedly workers who helped built Qatar’s stadiums under inhumane working conditions – paid to pose as Iranian football fans, carrying the Islamic Republic’s flags.
