Israel Won’t Be Allowed To Use Azerbaijan To Attack Iran - New Ambassador
Azerbaijan's ambassador-designate to Israel Mukhtar Mammadov says his country would not let Israel’s military to use Azerbaijan as a base for a possible attack against Iran.
Azerbaijan's ambassador-designate to Israel Mukhtar Mammadov says his country would not let Israel’s military to use Azerbaijan as a base for a possible attack against Iran.
Denying previous reports about preparing an airfield to assist Israel during an attack on the Islamic Republic, Mammadov said in his first interview after arriving in Tel Aviv last week that Baku would not assist Israel in case it decides to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
Mammadov also rejected reports that Azerbaijan would allow the Mossad to set up a branch in Azerbaijan to monitor what is happening in Iran.
“Azerbaijan, from the start, has declared that it will not interfere in the internal matters of other countries and will not allow its territory to be used against other countries,” the ambassador said. “This is because we expect other countries not to interfere in our internal matters.”
Iranian officials have been occasionally accusing Azerbaijan of allowing Israel to set up intelligence and military bases on its territory as an operational base against Iran.
The ambassador, who was set to present his credentials to President Isaac Herzog on Thursday, said “Every country is responsible for the protection and defense of their territorial integrity and the sovereignty of their citizens. Azerbaijan is no exception.”
His meeting was pushed off to a later undetermined date, as speculation has heightened over the possibility of an Israeli military attack against Iran, since the Islamic Republic appears close to producing weapons-grade uranium, according to The Jerusalem Post.
Azerbaijan and Israel have been increasingly public in their growing ties. While Israel has had an embassy in Azerbaijan since the 1990s, Azerbaijan formally appointed its first ambassador to the Jewish state in January.
Over five days of negotiations, it was agreed that the two countries will reinstate embassies and missions after seven years of deadlock.
Saudi Arabia severed relations with the Islamic Republic in January 2016 after pro-government Iranian mobs attacked and ransacked its embassy in Tehran and consulate in Mashhad following the execution of a Saudi Shiite cleric.
Relations remained tense as Iran expanded its influence in Arab countries with substantial Shiite populations and built up its proxy forces opposed to Saudi Arabia and supporting Iran’s regional policies.
The most crucial bilateral tension was with Yemen, where Iran supported Houthi rebels against the remnants of the country’s legal government, supported by Saudi led forces. However, a truce has been holding since last year.
The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, ‘the representative of the Supreme Leader’, Saudi Arabia’s national security advisor Musaad bin Mohammed Al Aiban and China’s Wang Yi, Director of the office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, all signed the deal.
China’s role in mediating the detente amid serious Western tensions with Iran signals the elevation of its status as a Middle East power player. Beijing has good relations both with Riyadh and Tehran and its success this week will irk other parties such as Qatar which has long tried to position itself as the region’s negotiator.
Reinstating relations with the most powerful Persian Gulf nation will be seen as a huge boost to Iran which is facing serious economic problems due to the lack of a nuclear agreement with the West and US sanctions weighing heavily over its finances. This has been exacerbated since the recent protests which began in September.
Meanwhile, the revived relationship does not alleviate Saudi’s concerns for the regime’s continued expansion of its nuclear capacity. Saudi Arabia and the United States have allegedly been in talks to build Saudi’s own civilian nuclear program as fears around Iranian actions grow and even the Persian Gulf's most powerful nation seeks greater security reassurances from its allies.
In spite of tense relations between the Biden administration and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the de facto ruler, Saudi Arabia also wants fewer restrictions on US arms sales, according to the New York Times.
People close to the talks say the US is leveraging the request to force Saudi’s hand to normalize relations with Israel, furthering the Trump-negotiated Abraham Accords which saw the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco sign up to diplomatic ties with the Jewish state. Sudan has since joined.
Saudi has long said that formal diplomatic relations with Israel depend on a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, though the two have been conducting business and security cooperation behind closed doors for some time. Saudi also opened its air space to Israel, in the wake of the Accords, signed in 2020.
However, as revelations of Iran’s growing capabilities continue and the JCPOA talks look no more likely to be revived after their collapse last year, the Kingdom is seeking other options. It is no simple process.
The US has no desire to give Saudi nuclear capabilities - Biden having already stated a desire to make the Kingdom a “pariah state” following the execution of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018. In spite of a visit last year, relations between the two countries remain tense.
Such a deal would no doubt be greatly challenged in Congress where several Democrats have voiced a desire to downgrade not increase relations with Saudi Arabia, where dozens of executions continue each year, without trial, and human rights are still widely violated, according to rights groups.
Without the assurances of a body such as NATO, agreements to arm Saudi could be a huge risk and possibly the end of the Biden administration.
Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a vehement campaigner to limit US arms sales to Saudi, told the New York Times: “If we’re going to enter into a relationship with the Saudis where we’re doing more significant arms sales, it should be in exchange for better behavior toward the United States, not just better behavior toward Israel.”
At a meeting of the State Social Council Thursday, President Ebrahim Raisi described women’s abidance by veiling laws as a “sharia requirement” and said all authorities are of the same mind on this matter. “It is necessary for everyone to feel responsible, and although some people may have different opinions on this matter, in social life, adherence to legal standards should be considered as a principle".
He also claimed that the social experience of the Islamic Revolution has shown that the Iranian women themselves are adamant on keeping the veiling as a priority to ensure their safety and security in the society while also calling on all responsible entities to support those who practice ‘amr-e be marouf’, that is, calling others to enjoin what is good and forbid them from doing what is wrong.
This video shows a veiled woman taking photos of two young girls on the street and telling them the photos will be used to identify them with face recognition software.
Raisi’s very influential father-in-law, Ahmad Alamolhoda, who represents Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Khorasan-e Razavi Province, urged “pious” women and men not to allow the women in the Iranian society unveil. Making similar remarks about individual’s responsibility to enforce the hijab last week he had implied that the regime and its security apparatus are no longer able to take the burden of stopping those who defy the compulsory hijab.
Several videos have emerged on social media in the past few days of disputes in public over veiling between its proponents and the women who are now defiantly appearing ‘hijabless’ in public.
“You live in an Islamic society and you must abide by its law,” a veiled woman holding a baby in her lap in a city bus is seen telling another woman in a video apparently taken in Isfahan, but the ‘hijabless’ young woman who is filming the incident with her mobile phone, objects and tells her how she dresses is none of other people’s business. The veiled woman threatens her with filming her, sending it to authorities and causing her trouble in getting into university for her defiance of the hijab.
A veiled woman being thrown out of an underground car by a crowd of young girls after trying to exhort them about observance of hijab.
To enforce the veiling rules the regime has always used the so-called ‘morality police’ as well as organized groups of male and female Basij militia. It was in custody of the morality police that the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini suffered injuries that led to her death in September, fueling the longest-ever anti-regime protests in the country.
The morality police have been keeping a very low profile in the past few months but on Wednesday hardliner female lawmaker Zohre Elahian said in a tweet that Basijis held their first “verbal warning (amr-e be marouf) maneuver” in some areas of the capital.
“The devout Basijis’ act, after the recent domestic and foreign riots and seditions in the country, is unprecedented,” she tweeted with a hashtag calling on authorities for support.
A video posted Wednesday on Twitter showed a long line of black-veiled women parading on a street in Isfahan in central Iran. The post called the parade “the great and mighty maneuver of chaste Isfahani ladies.”
These “maneuvers” seem to be part of a larger initiative planned to bring anti-compulsory hijab movement under control before more women flaunt the hijab rules in the intense heat of the summer.
