Breaking news: Bomb kills 11 during military parade

Official pointing to explosion

At least eleven people were killed in a bomb blast during a military parade in Mahabad, West Azerbaijan province, on Wednesday morning, 22 September 2010, according to various state and opposition news outlets. The Arabic-language Al Alam news channel, a subsidiary of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, was one of the first sources to break the news and reported that the blast had occurred at 10:30 AM, local time.

The photo above shows spectators on the official parade stand looking and pointing to the right, where the explosion took place a second before.

Vahid Jalalzadeh

Immediately after the blast, Vahid Jalalzadeh, the provincial governor, told Mehr News by telephone that since the event had occurred only an hour earlier he had no exact figures on casualties or the manner in which the attack had occurred. He added, however, 'This incident was carried out by counter-revolutionaries in the women's section during the armed forces parade.' On this date, the regime's armed forces participate in annual ceremonies marking the start of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980.

Footage broadcast by IRIB's Channel 1 showed troops marching at the moment of the explosion -- though not the blast itself -- and the immediate aftermath.

In later interviews, Jalalzadeh said that the explosion had taken place 50 meters from the official stand at the parade. He set the provisional toll at 10 dead and 20 injured, four of them in critical condition.The numbers have since been revised by Issa Ghanbari, the province's deputy governor in charge of security and military affairs, to 11 dead and 32 injured. Ghanbari told the Islamic Students' News Agency that the bomb was placed in a handbag, but other news sources have reported that the device was hanging from a tree next to the sidewalk.

Women constituted most of the casualties, according to Jalalzadeh, who said that the injured were being transferred to hospitals. 'None of the troops attending the ceremony were harmed,' he said.

According to General Nosrati, West Azerbaijan's military commander, the explosion took place among female spectators who had come to watch the parade. Jalalzadeh later added that two of the dead were the wives of senior military commanders.

Jalalzadeh told Fars News, close to the Revolutionary Guards, that the operation was a form of revenge exacted on the people. 'Last week, the ever-present people of Mahabad, through their spontaneous demonstration, condemned the insult to the sacred Koran,' he said in reference to a government-sponsored rally protesting a small US church's plans to burn the Koran. 'This bomb explosion shows that the enemy is enraged.' In the Channel 1 footage posted above, Jalalzadeh blamed the US and other foreign governments of being behind the terrorist attack, at least by virtue of their aid to Kurdish armed groups and the Mujahedin Khalgh Organization.

In line with Governor Jalalzadeh, other officials and pro-regime news sites have been quick to point the finger of blame on a broad spectrum of the usual, and sometimes contradictory, suspects.

Raja News, close to the Ahmadinejad government, quoted Deputy Governor Fakhrali Nikbakht as saying that the operation was a suicide attack. Raja based itself on a Fars News interview which did not make any such claim.

Fars News has been minimizing the news and does not feature it on its front page, although it has been attributing the attack to 'enemies of the Iranian people,' counter-revolutionaries, terrorists, and 'groupuscules.' Armed Kurdish groups, particularly Pejak, are active in the area, though, as far as this blog has been able to ascertain, they have never organized a bomb attack on civilians. Mahabad has a large Kurdish and Sunni population.

Security officer and 4-year-old killed in gun battle, says Kurdistan province news source

A battle between five unidentified gunmen and the regime's security forces in the streets of Saghez, Kurdistan province on September 20, 2010, left a 4-year-old boy and a member of the security detail dead, according to Rawa News.

Rawa, a site dedicated to news from Kurdistan province, reported that the skirmish occurred on Tuesday morning in Ostad Shirazi Street, on the fringes of Saghez, a town in northwestern Iran with a population of 150,000. The young boy was identified as Matin Ebrahimi, son of Ata.


View Saghez, Kurdistan province, Iran - 20 September 2010 in a larger map

Video posted on YouTube claimed to show the aftermath of the gunfight and the covered body of the child.


Another graphic video showed what appeared to be a lifeless body under a different sheet, though neither the age, nor the gender of the individual can be determined from the grainy footage. The language spoken in both videos is Kurdish.


The protracted gun battle raged for an hour after the unidentified men were surrounded by security forces, according to witnesses. Rawa News wrote that several regime troops were also injured, but that no other details of casualties were available.

Saghez is currently under a security blanket, per news sources.

Up to 600 national publications continuously attack government, complains regime's Deputy Islamic Guidance Minister

Mohammad Ali Ramin

A senior official in the Ahmadinejad cabinet strongly denounced what he described as the 'undesirable situation of the press' in the Islamic Republic during a controversial speech to students at Qazvin's Imam Khomeini International University on Wednesday night, July 28, 2010.

Was he referring to the dozens of imprisoned journalists and banned newspapers? Think again.

'The government is criticized and even disparaged on a daily and weekly basis by at least 500 to 600 publications in the country in the strongest, sometimes insulting, terms,' complained Mohammad Ali Ramin, Deputy Islamic Guidance Minister in charge of the press, who is directly responsible for banning publications, towards the end of his question-and-answer session with the students, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

Ramin also deplored the fact that there are too many publications in the country. 'In the period before me, the supervisory committee would issue 60 licenses during a one-hour meeting,' he said. 'We are now facing problems and some people have licenses over which there is no supervision. [...] Some of these publications which have obtained licenses are in the hands of individuals with no money and they become dependent on investors. The government must help them become absorbed into parties and organizations.'

Ramin, 56, was fairly unknown on the national stage until Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's first term, when he became a presidential adviser. He allegedly contributed to Ahmadinejad's questionable positions about Israel and the Holocaust, and was the prime initiator of the infamous 2006 Holocaust conference held in Tehran, which was attended by such luminaries as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. He headed Tehran's International Holocaust Foundation and was named deputy Islamic guidance minister last year.

Ramin lived in Germany from 1971 until 1994, when he was expelled from the country for unknown reasons, though some sources cite his activities in Islamist and neo-Nazi circles as the cause. He was jailed for a short period in 1982, again for reasons that have not been made public. He obtained degrees in engineering from Karlsruhe University and the Technical University of Clausthal, where he founded the Islamische Gemeinschaft in Clausthal (Islamic Community of Clausthal). It is said that during his time in Germany he forged close relations with neo-Nazi and extreme-right figures, including Benedikt Frings of the NPD (National Democratic Party), who was also a guest at the Holocaust conference.

For an individual whose devotion to the Islamic Republic and its principles was only exercised through a long-distance relationship for over 20 years, he has become quite a die-hard devotee of the concept of velayateh faghih (rule of the Islamic jurisprudent) and its embodiment Leader Ali Khamenei. 'The [Leader] has the position of surrogate of the Imam Zaman (NB The Mahdi or messiah of Shiites) and on his behalf must manage the world, in other words the imposition of God's proof upon humanity during the time of absence [of Imam Zaman],' Ramin said at the beginning of his address in Qazvin.

'We must find a way for the velayateh faghih system to manage the world,' Ramin told the students a bit later, obviously still enamored of the idea of world dominance with which he flirted in his younger days.

Genoa names square in honor of Iranian women

The Italian city of Genoa renamed one of its squares 'Rotonda Donne di Teheran' (Women of Tehran Square) in the Fiumara commercial district as part of its Human Rights Week on July 21, 2010.


View Fiumara district, Genoa, Italy in a larger map

Mayor Marta Vincenzi, Shirin Ebadi

Mayor Marta Vincenzi unveiled the new plaque honoring the women who demonstrated for freedom on the streets of Iran's capital at a moving ceremony attended by Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi. 'This is a sign of solidarity with the women of Iran, and other parts of the world, who are fighting for freedom,' said Mayor Vincenzi.

She expressed the hope that mayors in other major cities around the world would follow Genoa's lead and pay tribute to Iran's women.

Pro-regime, anti-Ahmadinejad site publishes photos of bazaar strike

A conservative news site published a photo report showing that the strike in Tehran's Bazaar continued on Thursday, July 15, 2010.

The web site, Alef, is run by Ahmad Tavakoli, Majlis representative (Tehran) and head of the legislature's research center. Tavakoli is a cousin of Speaker Ali Larijani -- he is the son of Larijani's aunt -- and has been a critic of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since his first term as president. Tavakoli, who obtained his doctorate in economics from the University of Nottingham in the 1990s, was one of the first Malis deputies to accuse Ali Kordan, interior minister in Ahmadinejad's first administration, of faking his doctorate. The late Kordan was subsequently impeached. Tavakoli and several of his close allies in the Majlis have continued to denounce the government's economic policies, the level of the post-election crackdown, and the fake doctorates of several ministers and vice-presidents.

The article which was posted yesterday on Alef contended, 'While [National Traders' Council chief] Ghassem Nodeh [Farahani] has spoken of the conclusion of discussions on traders' taxes [...] and business as usual in the bazaar in recent days, Alef's journalist's report shows that some portions of the bazaar remain closed.' Alef posted photos of the bazaar which were purportedly taken at noon on Thursday.

The report was followed by 27 comments left by the site's readers as of noon GMT on Friday, July 16. Only one reader opined that the tax rate on traders should not be increased (the government has agreed to a tax hike of 15% after first mentioning 70%).

But this did not mean that the comments on this conservative site favored the government either. Only two readers expressed support for the Ahmadinejad administration. One wrote, 'Stick to perfecting your prose and let the government do its job.' This comment garnered 5 thumbs up and 34 thumbs down. The other comment read, 'The benefit-seeking profiteers are lining up against the president.' It scored 23 'likes' and 46 'dislikes' by the other readers.

The vast majority of the comments either blasted the bazaaris (9 comments), without any kind words for the government, or questioned the coverage of the pro-regime media, particularly state radio-television, which have denied the existence of a strike or have tried to minimize its scope (6 comments).

'It's great that, after a week, you're finally covering this issue,' wrote one person. 106 readers gave this a thumbs up, while 7 disliked it. 'So why was television portraying the bazaar news in a different manner?' asked another individual. 110 readers approved this question, while 7 did not. Another comment read, 'We really didn't expect this text and the photos from you... You should have prepared a report on the bazaar like the 20:30 television newscast which said that everything is fine and dandy and the economy is growing and everything is open and what shutdown are you talking about... To hell with the age of technology and communications and the Internet... As long as these gentlemen, instead of resolving problems, continue to deny them and cover them up, not only will nothing be solved, but our problems will get worse every day.' 112 readers agreed with this, while 12 disagreed.

One angry comment said, 'So these heavy-hitting bazaaris shouldn't pay taxes and my father who is an employee should? Is this justice? 7% of my father's small salary goes to taxes.' 84 readers liked this and 7 did not. Another person said, 'Don't get me angry. How much do these people make every month? Where are their homes? Why are employees' salaries taxed before they see any money, while these privileged individuals refrain from paying taxes? I want to see their stores boarded up, by Imam Hossein.' 73 people supported this opinion while 20 did not.  'I think it's the best time for rivals of the bazaar to come on the scene. Chain stores and companies which engage in marketing and selling directly to customers are better solutions,' wrote another individual. This comment was approved by 26 people and opposed by one.

These are some of the photos published by Alef:

A view of the textile traders' section:

Jewelery and gold traders:

The jewelry and gold bazaar: