Who is killing the Iranian political virus

Moscow Mayor Sobyanin was going to build an infectious coronavirus building at City Hospital No. 1 - well, that’s understandable. Ordinary mortals always get war, plague and inflation. Another thing - there, above, “they” have everything safe, personal transportation, isolation from the plebs. What is surprising is the Iranian coronavirus, which made its way to the very top and changes the political landscape of the country.

Right now, some kind of nightmare is happening in the Iranian Foreign Ministry. On Thursday, Iranian media immediately reported two victims of coronavirus in the diplomatic corps of the Islamic republic.

Hossein Sheikholeslam, 67-year-old ex-adviser to Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, and former Iranian ambassador to Syria, died. The Foreign Ministry moderator of the Iran-Syria-Hamas-Hezbollah branch. In some ways, a legendary person, but about him a little later.

Senior Iranian Diplomat Dies of Coronavirus Infectionhttps: //t.co/b8rfOxkhXjpic.twitter.com/9at7f08jEl

Another adviser, Javad Zarif, who is infected with a coronavirus, has just been reported, we are talking about a member of the Expediency Council, Mohammad Sadr. This Council is an intermediary between parliament and personally Ayatollah Khamenei. Sadr is also an adviser to the spiritual leader and could communicate with him already being infected, as well as another adviser to Khamenei, Seyed Hadu Khosroshahi, who died a few days ago.

It seems that under the blow, Foreign Minister Zarif himself - conservative Iranian media have already launched fakes that he is also sick. The official Foreign Ministry courageously refutes the words of Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi: "Zarif is absolutely healthy and he has no signs of illness."

Of course, the virus does not have logic, its victims are random, but nevertheless it is interesting to trace who it destroys on the Iranian Olympus.

So, the most famous victims of the Iranian political virus today, except for the above.

The deputy head of the judiciary, Ali Khalafi, who headed the Iranian judiciary for ten years before Ebrahim Raisi, is a conservative, while the brother of President Rouhani, for example, was sent to prison. And he was among the three senior officials of the Ministry of Justice who refused to institute criminal proceedings against prison officials who used sexual and physical violence against arrested and convicted demonstrators who challenged Ahmadinejad’s victory in the 2009 election. On Friday, March 6, 2020, his death was announced as a result of infection with coronavirus (although before that he had been ill with liver disease for a long time). The head of the judicial system, Raisi, expressed his condolences on the death of his former boss.

Hossein Sheikholeslam, 67, a former Iranian ambassador to Syria and a “veteran” of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, contracted a coronavirus, according to official information, at about the same time as Iran’s vice president of family affairs, Masoumeh Ebtekar, 59 years old.

And this is all the more striking, because in 2015, when the Iranian Foreign Ministry held “nuclear” negotiations in Vienna and Geneva, and the United States did not know whether to trust the Iranian regime, Sheikholeslam and Ebtekar became the two main characters of a huge article in the American journal Foreign Policy. The article was called “Two Faces of Modern Iran” and presented them as antagonists, who, meanwhile, had a common and very remarkable start in Iranian politics.

Both of them were radical students who supported the Islamic revolution of Khomeini and in 1979 participated in the hostage-taking of the American embassy.

Ebtekar was the daughter of an Iranian doctor of science, and spent her childhood in Philadelphia, thanks to which she spoke excellent English. Thanks to this, she became the spokeswoman for the students who took hostages at the American embassy. Appearing regularly in the news and voicing the position of the Islamic Republic in English, she became famous in the United States.

Sheikholeslam studied at the University of California, Berkeley before the Islamic Revolution, knew English well, during the hostage crisis conducted interrogations of senior officials of the American embassy and studied documents that American diplomats tried to destroy before becoming hostages.

Then their fates parted, and they became on opposite sides of the "barricades" of Iranian politics. Ebtekar repented that the students did not understand what they were doing, taking hostages, and supposedly did not assume that the crisis would be so widespread and would forever change the history of Iran, sending it under an American sanctions prison. She was vice president in the team of liberal president Khatami, then in the team of the centrist and supporter of negotiations with the West, President Rukhani. Her fiercely hates the IRGC. The Vatan-e-Emrooz newspaper, behind which there are conservatives and Ahmadinejad, somehow brought it to the cover with the question: does she think that she is in the bazaar, making profit from negotiations with the West. Her son lives in the USA.

But Sheikholeslam remained faithful to the ideals of the Islamic revolution, hostile to the United States and played an important role in building Iran’s ties with Syria, starting with Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar al-Assad, and stood at the origins of the creation of Iran’s main export product - the Lebanese military group Hezbollah .

In 2020, both of them became heroes of Iranian politics affected by the coronavirus, and again fell on the covers of newspapers. Only Sheikholeslam died, while Ebtekar is still fighting.

In a coma there is also a conservative politician, little-known and recently elected to the Mejlis, Fatemeh Rahbar, 56 years old. Other conservative politicians from the clergy and the IRGC are younger and stronger - and hope to recover.

It may be noted that the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus in Iran. The average age of the deceased is 67–80 years, which fits into the world statistics of the most vulnerable age group, which can hardly tolerate the disease caused by the virus. And another interesting nuance - the epidemic began with the religious center of the country of Kuma, with mosques and shrines. But doctors and the army save the Iranians. All Iranian state propaganda spreads in the Iranian segment of social networks a picture of a doctor and a soldier, standing with their backs to each other on guard of their homeland. Iran’s defense minister, incidentally, comes from the Basij.

رهبر انقلاب: پزشکان ، پرستاران، # مدافعان_سلامت pic.twitter.com/RRwrscUdgj

It is too early to talk about the end of the epidemic of the Iranian political virus, but it has already played its important role, which for some reason the media do not notice. He accelerated and spent outside the traditional legal procedures the country's budget for the next year. A budget that the current, centrist, parliament of Rukhani would not have adopted in 290 deputies. But which, by decree of the spiritual leader, is about to be adopted bypassing the parliament, only by the budget committee of the parliament in the amount of 45 people. While the parliament is in quarantine, and the deputies are on sick leave.

Under Article 85 of the Iranian Constitution, members of the Majlis can delegate their authority to internal committees in case of emergency. And the COVID-19 virus in the Iranian parliament has become just that emergency.

“This budget will have the least dependence on oil revenues, about 8.5%,” said Mohammad Baker Nobacht, chairman of the budgetary organization. - The deputies rejected this project in February, believing that such a budget would lead to a budget deficit of about $ 47.7 billion.

- The dependence of the budget on oil has been reduced to 8.5%, but you need to ask a question - what then will this budget be filled with? - quotes the deputy Shahruz Barzegar information agency ICANA (Islamic Consultative Assembly News Agency).

Probably nothing - and this grandiose failed budget, adopted bypassing the majority of the liberal Majlis, the conservatives want to hang on President Rouhani.

After all, 2020 he is destined to spend with the opposition parliament, formed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. And this budget failure - utopian in advance - is planned to be made a nail into the lid of the political coffin of Rukhani, liberals, centrists and generally supporters of negotiations with the West.

Absolutely classified information: how much in 2020-2021 the IRGC will receive for its foreign policy expansion and strengthening of its power. But it was precisely the information about $ 11 billion in annual funding for Al-Quds and Basij that leaked to the press in early 2018 that provoked massive protests against the Guard Corps and brought millions of people to the streets. But no protests and collapse in the economy can shake Ayatollah Khamenei in the priorities of Al-Quds and the strategy of Iranian expansion over others. For example, after the death of Kassem Suleimani, the spiritual leader, despite the difficult economic situation, immediately allocated € 200 million from Al-Quds forces from the Iranian National Development Fund.

This year there was no leak about the scale of financing of the Guard Corps: a terrible political virus is walking and wandering in parliament and the government, and it is not known who it will fall next time.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.