Iranian-American businessman detained in Iran, family and friends say

A businessman based in Dubai has reportedly become at least the fourth Iranian American to be detained in Iran, family and friends say.
People close to consultant Siamak Namazi have told media outlets that he was taken into custody by Iran’s security forces around 15 October while visiting family in Iran.
“We’re aware of recent reports of the possible arrest in Iran of a US citizen,” said US Department of State spokesman John Kirby. “We’re looking into these reports and don’t have anything further to provide at this time.”
His friends told the Wall Street Journal that Iranian intelligence agents ransacked his family home in Tehran and confiscated his passport.
Namazi, who supports improved diplomatic relations between the US and Iran, is the head of strategic planning at Crescent Petroleum. He previously worked as an energy consultant at the Dubai-based Access Consulting Group and at numerous thinktanks.
The National Iranian American Council, which also supports the easing of relations between the two countries, said in a statement that it was “deeply troubled” by the unconfirmed reports.
It also disputed claims by other websites that said Namazi and his family have leadership roles in the organization. “While Mr Namazi has known members of NIAC’s staff, neither he nor his family have had any leadership or any other significant role with NIAC,” the statement said.
While Iran’s moderate president Hassan Rouhani has expressed interest in easing US-Iran relations, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made clear that he does not think improved relations should come with the historic nuclear deal reached in July.
Namazi’s affiliates told the Wall Street Journal that he was arrested by the Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence arm, which is under the supervision of Khamenei, not the government.
Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said that the detention feeds into an emerging pattern of the Revolutionary Guard targeting the Rouhani government’s economic policies in the wake of the historic nuclear deal reached in July.
This also comes ahead of the February parliamentary election in Iran.
“I read this as an attempt to undermine Rouhani’s policy of jumpstarting the economy through interactions with the diaspora,” said Ghaemi. “And of course this will politically weaken him in light of the upcoming election because he will not have much economic benefit to show to the people.”
At least three other Americans – Amir Hekmati, Saeed Abedini and Jason Rezaian– are being held in Iranian prisons. Their families hoped that a release could be secured with the nuclear deal, but officials have said they deliberately kept those negotiations separate from the nuclear talks in case the deal fell through.
Iran does not recognize dual citizenship, and those that hold it are viewed with suspicion.
US secretary of state John Kerry mentioned the detained Americans in a meeting with Iran foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif earlier this week in Vienna, where he is in discussions with Iranian diplomats about the Syrian war.
The state department on Friday said Kerry raised the issue of detained and missing US citizens in the country but did not provide further details on the conversation.
Kerry and Zarif’s meeting in Vienna came just two weeks after Rezaian, a Washington Post correspondent, was convicted in a secret espionage trial in Iran. He has been imprisoned in Iran for more than 450 days.
Former US marine Amir Hekmati has been held in Iran since his arrest there in August 2011 and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini is also jailed in an Iranian prison. The US is also looking for former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in the country in 2007.
IranWire first reported the arrest of an unnamed Iranian American earlier this month and on Wednesday edited the story to say the person they referenced is Namazi.
The reports came as Washington-based group IJMA3-USA, an internet freedom advocacy group, said its secretary general, Lebanese citizen Nizar Zakka, disappeared in September while attending a conference in Tehran.
“We have filed several requests with the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking assistance in locating him, without success,” the group said in a statement signed by lawyer Antoine Abou Dib. “We therefore respectfully ask the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Lebanese Embassy in Tehran and the Iranian authorities to assist us in locating Mr Zakka, and to confirm that he is safe and will soon be permitted to return home.”
Zakka was last seen in a taxi bound for the airport for a flight to Beirut. Abou Dib said that he did not board the flight.

Syria decision the latest blow to Obama's Middle East legacy

The decision to deploy US troops to Syria is seen in Washington as one of profound political consequence – both for the credibility of Barack Obama’s presidency and possibly for new peace talks aimed at ending the five-year war – but yet of limited military significance.
Administration officials were left squirming on Friday to explain how sending special forces to work alongside Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State was compatible with Obama’s earlier promises not to “put boots on the ground” in Syria or “engage in combat operations” against Isis.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest claimed there was still a difference of “night and day” compared with the Bush administration’s invasions, but in the space of a few short weeks a central promise of Obama’s presidential campaign has been undermined: first by conceding that he will not meet his pledge of removing troops from Afghanistan before he leaves office and now by acknowledging a long-term ground presence is necessary not just in Iraq, but Syria too.
Earnest would not say whether the deployments were permanent or would be bolstered, insisting: “I don’t want to try to predict the future here.”
Yet arguably that was exactly what Obama claimed he could do when he ran for office promising to bring US troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
When the president first contemplated intervention in Syria two years ago, in an effort to deter President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Obama went further still, making a clear-cut pledge not to escalate US involvement.
“Many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war?” said Obama in an address to the nation in September 2013. “My answer is simple: I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan.”
That mission against Assad was ultimately dropped in the face of opposition from Congress, and the White House claims critics are taking the “boots on the ground” quote out of context by using it now.

Syria talks focus on ceasefire hopes as missile barrage kills 40

International talks on the Syrian crisis are to resume within two weeks after a first round in Vienna on Friday was overshadowed by mass casualties in a government attack on an opposition-held area near Damascus. UN efforts are to concentrate on implementing a country-wide ceasefire.
Tensions between Iran, a staunch supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, and its rival Saudi Arabia, which insists Assad must step down or face military defeat, were evident at the meeting. Crucially but predictably, no agreement was reached on Assad’s fate, so agreement to continue discussions was probably the best possible outcome.
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, accentuated the positive after the seven-hour meeting in the Austrian capital: “The US position is that there is no way that Assad can unite and govern Syria, but we cannot allow that difference to get in the way of diplomacy to find a solution.”
Kerry referred to the announced deployment of US special forces in Syria as part of a “two-pronged” approach. “We are intensifying our counter-Daesh [Isis] campaign and intensifying our diplomatic efforts to end the conflict,” he said. “We believe these steps are mutually reinforcing.”
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Moscow was determined to fight terrorism in accordance with international law.

Baby dies in West Bank after inhaling teargas, says Palestinian ministry

An eight-month-old Palestinian baby has died after inhaling teargas in a village near Bethlehem, the Palestinian ministry of health has said, on another day of killings and clashes in the West Bank.
The baby, named as Ramadan Mohammad Faisal Thawabta, suffocated inside his family home in Beit Fajjar, a village south of Bethlehem. 
Abu Anan, a medic with Red Crescent, said Israeli forces had fired teargas into the house during clashes between the army and Palestinians. “We went to the family house and we tried to save his life, but we failed. He was dead,” he said.
It was not immediately clear if a teargas grenade had entered the house or if the baby had been exposed to gas that had seeped in from outside. Thawabta’s body was being transported to Beit Jala governmental hospital. The Israeli defence forces said they were looking into the incident.
The teargas was fired as Israeli soldiers faced off against stone-throwing Palestinian youths in one of a series of clashes that swept the West Bank on Friday.
While Muslim prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque – the focus of recent tensions – passed peacefully, elsewhere the unrest of recent weeks, which has left 60 Palestinians and 11 Israelis dead, continued.
Israeli and Arab media reported that a Palestinian youth had been shot dead and another injured after an attempted knife attack on border guards in an incident at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus. Clashes were also reported from the Ramallah area further north and Hebron to the south.
Elsewhere in East Jerusalem another Palestinian stabbed an Israeli and was quickly shot and critically injured by border police close to the light railway line that links Jewish and Arab areas of the city – unilaterally united and annexed by Israel after the 1967 war. An Israeli was also injured in the shooting.

Syria’s horror shows the tragic price of western inaction

It is a rare thing for a high-level official to admit they got something completely wrong. Frederic Hof, the former special adviser on Syria to Hillary Clinton (as secretary of state), has had that temerity – or that kind of despair. He recently wrote an article (for Politico magazine) headlined “I got Syria so wrong”. It is a painful analysis of how early hopes, in 2011, of seeing Bashar al-Assad overthrown by a popular revolt were either naive or blind. It also contains stark criticism of the Obama presidency, which apparently never fully intended to do anything about Syria’s killing fields, preferring to let the problem fester, unaddressed.
It’s tempting to believe that the latest rekindling of international diplomacy over Syria will lead to a brighter outcome. But a few days before ministerial talks were to begin in Vienna, Hof seemed to dash these hopes at a meeting on Syria’s human rights catastrophe in the House of Commons. The walls were covered with photos of tortured bodies smuggled out of Syria two years ago by “Caesar”, a military photographer who believed that if the world could see the slaughter going on in Assad’s jails, it would act. Nothing happened. Now Hof says he can see “no evidence yet of a change of policy” from the US side. Basically, his warning is: don’t be fooled by the new round of talks.

Obama orders US special forces to 'assist' fight against Isis in Syria

Barack Obama has ordered up to 50 special operations troops to Syria, US officials announced on Friday, in an apparent breach of a promise not to put US “boots on the ground”, to fight Islamic State militants in the country.
The Pentagon has also been “consulting” with the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, to establish a special operations taskforce to fight Isis “leaders and networks” across the Syrian border in Iraq, a senior administration official told the Guardian on Friday.
But the White House insisted that its overall strategy to combat Isis remained the same and said the special forces troops would be helping coordinate local ground forces in the north of the country and other non-specified “coalition efforts” to counter Isis rather than engaging in major ground operations.
“The decision the president has made is to further intensify our support for our forces who have made progress against Isis,” the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said at a news conference.
The move came as diplomats worked in Vienna to restart talks on a political transition that would remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. At the discussions with leaders from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, framed the troop announcement as part of a shifting policy that included this major diplomatic push to initiate talks that would bring about a political transition in Syria.
“We are intensifying our counter-Daesh campaign and we are intensifying our diplomatic efforts to end the conflict,” Kerry said, using the Arabic acronym for Isis. “That is why President Obama made an announcement about stepping up the fight against Daesh.”
The injection of US special forces in Syria seemed at odds with earlier statements Obama has made about not placing troops in the country.

White House confirms US 'special operators' to fight Isis in Syria

White House press secretary Josh Earnest confirms that President Obama will be deploying ‘special operators’ to fight Islamic State on the ground in Syria. Earnest concedes to one reporter that the move is not likely ‘a game-changer’, but that the mission will intensify the overall strategy for building the capacity of local forces in Syria.