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Irans controversial former president is reportedly set to offer to negotiate a peace settlement between warring groups in Yemen, but he may find no takers in either the Arabian Peninsula or his own government.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a one-time firebrand who served as Irans president from 2005 to 2013, plans to send letters to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the leader of Yemens rebel Houthi movement and Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, offering to mediate an end of the conflict, several Iranian news websites cited an informed source close to the former official as saying.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a war in Yemen in 2015 after the Iranian-backed Houthi militia took control of the countrys capital, Sanaa, from the internationally recognised government. The conflict has since turned the country into the worlds most dire humanitarian crises, according to the UN.

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According to the source close to Mr Ahamadinejad, the letters would be followed by the formation of a mediation commission that would oversee peace talks. Citing an unnamed source, Independent Persian journalist and scholar Arash Azizi said Mr Ahmadinejad had asked former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad to join the mediation panel.

Mr Ahmadinejads letters have yet to be publicly released. But a senior official of the internationally recognised Yemeni government, now based in the city of Aden, quickly dismissed any talks.

The best thing Iran could do to Yemen is to stay away from Yemen and to stop their support for the Houthis, Yemeni foreign minister Mohammed al-Hadhrami told the Independent.

It also remains unclear if Mr Ahmadinejad understands the extraordinary complexity of Yemens conflicts, which include battles between UAE-backed southern separatists and the pro-Saudi government in Aden and a military effort to defeat Al Qaedas local branch.

Mr Ahmadinejad, the first non-cleric to become president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, also lacks credibility in his own country. He was a noisy populist hardliner in office but managed to alienate both reformists and conservatives with his disruptive foreign and domestic policies. Under his presidency Iran drastically expanded its nuclear programme and increased hostility with the west while damaging Irans economy with pricey handouts that fuelled inflation.

During his presidency, he frequently wrote letters to world leaders requesting dialogue, but was frequently ignored.

At 63, Mr Ahmadinejad, who is also a former mayor of Tehran, has been struggling to redefine himself and remain in the public limelight.

His attempt to run for the presidency in 2017 was thwarted by the Council of Guardians, which vets Iranian candidates for national office. He has sought to generate buzz through social media, praising professional athletes, quoting American rap stars and commenting on world affairs.

What sin have the people of Kashmir, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the people of the Ninth Ward [of New Orleans] and those of the South Side of Chicago committed to live under such an inhuman world system of governance? he wrote last year on Twitter.

Some analysts have suggested Mr Ahmadinejad may be preparing a 2021 presidential bid. Earlier this week he decried a potential long-term deal between Iran and China, saying it would allow Beijing to economically exploit the country.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Irans controversial former president to offer to mediate in Yemen war, reports say - The Independent

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News Update: Iran blames bad communication, alignment for jet shootdown, bicyclist hit by car, Tyson moving toward meat cutting robots - KCTV Kansas...

People gather to protest the US air strike in Iraq that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, who headed Iran's Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds force in Sanaa, Yemen on January 6, 2020.

Mohammed Hamoud | Andalou Agency | Getty Images

Iran's government has issued an arrest warrant for U.S. President Donald Trump over the killing of its top commander,Gen. Qasem Soleimani, in January, the country's semiofficial Fars news agency reported Monday.

Tehran is also reportedly asking Interpol for help, according to Fars. Ali Alghasi-Mehr, the attorney general of Tehran,named Trump and 35 others Iran has accused of involvement in Soleimani's death asfacing "murder and terrorism charges," and was quoted as saying he had asked Interpol to issue "red notices" for them the highest level notice Interpol can issue on an individual to pursue their arrest.

Trump, however, is in no danger of arrest and it's highly unlikely Interpol would honor Iran's request, as the international agency's guidelines forbid it from "undertaking any intervention or activities of a political" nature. Red notices enable local law enforcement authorities to arrest individuals on behalf of the requesting country, though they cannot force the country to arrest or extradite suspects.

The Trump administration has so far not responded to Iran's announcement. Interpol did not immediatelyreply to a request for comment from CNBC.

Soleimani led Iran's Quds Force, the foreign operations wing of the elite paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Trump administration labeled him a terrorist, and Washington deemed him responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The 62-year-old Soleimani was killed in a drone strike directed by Trump in early January while in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, in a move that sent regional tensions and oil prices soaring and triggered a retaliatory attack by Iran and its proxies on Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops.

In emphasizing Soleimani's significance, one defense analyst called the strike "the equivalent of Iran killing the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and then taking credit for it."

Less than a week after the drone strike, on Jan. 8, more than a dozen Iranian ballistic missiles hit Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq's western Anbar province and a base in Erbil in the country's north. There were no deaths.

The death of Soleimani, revered as a hero in much of Iran, prompted three days of nationwide mourning across the country. And while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised the retaliatory attack as a "slap on the face" to the U.S., he said it was "not enough," suggesting further action.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards vowed"severe revenge"on the U.S. andexperts warned of Iranian-led attackson U.S. military bases and energy facilities in the region, cyberattacks and potential assaults via Iran's numerous proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and beyond. But confrontation between the two adversaries has been relatively quiet since, at least compared with the previous year something some experts attribute to the coronavirus crisis, which has engulfed both countries. By late February, Iran had become the Middle East's epicenter of the disease.

Last year saw the U.S. accuse Iran of blowing up multiple foreign tankers in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian downing of a U.S. drone, and more sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic by the Trump administration as the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal moves ever closer to collapse.Tehran has denied involvement in the tanker attacks.

Iran has announced numerous steps to roll back its adherence to the Obama-era deal, meant to curb its nuclear program in exchange for economic relief, ever since Trump withdrew the U.S. from it in 2018.

Washington and Tehran have not had formal diplomatic relations since 1980.

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Iran issues arrest warrant for Trump over killing of Qasem ...

President Trump is among three dozen U.S. officials for whom Iran has issued arrest warrants in the Jan. 3 airstrike killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

President Trump is among three dozen U.S. officials for whom Iran has issued arrest warrants in the Jan. 3 airstrike killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The government of Iran has issued an arrest warrant and has also requested assistance from Interpol in detaining President Trump as well as other U.S. military and political leaders in the killing of a prominent Iranian military commander this year.

Trump faces no real threat of arrest, but the new charges offer fresh evidence that tension between the U.S. and Iran shows no signs of subsiding.

Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani was Iran's Revolutionary Guard commander who was revered in his country and known for being the mastermind behind many conflicts in the region and against the United States. He did not become widely known to most Americans until his killing by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad on Jan. 3.

Iran's state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported that the officials wanted in connection with Soleimani's killing "have been charged with murder and terrorism acts." It added, "At the top of the list is US President Donald Trump, and his prosecution will continue even after the end of his term."

With Trump included, NPR's Peter Kenyon reported, "Iranian media quote Tehran's prosecutor general as saying 36 people are being sought in connection with Soleimani's killing."

He also noted the arrest warrant had been forwarded to Interpol, along with a so-called red notice, which would disseminate the alert to law enforcement agencies around the world.

The French-based Interpol has not commented on the matter.

It is unlikely, however, that Interpol will act on the request given that the agency's constitution prohibits it from taking on "any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character."

The U.S. airstrike that killed Soleimani was championed by Defense Secretary Mark Esper as a "decisive defensive action." He said at the time Soleimani was plotting attacks on U.S. diplomats and service members.

A retaliatory attack by Iran came on Jan 8, just days after the U.S. airstrike. Iran fired missiles on al-Asad air base in Iraq, where U.S. troops were stationed. As NPR reported, dozens of American personnel were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries in the attack.

The acrimonious relationship between the U.S. and Iran had deteriorated even further when the U.S. withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, more than two years ago.

The deal was reached in 2015 under the Obama administration and included China, France, Germany, Russia, the European Union and United States. It said in exchange for reduced sanctions, Iran would agree to limit its production of nuclear weapons materials.

"The fact is this was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever have been made," Trump said during a May 2018 announcement that the U.S. was withdrawing from the deal.

Link:
Trump Tops Iran's List Of U.S. Officials Wanted In Killing Of Top General In January - NPR

MEK Supporters in Free Iran Grand Gathering Paris 2018

As the clerical regime in Iran is facing the most challenging crisis of its life and is fighting for its survival, in a desperate bid to tarnish the image of the democratic opposition, it is resorting to spreading of more disinformation about the main Iranian opposition movement Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI-MEK) and the coalition of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

The Iranian peoples uprising at the beginning of January 2018 heralded a new era in Iran both for the ruling regime and the resistance. The MEK resistance units played a significant role in organizing, fomenting, and directing the uprisings demands for regime change. The regimes Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei publicly blamed the MEK for its key role.

Another nationwide uprising emerged spontaneously in November 2019, with additional protests across multiple provinces the following January. In both uprisings, the youth repeated MEKs regime change slogans and again, MEK resistance units played a key role in spreading the protests across the country.

Now, the regimes officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, are warning that the regimes prior repression of dissent and its ongoing mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic could lead to still more intense public protests in the months ahead. As part of these warnings, Khamenei and others have singled out the MEK, for its pivotal role in the uprisings and the main threat to their existence.

That recognition seems, however, to be aggressively challenged by Iranian intelligence operatives and lobbyists in Western policy circles and international media. The associated campaign of demonization has been carried out over the years, with the regimes high point arguably coming in the form of the MEKs false designation as a terrorist group in the United States and Europe. However, that designation was ultimately challenged in court, leading to the groups conclusive exoneration and its removal from all relevant lists by 2012.

Nevertheless, false allegations continue to linger on, thanks to funding and manipulation by the regime, on the false grounds that this is an isolated non-representative group with allegations going as far as calling the MEK a sectarian movement

This happened most recently in the Hamburg Regional Court, following a challenge to theFrankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitungover an article that had been published on May 13. The judgment, in that case, identified three specific claims whose inclusion in the article constituted violations of basic journalistic standards. The judgment also indicated that FAZ could face financial penalties of up to 250,000 euros for each of the offending claims, which are to be removed from online archives of the article and withheld from any subsequent publication.

The proposed penalty and the general ruling are the same as those handed down in March 2019 againstDer Spiegel, in connection with another legal challenge from the NCRI in the same region. Both FAZ andDer Speigelconveyed allegations that the MEK had carried out torture of its own members at its compound in Albania.

The legal challenges to FAZ,Der Spiegel, and other outlets have helped to clarify the source of such fake news. Among the evidence presented to the courts were documents that established the connections between Irans Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and some of the sources cited in defamatory articles.

The MOIS has a long history of presenting its operatives and affiliates as former members of the MEK and thereby seeming to substantiate allegations of torture, terrorist training, and abusive control over the organizations members by its leadership. This deployment of misleading sources reportedly goes hand-in-hand with the recruitment of friendly journalists, a phenomenon that every time Iranian officials face a significant impasse, deploy them to demonize its main opposition in the Western media.

This is the impasse the regime has been facing since January 2018, at the latest. On the one hand, with continuous domestic unrest, and activities of MEK resistance units all across Iran, and more international isolation of the regime, the regimes highest authorities blame the MEK as the source of their problems, while on the other hand their lobbyists abroad claim it is nonrepresentative, insignificant, sectarian, etc.

The German court rulings are among indexes that show the mullahs need a change of tone toward the Resistance, especially with more unrest insight because of the grim social and economic situation.

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EDITORIAL: Iran's Regime Disinformation About Iranian Resistance and MEK - NCRI - National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)