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Theres trouble in the Gulf, where a hijacked news website has helped kick off a blockade of Qatar. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their allies have cut off a fellow member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), citing as justification fake news stories that the Emiratis themselves allegedly planted.

The conflict started when several statements attributed to Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani appeared on the Qatar News Agencys website and the governments official Twitter feed. The comments, which the Qataris quickly dismissed as the result of a hack, strayed from the Arab Gulf consensus on hot-button issues such as relations with Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Israel. The Saudi-led bloc rejected that explanation and on June 5 severed diplomatic relations with Doha and also halted air, sea, and land transportation to the gas-rich state. Despite the mounting evidence that the offending news stories were contrived, the blockade has remained in place through extensive diplomatic intervention from abroad.

The confrontation, which threatens stability in a region critical to U.S. interests, is bad enough. But far more ominously, it shows how future crises can be sparked by cyberoperations to manipulate information. Operations of the kind used against France in 2015 and the United States during the 2016 presidential election take advantage of preexisting tensions to drive political change. In the case of the Gulf, these fake news stories exploited regional hostility and the Iranian boogeyman to push the region into conflict.

The recent hack didnt occur in a vacuum; tensions among the Gulf Arab monarchies have been simmering for years. The Saudis, with support from Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, have struggled for nearly half a decade to prop up the central government in Yemen against the Iranian-supported Houthi rebels. In Syria, many of the GCC states support Syrian rebel groups against the Islamic State, while Iran provides Bashar al-Assads government and groups like the Syrian Electronic Army with training and technical assistance. In the eyes of their neighbors, the Qataris also maintain an uncomfortably close relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, which they see as a movement that threatens established rulers across the region.

While internal GCC differences over Iran are a key driver of the current crisis, the next conflagration might be sparked by Tehran itself. The country has demonstrated growing maturity in offensive cybersecurity, conducts extensive espionage against its neighbors, and is actively engaged in harassing Israeli government websites with regular distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In a 2013 speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also claimed that Iran, together with Hezbollah, was carrying out nonstop attacks on Israeli industrial sites like water treatment facilities and power stations.

Irans capabilities have been strongly influenced by its own experience as the target of cyberoperations. In the years after Stuxnet, the U.S.-Israeli effort to stymie Iranian nuclear enrichment efforts, Tehran began making repeated efforts to gather information on industrial control systems in both countries. After a 2012 attack on an Iranian oil facility by malware designed to wipe computer systems of data, Iran responded by conducting precisely the same sort of attack against the back-office computer systems of oil giant Saudi Aramco and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas, which forced the replacement of tens of thousands of computers.

Iran is capable of causing a lot of havoc through cyberspace. Moving from web defacements and crude censorship in the early 2000s, through sophisticated internal information controls and sustained espionage campaigns, to complex multistage attacks today, Irans evolution in cybersecurity has been rapid. More recent Iranian operations have leveraged extensive reconnaissance of social media to successfully compromise American government organizations and critical infrastructure facilities.In 2016, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment against seven Iranian nationals accused of engaging in the costly digital harassment of American banks, one of whom was also charged with trying to hack into upstate New Yorks Bowman Avenue Dam.

All this means that the next hack in the Gulf might not simply exploit Irans reputation as a regional boogeyman it might be launched by Iran itself. There are limits to our ability to assign attribution for incidents in cybersecurity, which suggests that future information operations may be able to operate under the cloak of relative anonymity or at least plausible deniability.

This isnt the last time information operations are going to roil the region. The Gulf states need to be better equipped to defend themselves against these sort of attacks, and the first step is investing in their domestic cybersecurity capabilities. Their best bet is to leave aside surveillance and censorship to develop the technical capacity to identify and mitigate weaknesses in their own networks.

The episode demonstrates how the Gulf is ripe for exploitation via information operations. Through a fairly low-risk compromise of the Qatar News Agency, an actor managed to fracture one of the primary political blocs arrayed against Iranian action in the region. The Gulf has more than its share of political rivalries and long-standing antipathies, and Irans status as a growing power in cyberspace means that these vulnerabilities only appear poised to worsen. The damage done so far was likely the result of internal political fragmentation in the Arab bloc the potential fallout that could result from external interference is daunting.

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The Iranian Cyberthreat Is Real - Foreign Policy (blog)

An Iranian state television presenter has sparked outrage after footage emerged of her drinking beer without wearing a hijab while on holiday in Switzerland.

The consumption of alcohol in Islam is prohibited and alcohol has been banned in Iran since the establishment of Islamic Republic government in 1979.

Islamic dress codes are strictly enforced by 'morality police' in the country and womens hair and body must be covered in public. Wearing the hijab, a head covering worn in public by Muslim women, is compulsory.

Azadeh Namdari, who is also a presenter and actress, has actively endorsed wearing the hijab. Hard-line conservative Iranian newspaper Vatan-e Emruz published a photo of her in a full hijab in 2014 under the headline: Thank God, I wear the veil.

The TV presenter has also been a keen proponent of the black chador which is a large piece of cloth that covers women from head to toe and leaves only the face exposed. It has been extolled by conservatives for offering women the best protection.

Ms Namdari said she was proud to be a chadori in the front-page interview with the paper a saying used to refer to women who choose to wear the chador.

"You have to believe to be a chadori. [Otherwise] you'll be exposed ..." she said. "Thank God that I went on air, I was a chadori. I felt safe and I felt respected. All of these are blessings that the chador has brought me.

She added: "I apologise for saying that, but I'm more beautiful with this chador.

Ms Namdari has now been fiercely criticised and branded a hypocrite for being photographed holidaying without wearing a hijab and appearing to drink what looks like a beer. Critics on social media accused her of "hypocrisy" and "dual-behaviour.

Her name has been used as the Persian hashtag #Azadeh_Namdari, with the hashtag having been used over 11,000 times since the video emerged.

The backlash has prompted a torrent of memes of Ms Namdari, including an image of her with a bottle of Grey Goose vodka Photoshopped into her handbag. Another person has juxtaposed an image of the presenter in full hijab alongside two further photos of Namdari without a hijab and while drinking beer: "What she feeds us with versus what she feeds herself with!"

"The problem is not #Azadeh_Namdari or people like her. The problem is the ideology, culture and the system that forces individuals in society to have dual-behaviour for some reasons," read atweet from an account attributed to the pro-government cleric Abolfazl Najafi-Tehrani.

The presenter has now sought to explain herself in a two-minute video posted on the Young Journalists Club (YJC) news agency site under the headline: "Azadeh Namdari's reaction to the publication of scandalous photos in cyberspace".

Ms Namdari said she had been sitting alongside members of her family and "maharem" - close relatives who a woman is not required to wear a hijab among in a park. She claimed her scarf had fallen abruptly and the clip was immediately recorded by a random person. She did not mention the bottles of beer in the video or seek to explain them.

But her explanation has prompted yet further criticism and people have branded her a liar and accused her of attempting to pull the wool over Iranian's eyes.

In Iran, women who do not wear a hijab or are seen to be wearing a 'bad hijab' by allowing some of their hair to show face punishments spanning from fines to imprisonment.

Nevertheless, there has been resistance to the enforced hijab over recent years, withsome women shaving their hair and dressingas men. What's more, in a bid to show solidarity with their female counterparts last year men in the country appeared in photos wearing hijabs with their wife or female relative next to them withtheir hair uncovered.

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Iranian TV host who promotes Islamic dress code sparks backlash for drinking beer without hijab - The Independent

ISLAMIC STATE VS. ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

At first glance, it looks like an ordinary video produced by the so-called Islamic State with all the usual trappings. Its sleek yet macabre. A young boyin all probability, not even a teenagerspeaks to the camera as he stands on a battlefield. Dressed in military uniform and brandishing a knife, he goes on to behead a spy.

But what makes the video almost unique is its language. The boy speaks in fluent Persian and is explicitly addressing the inhabitants of Iran, especially its majority Shia population. While Persian propaganda used to be somewhat of a rarity for ISIS, it has recently become more common.

In this case the young protagonist, Al-Qatada the Persian, addresses all those who take part in and cooperate with the war against the Islamic State and issues an explicit threat: We will destroy your land and your home, we will disrupt your security and we will shed your blood.

At one level, this certainly is an act of desperation. Iranian-backed and in some cases Iranian commanded militias have played a key role fighting ISIS in Iraq and supporting the Assad regime in Syria. The ayatollahs and their acolytes no longer even try to be discreet about their military role in the region, as IranWire has reported.

But ISIS has proved flexible, imaginative, and resilient many times, to the chagrin of its enemies, and its current unconventional offensive against Iran should be taken seriously.

ISISs propaganda has long been multilingual. From glossy magazines in English and French to videos in Hebrew and songs in Chinese, it has sought to globalize its outreach. But it is only recently that it has seriously turned to Persian, one of the main languages of the Muslim world and the official tongue in three Muslim-majority countries (Afghanistan and Tajikistan in addition to Iran). Apparently its trying to increase recruitment in Iran and target Iranian territory.

Less than two months ago, on June 7, a group of Iranian recruits (mostly Sunni Kurds) staged attacks on the Iranian parliament and the shrine of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. Twenty-three people died, including the five attackers themselves.

While Iranians and commentators were caught by surprise, ISIS-watchers would have known that the attack came after months of extensive publishing of Persian-language propaganda. In fact, less than 24 hours before the attack, Radio Free Europe had published a report entitled IS Propaganda Increasingly Targeting Iran And Its Sunnis.

In the few months leading up to the attack, four issues of ISISs magazine, Al-Rumiyah, had been published in Persian for the first time. These seem to have been a direct translation of the previously-published English output. Articles detailed the supposedly religious justification for the killing of unbelievers. One issues front cover featured a blood-soaked blade and gave tips on using to kill using a knife.

More significantly, ISIS produced and posted a sophisticated 37-minute video in March, perhaps timed to coincide with the Iranian new year celebrations, that gave a detailed history of Iran and explained why the country, its rulers and its majority Shia inhabitants should be targeted.

The video recounts the time of pre-Islamic Iran when the Persian Sassanian empire had installed the religion of Magi [a pejorative term for Zoroastrianism] as its official creed and people worshipped fire. The ancient Persian empire is depicted with elaborately-staged reenactments that could be straight from a Hollywood production. The video falsely claims that the Sassanian capital was in the cities of Persia, in what is today Iran (the Sassanian capital Ctesiphon was, in fact, near what is today Baghdad, the Iraqi capital).

The historical narrative continues, with the championing of Salman the Persian, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad who, the video explains, helped the Muslims win a crucial battle by advising the prophet to build a moat around their trenches a common Iranian military tactic at the time. Iranians then remained Muslims for nine centuries, the video says, until the rise of Shah Ismail in the 16th century and his founding of the Safavid empire, which made Shia the official religion of Iran. In the video, talking heads remind viewers of the massacres in Tabriz, Shiraz, Yazd and Mazandaran by the Safavids.

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A Portuguese envoy is quoted as having allegedly documented the destruction of Sunni mosques and killing of the Sunni scholars under the Safavids. It is further alleged that the Safavids turned Abo Lo Lo, the Iranian-descended assassin of Omar, the second Islamic caliph, into a brave national hero.

Historical reenactments and documentary-style talking heads might not seem like effective propaganda tools, but the video tries to build a powerful narrative aimed at the Sunni minority, which forms up to nine percent of the Iranian population.

The narrative is updated to the present time with attacks on the Islamic Republic, whose founder Ayatollah Khomeini, it says, came from Paris with an airplane of French crusaders.

Along with the other crimes committed by the republic, the video points to its alleged attempts to disseminate Shiism around the world, its support for militias in the Arab world and its tolerance of Jewish synagogues and Christian churches in Iran.

The video features a film of Iranian Jews worshiping in peace in Tehran and Isfahan as signs of the Islamic Republics un-Islamicness. It also attacks Iranian Sunni imams like Mowlana Abdolhamid, the Friday prayer leader in Sunni-majority Zahedan, who has been a popular stalwart of the Iranian Sunnis due to his efforts to better their conditions and fight discrimination while also countering the influence of Takfiri groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, which regard those who do not share their rigid orthodoxy and heretics deserving death.

In addition to using Persian, the video also features a protagonist speaking in Balochi, a language spoken by about two percent of Iranians, most of them living in the southeast. Another speaks in fluent Arabic and is introduced as Al-Ahwazi, meaning he is allegedly from the Arab-populated southwest of Iran that has long harbored separatist and Pan-Arabist factions but has been mostly immune to Sunni radicalism (the majority of Iranian Arabs are Shia). The video also calls on Kurds and Persians to join ISIS and fight Iran.

It is perhaps surprising that it took ISIS so long to target Iran seriously. There have been many reports of the groups recruitment efforts in Iran since its foundation in June 2014. Analysts believe some Iranians have long been among the groups forces and may have even been killed fighting for ISIS. But the pace of the groups propaganda and recruitment efforts has accelerated in the last year.

In June 2016, Iranian media reported that 18 people had been arrested after using the popular Telegram app to join ISIS. Two months later, a military leader reported the killing of two ISIS members in the Western province of Kermanshah in clashes with security forces. Then, Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi said his forces had prevented 1,500 Iranians from joining ISIS.

Just days before the deadly June 2017 attack, authorities in the eastern province of Nangarhar in Afghanistan released a video in which a man, introduced as Yasser from the Iranian province of West Azerbaijan, claimed to have joined ISIS via the app Telegram. The recent release of the Al-Qatada video might signal an ISIS effort to further target Iran with terrorist attacks just as it stands on the edge of losing its last territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria.

The group will continue to have major difficulties for recruitment in Iran. Many Iranian Sunnis are under the influence of their official imams and religious leaders who, as the example of Mowlana Abdulhamid shows, often work hard to fight against Takfiri influences. The anti-government and regionalist efforts in Kurdistan and Arab-populated Khuzestan have historically been secular and nationalist.

Baluchistan seems to be the only region in Iran where Sunni radicalism has a foothold (and its capital, Zahedan, was the scene of a major terrorist attack in 2010). But even there, local, regionalist groups will be a serious rival for any outside group.

As ISIS furthers its Sunni-aimed propaganda, however, the Iranian authorities and society will need to remain vigilant. Despite existing discrimination toward Sunnis, senior Islamic Republic figures do not publicly malign or attack them. (This is in contrast to the pressure put on Shias in many Sunni-majority countries, especially Saudi Arabia. There, the Grand Mufti openly accuses millions of Saudi Shias of being unbelievers.)

Ayatollah Khamenei, Irans supreme leader, issued a fatwa back in 2010 banning any insult against Aisha, a favorite wife of the Prophet Mohammad who, after his death, fought against the forces of Ali, the first Shia Imam. The same fatwa extended the ban to insults against symbols of our Sunni brothers.

This is important, as occasional Shia sermons do include rants against Aisha, who Sunnis hold dear as the Mother of Muslims. Sectarianism has undoubtedly been used to bolster Shia militias as they fight in the territories of Iraq and Syria, filled with the holiest of shrines for Shias.

YouTube abounds with anti-Sunni rants by charismatic Persian-speaking preachers. Some Shia mosques in Iran organize festivities on the anniversary of the killing of the caliph Omar, sacred to the Sunnis, and celebrate his assassin, who is said to have been of Iranian descent.

But Iranians must understand that any fanning of the flames of sectarianism can have grave consequences that they will come to regret.

This article is adapted from one by Arash Azizi that appeared originally on IranWire.

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ISIS Turns its Gunsand Propaganda Machineon Iran - Daily Beast

That said, any crisis that occurs is likely to be less severe than the 2008 catastrophe that struck the United States because Iran generally has much less debt in its economy. But the threat remains significant.

The prospect of a banking crisis is so serious that in a speech earlier this year, the head of Iran's central bank, Valiollah Seif, warned financial executives that non-performing loans were a threat to all the gains the Rouhani government is making on the economic front. While he has proposed possible solutions, nothing has been agreed upon.

Turquoise's fund has no bank holdings Rabii said he exited the sector three years ago. He said he believes the central bank may need to intervene in the next 18 months to stave off a major threat.

Year-to-date, Turquoise's signature fund is up 12 percent, easily outpacing Tehran's main benchmark, which is up 3 percent. Turquoise has holdings in Iranian industrials, refined petroleum and the chemical sector.

"We have seen a big increase in European corporations coming to Iran, although inflow of foreign portfolio investment is still slow," he said. "It's better than it was, but it is still slow."

Read the rest here:
Iran already has a lot of problems, and the next one could be a banking crisis - CNBC

In testimony before a House committee Tuesday, the youngest son of a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran a decade ago urged greater sanctions on Iran if it does not account for his father and release U.S. citizens imprisoned in the country.

Doug Levinson, who was 13 when Robert Levinson was last seen on Irans Kish Island, described being crestfallen that his father was not among five Americans freed as part of a prisoner swap to accompany the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal in 2016.

Do not let Iran off the hook. They know exactly where he is, Doug Levinson told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee. Hold their feet to the fire. Threaten them with sanctions. Do something. Do anything.

Levinson was among three relatives of Americans imprisoned or missing in Iran who testified in support of a House bill calling for their freedom on humanitarian grounds. On Friday, the White House said President Trump is prepared to impose new and serious consequences on the country if they are not released and returned.

[With U.S. scholars conviction, power struggle escalates between hard liners and president in Iran]

Iran is known to be holding at least four U.S. citizens and two permanent residents of the United States. U.S. officials have never been able to ascertain the whereabouts of Robert Levinson, whose family is convinced he is still alive, although Tehran insists it has no idea where he is or what happened to him.

Levinson entered Iran to gather information on government corruption on a mission for CIA personnel who did not have authority to run such overseas operations. Ten agency employees were disciplined because of the Levinson case. Iran has never acknowledged holding him.

The other Americans have been accused of espionage, charges that their families and the U.S. government say are baseless.

My dad is innocent, and he will not be forced to do things against his will, including signing forced confessions, said Omar Zakka, whose father, Nizar, is an Internet-freedom advocate arrested in 2015 when he traveled to Iran for a conference. He is in the fifth week of a hunger strike protesting his imprisonment.

I fear for his life and safety, his son said.

Iran has used Americans as bargaining chips ever since the 1979 revolution, when Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy and held 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. Only this month, Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he accessed thousands of archived documents relating to his research on 19th- and early-20th-century Iran.

The prisoner swap that accompanied the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal in 2016, buying freedom for five Americans including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, brought bitter disappointment for the families of those who were left behind.

Babak Namazi told the committee he was devastated that his brother, Siamak, was not among the Americans flown out of Tehran that night with the others. Their father, Baquer, a former UNICEF official, was arrested in early 2016 when he went to Tehrans Evin prison hoping to visit Siamak. In October, father and son were sentenced to 10 years in prison for cooperating with a foreign government, meaning the United States.

[Trump promised not to let Iran jail Americans. When will he help free my father and brother? ]

Namazi said his fathers health is declining, and his brother, who has spent most of the past two years in solitary confinement, has grown despondent waiting for their release. He fears time is running out.

The whole thing is crazy, he told a small group of journalists Tuesday morning. The whole thing is beyond comprehension.

Last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told CBS News that the elder Namazi was not behind bars but also that he was not free to leave the country. But Babak Namazi said his father, who has been taken briefly out of prison twice to be hospitalized, remains in Evin.

Several Iranians are in U.S. prisons on sanctions-related charges. In recent weeks, officials in Tehran and Washington have suggested they may be willing to make a deal over the prisoners. Their fate has been brought up during bilateral meetings between U.S. and Iranian officials monitoring the nuclear deal and by allies from other countries who have met with Iranians.

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Son of American who disappeared in Iran pleads: 'Do something. Do anything.' - Washington Post