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The Islamic State (IS) extremist group has recently expanded its campaign to recruit Iranians and disseminate its message to Persian speakers.

In late March, IS published a rare video in Persian in which it called on Iran's Sunni minority to rise up against the Shi'a-dominated Iranian establishment. The video was dismissed by Iran's state broadcaster as "nonsense" and an attempt by the group to cover up mounting losses in Iraq.

Since then, IS has published four issues of its online propaganda publication Rumiyah. Rumiyah, whose title means Rome in Arabic in an allusion to prophecies that Muslims would conquer the West, is already published in several languages, including English, Russian, French, and Indonesian.

Iran has deployed senior military advisers and thousands of "volunteers" in the past six years to help regional ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battle an armed insurrection that includes IS and other Islamist fighters as well as groups supported by Turkey and the United States.

IS advocates a radical Salafi version of Sunni Islam and regards Shi'a as heretics, and controls parts of Iraq and Syria under what it describes as a "caliphate."

Iran has also been active in the fight against IS in Iraq, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has reportedly advised Iraqi forces and is helping mobilize Shi'ite militias.

Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have said that their efforts will prevent IS from advancing onto Iranian territory. Officials in Tehran have warned that they would take "decisive" action if IS militants came within 40 kilometers of its borders.

"IS has published translations of selected essays and statements in Farsi [Persian], but this appears to be the first time it published Rumiyah in translation," Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (ICSR), tells RFE/RL.

But he notes that the group has been publishing Persian written materials and subtitled videos since 2015. Winter says the video and the Persian editions of the magazine "seem to be a logical progression in what was already happening."

The first edition of Rumiyah in Persian includes an article detailing why the group's violent ideology regards the killing of unbelievers as "halal" and a form of worship. The second issue features a bloody knife on its front page and gives tips about how to successfully kill unbelievers with a knife. The content of the magazines appears to be straight translations from Rumiyah's earlier editions.

Finding An Audience?

IS's online propaganda has been a key aspect of its strategy to attract new members or sympathizers and spread its message of terror worldwide. It has recruited thousands of followers from all over the world to travel to Syria and Iraq and inspired individual acts of violence elsewhere, frequently targeting large crowds.

The degree of the success of the propaganda among Iran's Sunnis is difficult to gauge. Analysts have suggested that the group's ideology holds little appeal for Sunni Iranians, who are estimated to compose 5-10 percent of a total population of 81 million and are routinely discriminated against or harassed.

"Salafism and Persian culture are like oil and water, they don't mix," says Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group. "Violent extremism is more a product of instability than its primary driver, and is due more to radicalization during crises than beforehand. None of these conditions apply to Iran, which is both stable and has strong state institutions."

Vaez adds that "groups like IS exploit disorder," adding, "There might be discontent within Iran's Sunni community, but that's not quite the same as disorder."

The relatively high turnout among Iran's Sunni-populated regions in the May 19 presidential and local elections, from 60 to 90 percent according to official figures, suggests to some that extremist propaganda falls largely on deaf ears.

IS Recruits From Iran

Yet some reports and increased warnings by Iranian officials suggest that the extremist group has managed to recruit among Iranians.

In June 2016, Iranian news sites quoted an unnamed "informed source" as saying that authorities had arrested 18 people who were using the highly popular Telegram app to recruit new members.

"Eighteen top [IS] managers of Telegram channels inside the country have been identified and arrested. Some of these people ran groups with hundreds of members," the unnamed source was quoted as saying. The exact time and location of the purported arrests was not clear.

In August 2016, the commander of the Iranian ground forces said that IS had recruited members from the Western province of Kermanshah. "They recruited some in Naft Shahr and Ghasr-e Shirin and western regions," Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan said, adding that two IS members had been killed in clashes with security forces. "They had been trained and had suicide vests."

The same month, Iranian Intelligence Minister Mahmud Alavi said that authorities had prevented 1,500 young Iranians from joining IS.

Iranian authorities have also claimed that they have thwarted several planned "terrorist" operations in public places in Tehran and other cities.

Last week, authorities in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nangarhar, where IS has reportedly been active, issued a video in which a man claimed he was from Irans West Azerbaijan Province and had joined the group via Telegram, which is believed to have millions of users in Iran.

"In the name of god, I am Yasser from Iran, from West Azerbaijan. I joined Daesh via the app Telegram," the young man said, using a common but controversial label for IS.

He claimed an unspecified number of Iranians had joined the group in Nangarhar. Shortly afterward, Afghan lawmaker Hazrat Ali said that about a dozen IS fighters are active in that region.

"The information I now have says 10 or 12 Iranians are operating in the region comprising the homeland of the Shinwari tribe, such as Achin district," Hazrat Ali, a member of the lower house of the Afghan parliament, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan on May 30. "In the past, the number of Iranian fighters in [IS] exceeded 100, but I am not sure about where they went or what happened to them."

RFE/RL could not independently verify his claim.

Winter says Iranians among IS ranks are often forgotten about, even though, according to his research, they are relatively well represented in IS's suicide-operation statistics.

A report Winter authored for The Hague-based International Center for Counterterrorism (ICCT) claims that seven Iranians carried out suicide operations in Iraq and Syria from December 2015 to November 2016.

"Iranian fighters are rarely, if ever, featured in IS video propaganda, so it is only in suicide bomber eulogies that they come up -- and these images usually go under the radar because there are so many of them. It is not possible to know what language they speak," Winter says.

Vaez calls IS a "serious threat to Iran,... but not a homegrown one, given the limited appeal of its ideology within the country's Sunni minority."

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IS Propaganda Increasingly Targeting Iran And Its Sunnis - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Former Secretary of State John KerryJohn KerryKerry: New Iran sanctions may be dangerous Trump reignites debate over travel ban Kerry on London: 'Every American feels as if we were attacked also' MORE says it would be dangerous to impose new sanctions on Iran so soon after the negotiation of an international nuclear deal.

Speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser, Kerry argued that new sanctions could be seen as a provocation by Iran.

If we become super provocative in ways that show the Iranian people there has been no advantage to this, that there is no gain, and our bellicosity is pushing them into a corner, thats dangerous and that could bring a very different result, said Kerry, who led U.S. negotiations on the deal under former President Obama.

The Associated Pressreported on his remarks.

The Iran nuclear deal relaxed international sanctions on Iran in exchange for commitments from Tehran meant to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

Kerry also said he hopes President Trump listens to top advisers such as national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis.

My hope is that they would in fact not just be the adults in the room but that they would be listened to, he said of Mattis and McMaster.

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Kerry: New Iran sanctions may be dangerous - The Hill (blog)

WASHINGTON

For many, the whereabouts and machinations of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks until his death remain shrouded in mystery.

The terror mastermind had been on the run, trying to evade U.S. forces, while al-Qaida itself was in a period of disarray.

Yet even as U.S. Navy SEALs burst into bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011 and killed him, things already had begun to change with the help of officials in Iran and Pakistan.

"It's a very, very crucial period that always has been overlooked and misunderstood," said Catherine Scott-Clark, co-author of the new book The Exile: The Stunning Inside Story of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida in Flight.

There have been some prior insights into bin Laden and al-Qaida during his years on the run, including the release by U.S. intelligence of three tranches of documents recovered from the Abbottabad complex. But many more remain classified.

Those documents, according to U.S. officials, give insights into a paranoid jihadist, hoping to prevent al-Qaida from falling apart.

"The movement is nothing like unified. It disagrees with itself all the time," a senior U.S. intelligence official said of the second set of declassified documents, most of which date from 2009 to 2011. "You got to see the mess it was behind the scenes."

But Scott-Clark and co-author Adrian Levy tell a more nuanced story of bin Laden's exploits, relying on testimony from his family, his deputies, his spiritual adviser, and others with links to the al-Qaida network.

"He was active and ambitious and happy that al-Qaida was on the up and coming back, and money was flowing through and the affiliates were kind of getting under control and doing what he wanted them to do," Scott-Clark told VOA following a discussion Monday at the Brookings Institution. "Things were continuing. It was business as usual."

Scott-Clark attributes much of that success to alliances bin Laden had forged with some current and former officials in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, although she emphasized that key officials were kept in the dark.

Pakistani authorities have denied that any officials had any knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts. Scott-Clark said that the information was closely held.

"Not everyone has the same level of knowledge and people did not share information," she said. "If you look at the fallout after the killing [of bin Laden] and the way that the army and the ISI reacted by just shutting everything down, they were as shocked as everybody else."

Perhaps more important, bin Laden and al-Qaida got a boost from Iran an unlikely ally that kept several family members, including some of his wives and his son, Hamza, as well as key members of al-Qaida's Shura, or ruling council, held at a Quds force training compound in Tehran.

After an offer was reportedly rebuffed to hand over the family and al-Qaida leaders to the U.S. or other Western nations in exchange for an easing of sanctions, Tehran took a more proactive approach and "negotiated with al-Qaida to mutual benefit."

"It was a fraught relationship, from the people who were in Iran from al-Qaida that I interviewed," Scott-Clark said. "It went up and down all the time, and there was complete mutual distrust on both sides for the whole time that they were there."

But both sides, she said, were able to get some of what they wanted. Iran was able to use al-Qaida and al-Qaida in Iraq the forerunner of Islamic State to create problems for U.S. forces in Iraq. And bin Laden and al-Qaida were able to reinvigorate the group's networks, setting up a comeback that has yet to abate.

"They were able to re-establish a funding pipeline through Iran which still exists today," Scott-Clark said. "These days, the money comes from Kuwait and Qatar and goes to Syria and Iraq. A lot of it used to go to Pakistan."

Yet divisions with al-Qaida remained.

Bin Laden, enamored by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, wanted "to fight a physical war. He wanted the bigger bangs," according to Scott-Clark.

That vision seems to have died with bin Laden, Scott-Clark says, and was replaced by that of his former deputy and current leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who sees al-Qaida as a means for inspiration.

"I don't think al-Qaida Central is going to carry out a sort of coordinated home-based mass attack. I think those days are gone," she said. "It's all about PR [public relations]."

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Iran, Pakistan Crucial to al-Qaida's Long-term Success - Voice of America

The Iran sanctions bill was crafted as a response to Tehran's human rights abuses and its backing of terrorist-designated groups. | AP Photo

By Elana Schor

06/05/2017 07:46 PM EDT

Updated 06/05/2017 09:09 PM EDT

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday night teed up a vote this week to take up a bipartisan Iran sanctions bill, which also sets up potential battles over sanctioning Russia and blocking some of President Donald Trump's proposed weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

The Iran sanctions bill was crafted as a response to Tehran's human rights abuses and its backing of terrorist-designated groups.

Story Continued Below

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and the committee's top Democrat, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, have agreed to pursue legislation punishing Russia for its meddling in the 2016 election without the use of sanctions, but senators in both parties have vowed to push a debate on sanctioning Moscow regardless particularly given Thursday's hotly anticipated testimony from former FBI Director James Comey about Trump's efforts to shut down the bureau's Russia investigation.

In addition, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) may yet use the Iran bill as a vehicle to force a vote on their resolution blocking about $500 million in Trump-blessed weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

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Paul and Murphy are targeting their efforts toward a small group of offensive arms sales, citing humanitarian concerns that the weapons would be used to fuel the violent civil war in Yemen.

The Trump administration on Friday walked back a previous suggestion that it might revisit existing sanctions against Russia. But White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short told reporters Monday night that he is not yet not prepared to outline the president's position on sanctions against Moscow or Tehran, adding that more information is expected this week.

Matthew Nussbaum contributed to this report.

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McConnell calls up Iran bill as possible Russia and Saudi votes loom - Politico

LONDON Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei lashed out on Sunday against U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's leaders for their new regional alliance against Tehran, saying it would bear no fruit.

Trump singled out Iran as a key source of funding and support for militant groups during his visit to Saudi Arabia in late May, two days after the Iranian election in which pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani won a second term.

During Trump's visit to Riyadh, the U.S. sealed a $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Iran's regional arch-rival.

Khamenei called the visit a display of brazenness.

"The U.S. president stands alongside the leaders of a tribal and backward system and does the sword dance, but criticizes an Iranian election with 40 million votes," the supreme leader said in a speech broadcast live on state TV.

"Even with a multi-billion dollar bribe to America, the Saudis cannot achieve their goals in the region," he said.

Khamenei accused Washington of double standards, saying it turned a blind eye to the "killing of Yemeni people in mosques, streets and their homes," while claiming to promote human rights around the world.

Saudi Arabia is leading a Sunni Arab coalition fighting the Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen, part of the same regional power struggle that is fuelling the war in Syria.

The Iranian president championed a nuclear deal with the United States and five other major powers in 2015 that led to the lifting of most sanctions against Iran, in return for curbs on its nuclear program.

The landmark deal, however, has not led to normalization of ties between the two countries that Tehran hoped for.

Trump has frequently called the agreement "one of the worst deals ever signed" and said Washington would review it.

European countries, Russia and China have expressed concern that the Trump administration might withdraw from the deal.

"European leaders are now saying the Americans are not trustworthy. Imam Khomeini said the same thing more than 30 years ago," Khamenei said at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, marking the 1989 death of the founder of the Islamic Republic.

Relations with Washington were broken after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution and enmity to the United States has long been a rallying point for hardline supporters of Khamenei in Iran.

Khamenei hailed the high turnout in the election, saying that it showed the majority of Iranians still supported the Islamic revolution and its uncompromising values.

(Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

SYDNEY Australian police on Monday shot dead a gunman in the city of Melbourne who had been holding a woman hostage, police said, a confrontation for which the militant group Islamic State claimed responsibility.

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Iran's leader lashes out at Trump, Saudis for anti-Tehran alliance - Reuters