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Tensions between the United States and Iran, boiling after the U.S. killed Gen. Qassem Suleimani on Jan. 3, have now returned to a simmer. Tehrans ineffective response seems calibrated to avoid a damaging reprisal. But Tehrans reluctance to risk further open hostilities suggests that it will return to its old playbook of asymmetric, indirect attacks against the U.S. The sweet spot for Iran is an attack that wounds the U.S. but has enough murkiness around ultimate responsibility that the Trump administration would struggle to justify a vigorous response.

Africa could be the site of such an attempted revenge tour.

Thanks to recenteffortsby its Middle Eastern rivals, Iran has lost some of the influence it began building across Africa almost immediately after the 1979 revolution. Tehrans networks still weave across parts of the continent, however, offering options that it could tap for an attack.

Hezbollah, Tehrans most formidable terrorist proxy, smuggles everything fromdrugs to peoplethrough West Africa. Major Hezbollah funders have business empires stretching intomultiple African countries.

Moreover, Iranian proselytization in countries such asSenegalandSudanhas created Shiite communities which, though usually small, likely contain some devotees willing to take Iranian orders. The founders of an influential, Iranian-backed Shiite organization in northern Nigeria, in fact, hoped to foment in their own country arevolutionlike Irans.

Before Suleimanis death, the Quds Force he headed was reportedly creating new African capabilities for retaliating against the Trump administrations maximum pressure campaign. Suleimani establishedterror cellsdesigned to hit U.S. and other Western targets on the continent.

Suleimanis death could slow this plan, but his successor, Esmail Qaani, reportedlyranthe Quds Forces Africa operations previously, suggesting he could seamlessly continue Suleimanis project. Iran has also used Africa before: Kenyan authorities have arrested Iranians for involvement in two separateterror plotsagainst Israeli targets in Kenya, so operations there would be a return to familiar territory.

Surely, Tehran recognizes that Africa is one of the easiest regions in the world in which to launch a deniable attack. African terrorist groups have proliferated recently, giving Iranplenty of choiceif it seeks a partner to serve as the face of an attack.

Nearly all African terrorists are Sunni and not natural allies for Shiite Iran, yet Tehran and al Qaeda have previouslyembracedecumenicism long enough to cooperate against the great Satan. Iran and Hezbollahhelped al Qaedalaunch the devastating 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and reportedly had links to theIslamic Courts Unionand its successor,al Shabaab, which are both Sunni terrorist organizations from Somalia.

The U.S.'s surveillance and intelligence capabilities are also morethinly stretchedin Africa than in the Middle East, and arumored drawdownof U.S. military personnel in Africa would heighten the challenge of defending against an Iranian plot on a continent three times larger than the Middle East.

There is, as well, a staggering amount of illicit activity in Africa; informal cross-border trade accounts for more than 40% of the continents GDP, for example. This creates enough noise to cloak terrorist undertakings.

The incapacity of many African governments hobbles their ability to disrupt terror activity on their soil; byone measure, 18 of the worlds 25 most fragile states are African. And the great cancer of many African countries,corruption, has already made terrorists jobs far easier there.

Africa has no shortage of potential U.S. targets for an Iranian-backed attack. For instance, thousands of U.S. aid workers operate on the continent, often in remote and insecure areas. In fact, terrorists already frequentlytarget aid workers.

Even the U.S. military presence in Africa has been vulnerable at times, as shown by the recent terrorist attack on a joint U.S.-Kenya military base thatkilled three Americans. Last year, the U.S. had 29 military sites on the continent, though not all of them are manned full time.

The Trump administrations killing of Suleimani has made Iran wary of openly provoking the U.S., but it is not going to abandon four decades of hell-raising now. Tehran may decide that Africa, sprinkled with Iranian networks, burdened with swathes of territory ungoverned by any legitimate authority, and target-rich, is just the right place for a series of deniable, asymmetric attacks against U.S. interests there.

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Where Will Iran Strike Back Against the U.S.? - Heritage.org

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates Irans enriched uranium stockpile has far exceeded the level allowed by its international nuclear deal, an aide to Irans nuclear chief said on Saturday.

Ali Asghar Zarean said that Iran has stockpiled 1,200 kilograms, or about 2,600 pounds, which is well beyond what the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers allowed.

Iran is increasing its stockpile of the enriched uranium with full speed, he said. The claim has not been verified by the U.N.s nuclear watchdog.

In November, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Irans stockpile of low-enriched uranium had grown to 372.3 kilograms (821 pounds) as of Nov. 3. The nuclear deal limited the stockpile to 202.8 kilograms (447 pounds).

Iran has routinely vowed to begin enriching its stockpile of uranium to higher levels closer to weapons grade if world powers fail to negotiate new terms for the nuclear accord following the U.S. decision to withdraw from the agreement and restore crippling sanctions. European countries opposed the U.S. withdrawal and have repeatedly urged Iran to abide by the deal.

Meanwhile, Iran is not ruling out negotiations with the United States even after an American drone strike that killed a top Iranian general, the countrys foreign minister said in an interview released Saturday.

Mohammed Javad Zarif told Germanys Der Spiegel magazine that he would never rule out the possibility that people will change their approach and recognize the realities, in an interview conducted Friday in Tehran.

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Iran Says Its Enriched Uranium Stockpile Is Far Beyond Allowed Amount - The New York Times

Irans powerful Guardian Council has purged many Reformists from the ranks of would-be candidates for the fast-approaching parliamentary elections, including many incumbents.

The council, controlled by hard-liners, vets hopefuls in all Iranian elections with the exception of city and village council polls. Its strict qualification procedures for the Feb. 21 vote have seen 90 current legislators sent out of the game, not to mention thousands of first-timers. Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaee cited "multiple grounds" on which candidates had been rejected, including alleged corruption, embezzlement, drug use or dealingand a bevy of other possible convictions and misconduct.

The widespread purge even prompted President Hassan Rouhani to strike out at the council.

"People favor political pluralism in elections," Rouhani said during a televised Cabinet meeting Jan. 15. "We cannot simply announce that 1,700 candidates have been approved and ignore the question of how many political groups those people represent. That's not what an election is about.

He likened the council to a shop where the owner claims diversity by "offering 2,000 items on his shelves, but all [are] the same commodity.

The 12-member council includes six senior clerics appointed by the country's supreme leader; the other six members are lawyers nominated by the judiciary chief and appointed only after winning parliamentary approval.

Rouhani's sharp rebuke of the council triggered a biting reaction from its spokesperson on Twitter.

"Causing an uproar over the vetting process is nothing new. But it is unfortunate to see the president at the forefront of such a campaign against the nation, Kadkhodaee said. He ended his tweet with a diatribe: "We didnt know, though, that what the president describes as purging other factions is, in fact, about disqualifying a candidate with a family association.

The spokesman's scorn alluded to an open secret, referencing the Guardian Council's disqualification of Rouhani's 34-year-old son-in-law, Kambiz Mehdizadeh, who had wanted to represent the northwestern constituency of Tabriz.

The tit-for-tat exchange was still far from over. Rouhani's office came out with a statement lamenting Kadkhodaee's comments as "ill-considered, hasty and petty.

It said, "While the president's criticism was meant to boost national unity and voter turnout, the Guardian Council's spokesman reduced the issue to a personal matter with an unwise tone that revealed his approach toward elections.

The latest infighting among the ruling elites came against a backdrop of multiple crises Iran has been grappling with in recent months. Opinion polls say public discontent rooted in economic grievances and the state's handling of nationwide street protests in November have dramatically reduced Iranians' willingness to take part in the upcoming polls.

TheIranian Students Polling Agency has already painted a gloomy picture of what lies ahead. According to its report released in early January, as many as 49% of residents surveyed in the capital, Tehran, have absolutely no intention to vote, 26.5% of respondents said they would go to the ballot box only if the Guardian Council approves their favored candidatesand 55.1% also held a cynical view toward the electoral process, predicting it wont be a healthy one.

The opinion poll's grim results came even before the recent wave of public rage in Iranian streets against what many deemed the state's attempt to cover up the Jan. 8 downing of a Ukrainian passenger jetliner by an Iranian missile strike that killed all 176 on board, most of them of Iranian origin.

The Guardian Council's unprecedented purge of candidates has not even spared such senior politicians as Ali Motahhari, who served as parliaments deputy speaker for threeyears.

The official explanations for the wide-reaching removals drew criticism from parliament Speaker Ali Larijani.

"Some of those lawmakers have been disqualified on the grounds that they have not demonstrated practical commitment to the Islamic Republic. This is while I have been working with them on a daily basis for the past four or even eight years, and I have not witnessed such a problem in most of those people, he said.

Larijani, who has been at the helm of the Iranian parliament for 12 years, abruptly announced in late November that he would not run again for parliament. In defense of his fellow legislators, he urged "the gentlemen at the Guardian Council to practice the necessary shrewdness so that the rights of the candidates are not violated.

The heated political debate at the top echelons, however, does not seem to be shared by ordinary Iranians. Multiple woes faced by the Rouhani government the top one being the failure of the nuclear deal have deeply disillusioned the Iranian public, killing their expectations for the ballot box. What worsens the apathy is the perceived poor performance by many Reformist lawmakers, who won the 2016 elections and gained the parliamentary majority thanks to a remarkable turnout from a public hoping for change.

With those bleak factors at play this close to the election, Iran could be awaiting one of the least competitive electoral races in its recent history. Amid the anticipated low turnout, its no tough task, or a matter of speculation, to predict a winner. As Reformists and their supporters have been offered nearly no spot on the pitch, the vote is expected to see only like-minded conservatives and ultraconservatives battle it out for seats in their seeming win-win game.

Found in: reformists, conservatives, ukrainian jet, iranian protests, iranian parliament, iranian politics, hassan rouhani, guardian council, ali larijani

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Iran Iran pares election roster in favor of hard-liners - Al-Monitor

Countries tend to go to war when diplomacy fails. But Washington and Tehran are now facing off because it succeeded. It was because the 2015 nuclear deal was Barack Obamas proudest foreign policy achievement that Donald Trump was so determined to destroy it.

The US and Iran are sliding back towards the brink of conflict. If a missile had landed a little bit differently in the course of the latest exchange of hostilities, they would probably be at war by now.

As the pendulum has swung one way and then the other, the Guardian has tried to cover the diplomacy with the same depth and emphasis as the military manoeuvres, even when it seems slow-moving and complex.

When formal talks began between the Obama administration and the new government of Hassan Rouhani in September 2013, our foreign editor, Jamie Wilson, decided we should cover the whole process in detail because of the potentially historic nature of success, and the very high price of failure.

That began for me a 22-month odyssey, trailing the diplomats from a number of countries, many a time while perched uneasily in a hotel lobby waiting for them to finish an elaborate and expensively catered meal. My colleagues and I have wondered whether the negotiations might not have moved a bit more rapidly if the parties had been booked into a Holiday Inn Express.

On the other hand, you could add up all the room service and minibar bills over the months and it would still cost less than a brace of cruise missiles. Diplomacy always seems expensive until you consider the alternative.

There was something heroic, too, about the diplomacy back then. The US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, regularly worked into the earlier hours and everyone else had to follow suit. All that effort in the service of compromise is hard to imagine now.

I first got drawn into the endlessly complicated world of the Iranian nuclear programme through a stroke of luck. In July 2007 I answered the phone to an Iranian diplomat with a special offer. He said a rare opportunity had opened up would I like to be part of a small group of European and American journalists on a comprehensive tour of Iranian nuclear facilities? It felt, at the time, like finding one of Willy Wonkas golden tickets, but with a nuclear reactor at the end of the ride in place of a chocolate factory, and Irans combative, messianic president at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a very unlikely Wonka.

The nuclear programme had been enveloped in intrigue since 2002, when it was revealed that the government had secretly been building a uranium enrichment facility and a heavy water production plant both possible routes to a bomb.

At the time of the call from the Iranian embassy, the UN security council was days away from passing the first of many resolutions aimed at getting Iran to halt its programme. So when we met at the airport on 19 July, it was as if we were about to enter the eye of the storm.

The mystery tour became somewhat less magical on arrival in Tehran. The foreign ministry, which had invited the eight of us, assumed it had approval from the supreme leader, but it soon became clear that the military and the Revolutionary Guards felt they had not been adequately consulted. Items were crossed off our menu like the specials at a cheap diner at closing time. The enrichment plant at Natanz? That will no longer be possible. What about the heavy water plant at Arak? Ah, that was never possible. The interview with Ahmadinejad? An awkward silence.

Perhaps the low point was driving five hours south to Isfahan to be greeted by the news that the visit to the uranium conversion plant was off, but there was a very impressive steelworks nearby.

The happy outcome of the resulting standoff between mutinous journalists and resolute officials was that we had two days to walk around the old Persian capital, surely one of the worlds most beautiful cities. When Donald Trump threatened to target Irans cultural sites this month, it was Isfahan I pictured in flames.

In the end, the authorities relented and we were allowed into the conversion plant (where uranium is turned into a gas that can be enriched to make it more fissile), a cluster of squat yellow-brick buildings, in the semi-desert 10 miles from Isfahan, ringed by anti-aircraft batteries at the foot of sandstone crags.

Once we were inside, staring at gleaming machinery, the underlying absurdity of our trip became evident. We had no independent way of knowing what we were looking at. It could have been a vast dishwasher for all we knew.

The one exception to our collective cluelessness was spotting the red and black wires that stretched from a concrete wall to the giant white tanks full of uranium, passing through a brass seal. This was the safeguard by which inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) hoped to detect whether any uranium was being diverted.

The great unanswered question at the time was whether Iran had a weapons programme and how advanced it was. The US administration was trying to play down reports of covert weapons plots, not wanting to derail the overall deal, while it was the inspectors at the IAEA who were suspicious.

Their suspicions about these possible military dimensions were ultimately published as an annexe to an IAEA report in November 2011. The inspectors did find evidence of weapons design studies but also found there were no credible indications that they had continued beyond 2009.

As part of the July 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA), Iran pledged to cooperate in the IAEAs inquiries but with no fixed definition of what cooperation would look like. Its critics were also quick to point out it did not address Irans missile programme.

Nor did it have anything to say about human rights, an issue that was driven home to us journalists when one of our number, the Washington Posts Jason Rezaian, and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, were arrested in July 2014. A few days earlier we had gone for a pizza in Vienna, and he was talking enthusiastically about Tehran and Iranian food. He was held for 544 days on absurd charges of espionage.

For Rezaian now a Washington columnist and many of those who saw the worst side of the Islamic Republic, its cruelties are all the more reason to prevent it developing nuclear weapons, and bind it into an international agreement. For others, particularly on the American right, any deal that eased the pressure on Irans economy would make the west complicit in Irans oppression at home and aggression abroad.

In the end, all those years of diplomacy and all the delicate compromises of the JCPOA, by which the Iranians accepted nuclear limits for sanctions relief, came to naught. Tehrans nuclear programme is expanding again, and the US and Iran are back on the brink of conflict.

It is a chilling thought that no one in the US chain of command has the authority to stop Trump if he were to pick up the verification codes on the small plastic card (for some reason called the nuclear biscuit) that a US president always has close by, and order up Armageddon.

With that other extinction-level threat, the climate emergency, there is so much happening that it is impossible to keep up. But the nuclear threat is different: nothing happens until everything happens. By the time there is something substantial to report on, it could be far too late.

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Reporting on the Iran nuclear deal: 'nothing happens until everything happens' - The Guardian

As a newly-married but penniless student in the Afghan city of Herat, Mehdi recalls he had little idea how he was going to support his new family.

Pondering his meagre finances and surveying Afghanistan's bleak jobs market, he was at a loss until a friend made an unexpected offer.

The friend, who Mehdi declined to name, had recently returned from fighting with an Iranian-backed militia in Syria, called the Fatemiyoun.

The wages were good and fighters were rewarded with prized Iranian residency papers.

Desperate for money, Mehdi, a Shia Muslim from Afghanistan's Hazara ethnic minority who declined to give his full name, became one of what are estimated to be up to 50,000 Afghan volunteers of the Fatemiyoun brigade who have fought in the Syrian war since 2013.

The pro-Assad force organised by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been pitched into some of the most intense fighting of the conflict, as part of Tehran's campaign to help the Syrian regime recapture territory from opposition factions.

Battlefield communications obtained by the Telegraph suggest Afghan militiamen and their Iranian commanders are now fighting in Syrias final rebel stronghold.

I was in desperately in need of money to handle my life, Mehdi, now 26, recalled of his decision. Here, I had a friend who was a fighter and when he saw me in need of money and told me about a profitable job.

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Thirsty for martyrdom and a living wage: why thousands of Afghans signed up to Iran's shadowy war in Syria - The Telegraph