The Iranian regime’s suppressive forces and intelligence agents attacked, injured and arrested many members of dervishes community as they assembled to protest outside Tehran’s Prosecutor’s Office for the second day.

Some 800 people, including many children and elderly, have been arrested during Saturday and Sunday. A number of the arrestees were transferred to notorious Evin Prison.

The attacking forces and intelligence agents battered the dervishes using electric batons and humiliated them.

Following yesterday’s arrests, a large number of dervishes from various cities travelled to Tehran to express their solidarity with those arrested. They assembled near the regime’s Prosecutor’s Office in Behesht Street since this morning, September 21.

 NCRI News 

NCRI – Mullahs’ judiciary chief: Who is [the UN] Secretary-General to tell us stop the executions; these words are cheap, baseless and lack reasoning. Executions for corruption on earth is an internal matter.

On Thursday, September 17, 2014, at least 17 prisoners were hanged in cities across Iran, including five in public. The executions were carried out in cities of Shiraz, Marvdasht, Kerman and Bandar Abbas. A group of four prisoners were hanged in public in Shiraz while another group of eight sent to gallows in Shabab Prison in city of Kerman.

The Thursday’s executions followed reports of more executions that had been carried out in other cities in Iran. A group of seven young men, mostly in their 20s, were executed on September 10 in cities of Karaj and Hamadan.

Frontpage Mag

 NCRI News  U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has asked the Iranian regime to release all political prisoners and journalists including the Washington Post’s reporter and his wife who are being held in Iran.

Ban Ki-moon said in an interview that he spoke with the Iranian regime’s foreign minister in a closed-door meeting on Thursday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session.

Ban said that he brought up the case of the two detained journalists and urged Javad Zarif not only to release the two reporters, but also to free other political prisoners in Iranian jails.

“Why don’t you release them?” he recalled asking the Iranian diplomat, during an interview in his 38th-floor office atop the U.N. headquarters building.

There is no doubt that the Islamic State (ISIL) – the nascent caliphate being set up by ultra-extremist fighters in Syria and Iraq – is a serious threat to all Western democracies and to the peace and stability of the world. All reasonable observers, of all whatever political hue, agree upon this fact. What is nonetheless a matter of dispute is how best to meet that threat. And far too many commentators are already committed to the notion that we can drive ISIL out of existence by simply bombing its captured territory and partnering with enemies or adversaries, whatever form they may take.

The tactics of ISIL are so shocking, the content of its rhetoric so unqualified that we can’t help but focus upon them. But recognizing the threat does us little good if we fail to assess it in its proper context. We can supply massive quantities of arms to the Peshmerga and bomb ISIL positions to oblivion, but we equally must confront and grapple with the root cause of this threat.

Al-Manitor

Remember Iran? The dominant foreign policy issue of the past year has fallen by the wayside as Congress focuses on the rise of the Islamic State (IS). Republicans who just months ago vowed to use every tool at their disposal to force a vote on new sanctions in the Senate have shelved those plans, and even the GOP-controlled House isn’t scheduled to hold a single hearing before the midterm elections. The shift in focus has given President Barack Obama’s negotiating team welcome breathing room as it pursues a nuclear deal in Vienna, even as congressional skeptics fret that Iran will take advantage of the lull in attention.

“The negotiators need the room to work,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations panel on the Near East. “And I think maybe a little bit less pushing and pulling from this angle may help that work be done.”