IranMiddle east

Trump team scours intel sent by Iranians as it weighs new sanctions

The team sees the Iran protests as a sign that its sanctions-heavy “maximum pressure” campaign is working.

Aides to President Donald Trump are weighing imposing new sanctions on Iranian officials implicated in human rights abuses, relying in part on intelligence gleaned from some 36,000 pictures, videos and other tips sent in by Iranians caught up in the regime’s recent crackdown on mass protests.

The Trump administration is also exploring new ways to help Iranians evade internet blackouts imposed by the regime in Tehran, people familiar with the plans said. It further is expected to dial up its own information campaign against Iran in the coming days, including a potential speech on Iran by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The Trump team sees the Iran protests as a sign that its sanctions-heavy “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran is working – fueling dissent among ordinary Iranians who will then pressure their leaders to spend more at home instead of their nuclear program or military actions outside Iran’s borders. The end goal: an Iran less threatening to the U.S. and its allies.

“The United States of America supports the brave people of Iran who are protesting for their FREEDOM. We have under the Trump Administration, and always will!” the U.S. president tweeted Tuesday from London, where he’s attending a NATO gathering.

The debate among U.S. officials now centers on exactly how to take advantage of the moment:

How much and how fast to further maximize the pressure campaign given the potential blowback in a region mired in crises. The U.S. and Iran barely avoided military confrontations earlier this year following attacks on oil tankers and Saudi facilities that U.S. officials blamed on Iran.

The immediate crisis soon passed, but the risk of confrontation remains high as the Trump administration seeks to starve the Iranian regime of revenue and as the president beefs up the U.S. military presence in the Middle East — by some 14,000 troops since May.

“If you do double down on the economic pressure, how will the regime respond? You have to be prepared for major escalation,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive officer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank close to the administration. He stressed that he wants the administration to exert more pressure.

A Trump administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, added: “There’s an emerging belief that these protests are not like the others. More convulsions are coming.”

Administration officials and their allies are aware that protest movements can go any number of ways, especially in the Middle East, from helping establish still-nascent democratic rule in a place like Tunisia to devolving into a vicious civil war in a place like Syria.

Aside from Iran, there are ongoing protests across Iraq and in Lebanon; the prime ministers of both those countries have resigned in a bow to demonstrators’ demands. While the Iraqi and Lebanese protesters have various grievances, some of their anger is over Iran’s influence in their countries. “Here is Lebanon, not Iran” some protesters have chanted; in Iraq, protesters have torched the Iranian consulate in the city of Najaf.

Iran has a history of mass protests, not the least of which led to its 1979 Islamic revolution and the end of its diplomatic ties with the United States. The cleric-led regime that has ruled since managed to quell protests in 2009 — known as the “Green Movement” — after a disputed election. It also clung to power despite a spate of protests across the country in late 2017 and early 2018, in which labor rights were a major issue.

Just how much these protest movements have been fueled by political demands, as opposed to purely economic grievances, is the subject of fierce debate among Iran watchers.

The latest protests were sparked in mid-November by the Iranian government’s sudden move to raise gasoline prices. The decision infuriated a population already battered by heavy U.S. sanctions imposed by Trump after he quit the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, but which also has seethed over regime corruption and mismanagement.

As the protests spread, the regime reacted violently. Its armed forces gunned down demonstrators, many of whom were unemployed or otherwise poor young men. The Islamist leadership also effectively shut down the internet for roughly a week, making it difficult for Iranians to communicate with the outside world or even with each other.

On Monday, Amnesty International put the death toll at 208; many observers suspect it is much higher. Thousands are believed to have been arrested, although the regime has been vague or dismissive of some of the reports. It has described the protesters as foreign-linked rioters.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke out relatively quickly about the protests; in a tweet sent Nov. 16, he told Iranians: “The United States is with you.” But he’s also downplayed the notion that U.S. sanctions were a driver in bringing people out to the streets, insisting Iranians are unhappy with their repressive government.

On Nov. 21, Pompeo issued an unusual request: In a Farsi-language tweet, he asked Iranians to send in photos, videos and other data that would help the U.S. expose and sanction abuses. A week ago, he said the U.S. had received “20,000 messages, videos, pictures, notes of the regime’s abuses through Telegram messaging services.”

The Trump administration official who spoke to POLITICO said the number in the days since had climbed to 36,000, with more data still coming. Now that Iran has begun restoring internet access, the number is likely to keep rising.

The official said that State Department has assigned staff to analyze the data, which he described as being tips about “people and places, both victims and perpetrators.” He declined to get more specific.

Analysts said U.S. officials from the intelligence services, the Treasury Department and other agencies also would likely play a role in sifting through the information and verifying it as they build dossiers of people they want to hold responsible for any abuses.

Already, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran’s minister of information and communications technology, over the internet shutdown. U.S. officials declined to say whom they would sanction next.

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