New information has emerged in what appears to be a continued public relations war over an Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official who was nabbed and interrogated by the Mossad, with broad implications for US-Iran diplomacy.
Iran International TV in Persian provided significant additional details on Thursday about Mansour Rasouli’s connections with the IRGC.
It had been reported last week that the Mossad got Rasouli to admit that he was assigned to assassinate an Israeli diplomat in Turkey, a journalist in France, and most significantly for the diplomatic front, a senior US general in Germany.
News about an IRGC plot to kill a US general seemed designed to undermine any chance that the Biden administration would remove the IRGC from its Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list, a deadlock that could torpedo the Iran nuclear negotiations.
According to the report, Rasouli is a member of an external unit affiliated with the IRGC.
His origins are as a Kurd from the Hashemabad region near Ziwa in West Azerbaijan Province.
Rasouli’s unit launders money through a border cooperative called Dalapar, and in exchange for cooperating with the IRGC, is allowed to carry out illegal exports and imports, the report said.
Regarding illegal activities, the report said that the Rasouli family cooperates with the IRGC in drug trafficking to Turkey and Iraq.
Loghman Rasouli, the brother of Mansour Rasouli, is the main shareholder of the Dalapar Border Cooperative and is in charge of the group’s activities in Iraq, the report stated.
According to the report, the leader of the group is Bahman Hatami, from the family of Pirut Hashemi, a member of the Heraki tribe, who died last year.
The Hatami family is known for being close to IRGC commanders and the regime, and the report noted, is also linked to the Rasouli-IRGC drug trade.
After the US added the IRGC to its FTO list in spring 2019, Pirut Hatami, along with several others, announced their support for the IRGC in a video and declared their connection to the IRGC, the report said.
The report has a photo of Sabah Rasouli, the commander of the IRGC’s Zivieh Brigade in the Urmia region and Mansour Rasouli’s cousin.
His other cousin was Adel Rasouli, a member of the IRGC who was killed in 1960 in a clash with the Peshmerga, Kurdish forces opposed to the Islamic Republic.
Another member of the group is Abed Fattahi, a representative of Urmia in the seventh and ninth parliaments and a member of the Rahrawan faction in the province, according to the report.
Fattahi is also a representative close to the IRGC tasked with developing its media operations.
Rasouli collaborated with Unit 840 of the IRGC Quds Force, responsible for the Islamic Republic’s overseas terrorist operations.
A week later, Rasouli denied the allegations against him and that he seemed to have admitted to in a video broadcast last week by Hebrew media. In a new video, he said he had been forced to confess under pressure from a gang, the report said.
Sources have said that the security services of the Islamic Republic have kept Rasouli in a safe house.
In the latest video, he claimed that his phone had been stolen and that other films of him might be released. The remarks suggest that the Mossad may leak other parts of his interrogation and reveal new dimensions of the IRGC’s plan for foreign assassinations.
Meanwhile, Iran seeks to downplay the incident in an effort to get the US to remove the IRGC from the FTO list.
Aspects of the report are based on a translation of the Persian report.