The New Zealand Herald
The commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards yesterday threatened to deal heavier blows in future against the United States after Washington said it may label the force a terrorist group, according to news reports. Local press in Tehran quoted Revolutionary Guards leader General Yahya Rahim Safavi saying he could understand Washington’s ire towards the group because of their recent successes against the US.
The Guardian
Jabar Yawar, a deputy minister in the Kurdistan regional government, said four days of intermittent shelling by Iranian forces had hit mountain villages high up on the Iraqi side of the border, wounding two women, destroying livestock and property, and displacing about 1,000 people from their homes. Mr Yawer said there had also been intense fighting on the Iraqi border between Iranian forces and guerrillas of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), an armed Iranian Kurdish group that is stepping up its campaign for Kurdish rights against the theocratic regime in Tehran.
International Herald Tribune
Senior officials from the U.N. nuclear watchdog and Iran began their final round of talks in Tehran on Monday in efforts to resolve remaining issues surrounding Iran’s controversial nuclear program, state television reported. The talks are critical because their outcome is to be the basis for a progress report by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, before the agency’s key meeting in September.
The Sacremento Bee
For the first time, the U.S. military said on Sunday that Iranian soldiers are in Iraq training insurgents to attack American forces. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a top U.S. commander who is in charge of a large swath of Iraq south of Baghdad, believes there are about 50 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in his battlefield area, military spokeswoman Maj. Alayne Conway said. Conway said that U.S.-led forces have not caught any of the Iranians, but she said military intelligence and recently discovered caches of weapons with Iranian markings on them indicate that the Iranians are there.
FOX News
One of the hijackers of a Turkish plane received training at an Al Qaeda camp and wanted to be flown to Iran so he could eventually join Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported Monday, citing police.
Radio Free Europe
he wife of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in March while on a business trip to Iran, says she might travel to Iran to search for him. Christine Levinson told RFE/RL correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari on August 17 that she is planning the trip even though the State Department has advised against it. Iranian authorities have reportedly denied any knowledge of Robert Levinson’s whereabouts.
Breitbart
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is planning to make his first visit to Iraq, the highest level trip by an Iranian leader since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki invited Ahmadinejad after he visited Tehran earlier this month, the ISNA student news agency reported. “This invitation has been accepted and the preparation is underway. When the trip becomes definite we will make an announcement,” Mottaki said in Iran’s holy second city of Mashhad late on Sunday.
