Page 2 - B Tehran News Today

Russia is mulling sending fighter jets to Iran as part of an expanding military alliance that has seen Tehran ship artillery and tank rounds to Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, the White House said Friday.

Forty-four years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Tehran is once again feeling the wrath of its citizenry. Then, it was the Shah and his "modern ideals" the people sought to, and successfully did, overthrow. Now, a different regime -- the Islamic Republic -- is in power and in the people's crosshairs.

Thousands of university professors are calling on the White House to hold Tehran's hardline regime accountable as Iranian security forces crack down on student protestors.

Iran has rapidly and unexpectedly emerged as Russia's most reliable wartime partner, providing drones and missiles for its brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians, on-the-ground tech support for its flight operators, and even turbines to help Russia's gas industry skirt Western economic sanctions.

Pentagon officials said Thursday that Iranian troops are on the ground in Ukraine assisting Russian forces with drone strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure and other targets, marking a major escalation in Tehran's involvement with the war and its close military partnership with the Kremlin.

Fierce nationwide protests that have gripped Iran for the past month mark an inflection point for the country, said the leaders of a powerful exile Iranian dissident group on Wednesday. They urged the United Nations and governments across the globe to immediately expel all Iranian diplomats and escalate pressure on the theocratic regime in Tehran.

U.S. officials said their current priority is supporting Iranian protesters rather than pursuing stalled talks with Tehran on the troubled 2015 Iran nuclear deal that President Trump canceled and President Biden vowed to revive.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are condemning the Iranian regime after the death of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran's religious "morality police" earlier this month for allegedly wearing her headscarf too loosely in violation of the Islamic Republic's dress code.

Iran launched dozens of missile and drone strikes at Kurdish positions in northern Iraq that are believed to have killed or wounded almost 40 people. Wednesday's attack, the fifth in as many days, resulted in a sharp rebuke from U.S. officials who called it an "unjustified violation of Iraqi sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Iran on Monday accused the U.S. and Europe of directly fueling the deadly popular uprising that has gripped the Islamic republic over the past 10 days, while the West threatened new economic sanctions on Tehran and called for an immediate end to the "brutality" with which Iranian security forces are treating protesters.