The arrest of Cecilia Sala has so far gone completely unnoticed in the Iranian press. Almost ten days after the crime, none of the media outlets in Tehran, from the press agencies that are close to the Pasdaran Tasnim and Fars to the dailies that support the moderate president Masoud Pezeshkian, such as Shargh, Etemad and Ham Mihan, have reported the arrest of the journalist from Foglio and Chora News. One of the few recent articles of any importance concerning Italy is a long exposé, published in Shargh on December 7, on the very lengthy times, which sometimes extend well beyond a year, for the Italian Embassy in Tehran to grant student visas to the many young people who have obtained admission to Italian universities. Studies abroad are a particularly popular alternative for the young in Iran, where 84 percent of the population, according to a recent study produced by sociologists close to President Masoud Pezeshkian, are considering expatriation as the best solution for escaping the myriad economic and political crises gripping the Middle Eastern country.
The journalist visa to Iran that Cecilia Sala obtained in Rome was issued in a process that was probably faster, but not without its complexities. Journalists who intend to travel to Iran for work must apply with the diplomatic office of Tehran, controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. American journalists, in the absence of embassies, go to the headquarters of the UN mission in New York. The application is then forwarded to the foreign press office of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Ershad), known simply as Ershad in Tehran’s political jargon, the ministry that manages, among other things, the activities of foreign journalists in concert with a couple of private companies that handle reporters’ daily logistics. Within the Iranian journalistic community, it is believed that this is all done in tacit coordination with the Ministry of Information, the branch of the civil intelligence services formally incorporated within the government. Clearance from the Ministry of Information would be among the requirements for granting the visa, after a process involving three different ministries. If the results of all the checks are positive, the visa is attached to the passport of the media operator in question.
The Byzantine nature of this process has the effect of reducing the scope of journalists’ operations, often forced to follow official or unofficial red lines. However, it has also kept the number of non-Iranian journalists who have ended up in the crosshairs of the many – and very suspicious – amnesty departments, agencies set up to maintain domestic security, relatively low. Apart from moments of maximum crisis, such as the protests that followed the disputed elections of 2009, or the uprisings that arose from the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement of 2022, many of the journalists who have broken the rules of the game – drawn up in an often vague and arbitrary manner by the departments themselves – have been reprimanded, quickly expelled, and then blacklisted as no longer eligible to receive a journalist visa.
It is therefore difficult to attribute the arrest of Cecilia Sala primarily to the contents of a scoop she reported, to her observation of many women’s daily opposition to the imposition of the veil, or even to her effort to contact the many illustrious dissidents who are challenging the Islamic regime from within the Iranian capital, first and foremost Nobel Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, who is currently concluding a short three-week leave from Evin prison. This absence of domestic media implications suggests that there is not going to be a “thwarted” plot exhibited, as has often happened in the past, proving the newfound efficiency of the security apparatus after a torrid 2024 that was marked by several notable defeats, first of all the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh the day after Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration. The Italian ambassador Paola Amadei’s relatively quick trip to Tehran to visit Cecilia Sala in prison supports the thesis that we must look elsewhere to understand the reasons for the arrest of the Italian journalist.
Regardless of its relevance to the Cecilia Sala case, the December 16 arrest at Malpensa Airport of Mohammad Abedini-Najafabadi, who was identified by US magistrates as a supplier of drone technology to the Pasdaran, puts the spotlight on those Iranians who don’t have diplomatic passports but sometimes do have Western citizenship, who are arrested on a warrant from the US judiciary. In the case of Abedini, the US considers him complicit, together with another Iranian who holds US citizenship and was arrested in Boston, in the export and supply to the Pasdaran of drone technology that had contributed, among other things, to the killing of three US soldiers at the Tower 22 base in Jordan in January 2024. For reasons that are still unknown, Abedini was able to leave Istanbul’s airport without the international arrest warrant issued for him being enforced, which was instead executed in Italy.
Abedini’s arrival in Italy is most likely the result of recent European sanctions, which banned the national airline Iran Air from EU skies in mid-October, as well as the suspension of flights by the two remaining airlines operating direct connections between Tehran and Europe, Lufthansa and Austrian, due to the exchange of missiles between Iran and Israel. Since the day after the second Israeli air attack on October 26, Turkish Airlines has become the main outlet for international air transport from the Islamic Republic, currently offering between four and eight flights a day between Tehran and Istanbul. From there the Turkish national airline embarks for the countless destinations where the three million Iranians who have expatriated since then reside. In the past, Abedini could have relied on the decades-old direct connection between the Iranian capital and Geneva. Therefore, his presence in Italy may have been a result of circumstances, dictated by the few remaining options for connections between Iran and Switzerland, where he would have been safe from extradition to the United States, as he holds Swiss citizenship.
Thus, a resolution of the Cecilia Sala case will likely emerge from the tangle of sanctions the US and EU have implemented against the Islamic Republic, from the evolution of the long-distance challenge between the United States and the Pasdaran, and from what remains of the once cordial relationship between Italy and Iran. In the late 1990s, Lamberto Dini and Romano Prodi paved the way for a new path between the EU and the then reformist president Mohammad Khatami, after two decades of crisis triggered by events such as the bounty placed on Salman Rushdie and the assassination of Iranian dissidents in Europe. The nuclear deal of a decade ago temporarily ended the frost caused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s outbursts about the Holocaust and opened the door to a newfound understanding between the two countries. This led to several “system missions” to Iran by ministers of the Renzi and Gentiloni governments, and Renzi’s visit to Tehran in April 2016 following then-President Hassan Rohani’s visit to Italy in January 2016. Those were the times when Alitalia, already heading for its twilight, offered a daily connection between Rome and Tehran.
The arrival of Trump and his exit from the nuclear pact in 2017 led to a sharp cooling of relations, the interruption of Alitalia flights, well before the creation of ITA Airways, and an Italian embassy in Tehran which, according to what it has published on its social profiles, is currently occupied with the promotion of Italian art, culture and cuisine, in the absence of bilateral visits and direct contacts between the two governments. With the exception of a few occasional meetings between foreign ministers on the sidelines of events such as the UN General Assembly, and telephone contacts between Giorgia Meloni and the new chief executive Masoud Pezeshkian, relations between Iran and Italy have followed the substantial decline in relations between the Islamic Republic, the EU and much of the West. Meloni and Tajani’s interlocutors, such as Pezeshkian himself and his foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, are themselves intermediaries with the intelligence apparatus, or the Pasdaran, who could take over the case of Cecilia Sala if the theory of an exchange with Abedini were to be confirmed. This most likely explains Tajani’s call for caution and confidentiality and his emphasis on the “complicated” nature of the case.
The chill that surrounds relations between Iran and Europe will only ease if the Islamic Republic decides to negotiate a new agreement with Donald Trump. In the coming months, Tehran’s ruling apparatus will likely have to deal with the interruption of exemptions to US sanctions introduced by the Biden administration, which have allowed Iran to sell a good part of its crude oil and export electricity to Iraq. Should it decide to do so, Tehran will go to the negotiating table with few cards in its hand. The decline of the Axis of Resistance and the direct, albeit remote, conflict with Israel have removed the aces Iran had up its sleeve, thus it can only rely on uranium enriched well beyond the level stipulated in the 2015 agreement. The serious energy crisis, also triggered by the lack of development of the immense gas deposits under the Persian Gulf it shares with Qatar, due to technological sanctions, and the national currency’s constant losses against the main global ones, have exacerbated living conditions for a population that, according to some estimates, has removed as much as thirty billion dollars in cash from bank accounts and productive investments to hide under the mattress at home, fearful as everyone is of a new conflagration in the conflict between Iran, Israel and the West.
The Pezeshkian government, which includes architects of the 2016 nuclear deal such as Araghchi and Vice President Zarif, has achieved modest results so far, including suspending implementation of a law that imposes a harsh obligation to wear the Islamic veil, which is still avoided by many “unveiled” women, who also feature in writing Cecilia Sala produced before her arrest. After many months of lobbying, Pezeshkian has also obtained an initial relaxation in Internet filtering, ending limits on access to WhatsApp and Google Play, while other services used by millions of Iranians, such as Telegram, Instagram and YouTube, remain banned.
These are the constraints, certainly not positive, within which Italian diplomacy must now move to obtain, hopefully very soon, the release of Cecilia Sala.
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