According to a U.S. official, the United States has taken control of three dozen Iranian websites, a move that is certain to escalate tensions before the resumption of nuclear talks in Vienna next month.
Several Iranian state-run news websites posted a statement saying that the FBI and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security had seized them as part of a combined law enforcement operation.
The Arabic-language networks Al-Alam News and Al-Kawthar TV, as well as the English-language news network Press TV, are among the impacted websites.
The Islamic Republic of Iran News Network stated in a statement that the action seems to be a part of a broader U.S. crackdown on news websites associated with what Iran refers to as the Axis of Resistance, which includes Hamas, Syria, Hezbollah, and certain Iraqi militias.
The American official did not elaborate. A request for comment was not immediately answered by the Justice Department, which was referred to by the U.S. State Department. Fox News was among the sources that first reported on the seizure.
In October, the United States seized 92 domain names that it claimed were being used for worldwide disinformation campaigns by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In a statement at the time, the Justice Department claimed that four of those websites were legitimate news sources.
According to the Justice Department at the time, that prior endeavor started with intelligence from Google and was eventually a joint venture between Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.
The seizure on Tuesday is probably going to create further anxiety for the upcoming round of nuclear talks on renewing the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which US President Donald Trump renounced in 2018. These talks are anticipated to take place in Vienna in the upcoming weeks.
The first six rounds of those negotiations, which are being conducted through middlemen like France and Russia, have seen progress, according to U.S. and Iranian officials. However, there is still a lot of mistrust, and the hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi’s victory in last week’s Iranian presidential election further strained the negotiations.
Raisi has called for the lifting of U.S. sanctions and asserts that the nation will not relinquish its ballistic missile capabilities, which the U.S. argues should be discussed later if the two nations return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear agreement.
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By Nick Wadhams and Chris Strohm
(c) Bloomberg L.P., 2021.
