MESOP MIDEAST WATCH: The Takeaway –  Can sanctions curb Iran’s protest crackdown?  

WASHINGTON — As Western governments continue to pile sanctions on Iran for its protest crackdown, there are few signs that its leaders are backing down.  AL MONITOR  26-1-23

If anything, the violence has turned deadlier. Tehran has resorted to public executions to quash nationwide demonstrations that have arguably posed the most serious challenge to Iran’s leadership since the 1979 revolution.

On Monday, the US Treasury Department responded with new penalties targeting 10 Iranian individuals and what it described as a slush fund for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Among those blacklisted were two IRGC commanders whose forces reportedly fired on protesters in the city of Javanrud using machine guns and heavy weaponry.

“If Iran continues to engage in these human rights abuses, we will continue to apply even more pressure on Iran,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price told Al-Monitor.

The US has so far issued nine rounds of sanctions, but Price acknowledged it’s difficult to prove whether the steady drumbeat of designations is having its intended effect.

The sanctions are mostly symbolic, given that the targets are unlikely to have financial assets in the United States or plans to travel there. But Henry Rome, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there is still value in naming-and-shaming Iran’s human rights violators.

“There’s benefit in showing that the US can reach deep into these organizations and pluck out individuals for scrutiny,” Rome said. “It’s within the realm of possibility that getting hit with sanctions or getting threatened with sanctions could make a member of the security forces think twice about doing something. But there isn’t any evidence to suggest that that’s happened.”

Such sanctions can also serve as a tool for getting credible information out about the protests and keeping the attention on rights abuses as the uprising fades from the headlines. Monday’s sanctions announcement, for example, accused the IRGC of shelling vehicles that were delivering blood bags to local hospitals treating the wounded.

The latest US sanctions were coordinated with the European Union and United Kingdom, which slapped sanctions on their own sets of targets Monday. Bijan Ahmadi, executive director of the Toronto-based Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, said there are other ways for the West to exert diplomatic pressure on the regime.

“The strategy can include revoking entry, study, and business visas for family members of Iranian officials, and those with business interests in the regime, exclusion of regime representatives from multilateral fora, and carefully targeted expulsions of Iranian diplomats from capitals,” Ahmadi said.

As Al-Monitor first reported, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for the Biden administration to impose visa bans on the family members of Iranian officials connected to the protest violence.

That violence has escalated since the demonstrations erupted in mid-September over the death in police custody of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini. According to the Oslo-based monitoring group Iran Human Rights, at least four people have been executed and some 481 people have been killed in the protests.

The brutal government response has taken a toll on the protest movement, which observers say appears to be waning in strength. Our correspondent in Tehran — whose name The Takeaway is withholding for security purposes — says the authorities’ clampdown, along with the cold weather, is keeping many protesters at bay.

“Many Iranians are now investing much hope in outside pressure,” our correspondent said. But if there are more executions or the economy gets much worse, “a resurgence of the protests could take place any moment.”