Arizona Proclamation April 12, 2017
To urge the United States Government to confront the main source of international terrorism sponsored by the Government of Iran and designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization responsible for the deaths of hundreds of members of the United States Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places.
WHEREAS, designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1984 by the US State Department, Iran has remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism because of IRGC’s financial, material, and logistic support for terrorist and militant groups throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.
WHEREAS, IRGC’s continued engagement in terrorism has had a direct impact on undermining international efforts to promote peace, economic stability in the Persian Gulf, and the growth of democracy;
WHEREAS, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford, the IRGC is responsible for the deaths of more than 500 members of the United States Armed Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including by providing Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFPs) to terrorist Shia militias in Iraq, intended to target U.S. military forces;
WHEREAS, the Government of Iran and the IRGC have been responsible for the repeated testing of illegal ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear device, including missile tests in October and November 2015, March 2016, and January, and February 2017 in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions;
WHEREAS, the IRGC is complicit in the ongoing slaughter of the people of Syria as it maintains support for, and seeks to preserve, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of displaced citizens of Syria;
WHEREAS, the IRGC have long been suspected of being behind the “Chain Killings” from 1988 to 1998, where over 80 Iranian intellectuals and dissidents were killed;
WHEREAS according to detailed information released by the Iranian opposition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran in February 2017, the IRGC has at least 14 terrorist training centers in Tehran and other Iranian cities, where foreign nationals receive terrorist training before being dispatched back to Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen among other places;
WHEREAS, The United States holds the IRGC responsible for flagrant and persistent human rights abuses in Iran, including unlawful arrests, torture, imprisonment, and executions that are contrary to international standards and in violation of due process;
WHEREAS, according to the 2015 State Department Iran Human Rights Report, “The government and its agents reportedly committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, including, most commonly, by execution after arrest and trial without due process, or for crimes that do not meet the threshold of most serious crimes”;
WHEREAS according to the State Department report, “Commonly reported methods of torture and abuse in prisons included prolonged solitary confinement, threats of rape, forced virginity tests, sexual humiliation, threats of execution, sleep deprivation, electroshock, burnings, the use of pressure positions, and severe and repeated beatings”;
WHEREAS, the IRGC threatens the national security of the United States, American nationals, as well as United States allies;Now, therefore, be it resolved by the House of Representatives of Arizona to Condemn the IRGC and the Government of Iran for their actions in supporting and funding terrorist groups in the Middle East and beyond, and denying involvement in said group’s actions;And urges the US Government to publicly condemn such actions, and designate IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization as consequences for their support for violent terrorism.