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Five of the men who launched an attack in the heart of Iran's capital previously fought for the Islamic State group, the country's Intelligence Ministry said Thursday, acknowledging the first such assault by the extremists in the Shiite power.

The attacks Wednesday on Iran's parliament and the tomb of its revolutionary leader killed at least 17 people and wounded over 40, stunning its people.

The ministry issued a statement on its website with bloody pictures of the men's corpses. It identified them by their first names only, saying they didn't want to release their last names due to security and privacy concerns for their families.

It described them as "long affiliated with the Wahhabi," an ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. However, it stopped short of directly blaming the kingdom for the attack, though many in the country expressed suspicion Iran's regional rival had a hand in the attack.

The men had left Iran to fight for the extremist group in Mosul, Iraq, as well as Raqqa, Syria the group's de facto capital, the ministry said. It said they returned to Iran in August under the command of an Islamic State leader and escaped when authorities initially broke up their extremist cell.

The ministry did not identify the men's hometowns, nor say how they were able to evade authorities. A woman suspected to be involved in the attack was arrested Wednesday.

Commuters in the Iranian capital noticed police on street corners and motorcycles, more than usual as dawn broke. That came after Mohammad Hossein Zolfaghari, a deputy Interior Minister, told state TV that "law enforcement activities may increase."

"We are focused on intelligence" gathering, he said.

The state-run IRNA news agency also reported Thursday that the death toll in the attacks had risen to 17 people killed, citing Ahmad Shojaei, the head of the country's forensic center.

The attack Wednesday as lawmakers held a session in parliament and at the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini shocked Iranians who so far had avoided the chaos that has followed the Islamic State group's rise in Syria and Iraq. Iranian forces are backing embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad while the Shiite power also is supporting militias fighting against the extremists in Iraq.

The attack came as emboldened Sunni Arab states backed by U.S. President Donald Trump are hardening their stance against Shiite-ruled Iran.

The White House released a statement from Trump condemning the terrorist attacks in Tehran and offering condolences, but also implying that Iran is itself a sponsor of terrorism.

"We grieve and pray for the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks in Iran, and for the Iranian people, who are going through such challenging times," the statement said. "We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote."

The comments sparked anger from Iranians on social media, who recalled the vigils in Tehran that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a tweet on Thursday called the White House comments "repugnant" and accused the U.S. of supporting terror.

"Iranian people reject such U.S. claims of friendship," Zarif tweeted.

Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard indirectly blamed Saudi Arabia for the attacks. A statement issued Wednesday evening stopped short of alleging direct Saudi involvement but called it "meaningful" that the attacks followed Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia, where he strongly asserted Washington's support for Riyadh.

The statement said Saudi Arabia "constantly supports" terrorists including the Islamic State group, adding that the IS claim of responsibility "reveals (Saudi Arabia's) hand in this barbaric action."

The "spilled blood of the innocent will not remain unavenged," the Revolutionary Guard statement said.

Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash told The Associated Press on Wednesday that "the Iranian government should not use the attack in a very polarized situation against Saudi Arabia or claim that Saudi Arabia is somehow linked to the attack, because it isn't."

On the streets of the capital Thursday, Iranians said they remained suspicious that Saudi Arabia had a hand in the attack. Some pointed to comments in May by Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of the King Salman and the kingdom's defense minister, who said his country would "work so that it becomes a battle for them in Iran and not in Saudi Arabia."

"I am sure Persian Gulf Arab countries are behind this," said Nahid Ghanbari, a 21-year-old university student studying accounting. "They have been angry about Iran's power in the region. They look for a way to destabilize our country."

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, used the attacks to defend Tehran's involvement in wars abroad. He told a group of students that if "Iran had not resisted," it would have faced even more troubles.

"The Iranian nation will go forward," he added.

The violence began in midmorning when assailants with Kalashnikov rifles and explosives stormed the parliament complex where a legislative session had been in progress. The siege lasted for hours, and one of the attackers blew himself up inside, according to Iran's state TV.

Images circulating in Iranian media showed gunmen held rifles near the windows of the complex. One showed a toddler being handed through a first-floor window to safety outside as an armed man looked on.

As the parliament attack unfolded, gunmen and suicide bombers also struck outside Khomeini's mausoleum on Tehran's southern outskirts. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to become Iran's first supreme leader until his death in 1989.

Iran's state broadcaster said a security guard was killed at the tomb and that one of the attackers was slain by security guards. A woman was also arrested. The revered shrine was not damaged.

Police on Thursday said they now held six suspects as part of their investigation into the attacks.

Reza Seifollahi, an official in the country's Supreme National Security Council, was quoted by Iranian media as saying that the perpetrators of the attacks were Iranian nationals. He did not elaborate.

Tehran's stock exchange fell nearly 2 percent Thursday after the attacks.

Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

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Iran says 5 Tehran attackers had fought for Islamic State ...

Kerry called the Iran deals monitoring processes a system thats working, according to the San Francisco Chronicle,and criticized President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress for pushing for new sanctions against the Iranian regime.

It doesnt make sense, folks, to risk a step that gets us nothing, Kerry said of proposed new sanctions onIrans ballistic missile program, according to theChronicle.

Kerry also blasted the Trump administration for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, the Obama administrations other major foreign policy legacy. He reportedly defended his 2014 remark that climate change was a weapon of mass destruction and a threat to national security. Scientists, people whose life is invested in this are telling you, This is growing in instability, and the threat is that whole parts of the ice sheet will break off., Kerry said, according to theChronicle.

As Breitbart News Aaron Klein reported a year ago, the Ploughshares Fundhas been sponsoring national security coverage at National Public Radio (NPR) since 2005, as well as several think tanks that supported the Iran deal. It is also, Klein reported, funded in turn by George Soross Open SocietyFoundations.

NPRs ombudsman foundit had not disclosed Ploughshares funding in reporting on the group and interviewing itspresident and sponsored experts.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the most influential people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author ofHow Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Photo: file

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John Kerry Defends Iran Deal in San Francisco to Soros-Backed ...

New York Times

Iranian Kurds Are Implicated in Terrorist Attacks in Tehran New York Times TEHRAN The Iranian authorities arrested 41 people Friday in connection with the twin terrorist attacks in Tehran this week, the semiofficial Fars News Agency reported, as evidence mounted that Iranian Kurds affiliated with the Islamic State had ... Islamic State rarely carries out terrorist attacks in Iran. How does Iran prevent them?Los Angeles Times Iran leaders accuse US, Saudis of aiding attackThe Recorder Iran arrests seven Tehran attack suspectsSBS News18 -USA TODAY -The White House all 2,230 news articles »

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Iranian Kurds Are Implicated in Terrorist Attacks in Tehran - New York Times

Fighters in the Sheikh Maqsood district of Aleppo, Syria, in 2013. CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY JACK HILL / THE TIMES / REDUX

For the first time since the Syrian civil war began, Iranian-backed militias appear to have secured a road link from the Iranian border all the way to Syrias Mediterranean coast. The new land route will allow the Iranian regime to resupply its allies in Syria by land instead of air, which is both easier and cheaper.

The road network, which starts on Irans border with Iraq and runs across that country and Syria, was secured last week, when pro-Iranian Shiite militias captured a final string of Iraqi villages near the border with Syria. The road link zigs and zags across the two countries, but it appears to give Iran direct, uninhibited access to Damascus and the government of Bashar al-Assad, which the Iranians have been supporting since the uprising there began, in 2011. Since then, the Iranians have been Assads primary backer, sending men, guns, and other material by air and sea.

The news of the Iranian breakthrough comes from officials in the Kurdish Regional Government, the semiautonomous area in northern Iraq, and from an expert in Washington who has been tracking the Iranians progress. Kurdish officials have briefed the Trump Administration on the developments.

The corridor is done, a Kurdish official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The Iranians can go from the Iranian border all the way to the Mediterranean. Officials with the K.R.G. oppose the Iranian road. In 2012, they rebuffed an Iranian request to transit their territory to Syria. They want the Trump Administration to help block it now. Its an Iranian road, Fabrice Balanche, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said.

The development is potentially momentous, because, for the first time, it would bind together, by a single land route, a string of Iranian allies, including Hezbollah, in Lebanon; the Assad regime, in Syria; and the Iranian-dominated government in Iraq. Those allies form what is often referred to as the Shiite Crescent, an Iranian sphere of influence in an area otherwise dominated by Sunni Muslims.

The Iranians have sought to create such a sphere since the end of the Iran-Iraq War, in 1988, which they saw as a Western-backed effort to destroy their regime. Thats why Iranians helped create Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that dominates Lebanon, and trained and directed Shiite militias that attacked American soldiers during their occupation of Iraq. The Iranian push into the Arab Middle East has helped aggravate the Sunni-Shiite schism that is fracturing the region. The attack in Tehran this week by ISIS militants is emblematic of the enmity with which Sunni militants regard the Iranian regime.

No Iranian trucks or other vehicles have apparently used the route yet, and no Iranian official has spoken publicly about it.

A senior American official who deals with the Middle East contested the idea that the Iranian corridor was open, saying that there were still many actors on the ground who could frustrate the Iranians efforts to pass. Its an extremely long way through Syria, and they would not control those roads, the official said, of the Iranians.

The road network makes its way across a long stretch of Iranian-friendly territorythe majority of it held by the Iraqi government, which has little leeway in opposing Iranian demandsand areas controlled by the Assad regime, in Syria.

Much of the Iraqi territory that hosts the road was until recently held by the Islamic State, beforeit was cleared by Shiite militias, whose manpower is largely composed of Iraqis often trained and directed by Iranian operatives. In Syria, many of the areas that make up the road network are held by Irans allies and proxiesincluding Hezbollah and Shiite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan, which have done much of the Syrian governments fighting.

The one potential obstacle to the Iran-Syria land route is the Kurds of Syria, who dominate the northeast corner of the country and who operate independently of the Kurds of Iraq. Much of the Iranian corridor runs through Syrian Kurdish territory. In recent years, the Syrian Kurds have engaged in a precarious balancing act to preserve their autonomy amid the chaos that has overwhelmed much of the rest of Syria. In practice, that has meant entering into what amounts to a nonaggression pact with the Assad government, an arrangement that has evolved at times into moments of explicit military coperation.

And it has also meant coperating with American and other Western forces in the battle against the Islamic State. Like other Kurdish groups in the region, the Syrian Kurds are mindful of the fact that almost every state in the regionin particular, Turkeyis opposed to their independence.

Kurdish Syrian officialssay that they dont wantany Iraqi Shiite militias to cross into their territory. Thats code for not wanting any Iranians, either. Irans allies are already bringing pressure to bear on the Kurds to coperate: In recent days, the Kurds have said that Russiathreatened themwith an attack by Turkish forces.

The Iraqi Kurdish official whom I spoke with told me he believed that the Iranian corridor was inevitable, unless the United States weighs in to stop itpossibly by pressuring the Syrian Kurds. Much of the future of the Middle East will depend on who wins the tug-of-war. Everything depends now on the Americans willingness to stop this, the official said.

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Iran Extends Its Reach in Syria - The New Yorker

LONDON International energy companies including Total, Petronas and Inpex, have presented technical surveys for the development of the Azadegan oilfield, an Iranian oil official was quoted as saying on Saturday.

Tehran is looking to ramp up its crude output and with 37 billion barrels of oil, the Azadegan field is Irans largest, shared with its neighbor Iraq. It is located in southern Iran, 80 km west of the Khuzestan provincial city of Ahvaz.

The managing director of Iran's Petroleum Engineering and Development Company was quoted by Mehr news agency as saying that France's Total, Malaysia's Petronas, and Japans Inpex Corp. <1605.T, > have offered their surveys on the field.

Noureddin Shahnazizadeh added that some other companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Italy's oil and gas group Eni, and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) are also interested in the tender for development of the oilfield.

Iran's oil minister said in May that the international tender for the Azadegan oilfield was underway.

(Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Alexander Smith)

MOSCOW The energy ministers of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan did not discuss any adjustments to output levels Kazakhstan agreed to as part of a global oil output deal, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak was quoted as saying on Saturday.

LONDON OPEC's battle against an oil glut is under threat as unsold crude from members Nigeria and Libya, which are exempt from a global production-cutting deal, is swamping the Atlantic Basin.

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Oil majors submit surveys to develop Iran's Azadegan - Reuters