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TOP STORIES
The Trump White House is poised to ratchet up existing
sanctions against Iran and is weighing a much stricter interpretation
of the nuclear agreement between Tehran and major world powers. The
administration is inclined to adopt a "more rigorous application
of the tools at its disposal," a senior White House official
told Foreign Policy, referring to sanctions policy. Among the options
under consideration: broadening U.S. sanctions to include much larger
chunks of the Iranian economy linked to the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC). No final decision has been taken by the president
or the cabinet. But officials said some decisions will need to be
taken soon. On April 25, Iran and the six governments that negotiated
the nuclear deal with Tehran, including the United States, are due to
meet in Vienna for a quarterly review of the accord.
President Hassan Rouhani's popularity may not be enough
to win him another four years in office, according to the findings of
a poll released on Monday. While the majority of respondents in a
survey conducted by the Toronto-based company IranPoll have a
favorable view of the president, they also said that his first term
and the nuclear accord he championed have not improved the economy
and the living standards of average Iranians. More than 40 percent
said he's "somewhat likely" to lose the election and 14
percent said his defeat was "very likely."
At a wake in Iran's holy city of Qom in February, a
small group of Bahraini emigres and clerics mourned a young militant
killed in a gun battle with Bahrain's security forces. The eulogy was
delivered by an exiled Bahraini cleric who has called for the
island's Shi'ite Muslim majority to uproot the Sunni Al Khalifa
monarchy in a holy war. "The choice of resistance is widening
and spreading on the ground," said the cleric, Murtada
al-Sanadi, who has been named by the United States as a
"specially designated global terrorist" backed by Iran. The
ceremony shines a light on Iran's widening influence over an armed
fringe of the opposition in Bahrain, a country with a strategic value
that belies its small size. It hosts a U.S. naval base and is a close
ally of Saudi Arabia, Iran's main regional rival. A quickening tempo
of mostly crude bombing and shooting attacks has accompanied a
government crackdown, which culminated last year in the dissolution
of the main opposition bloc.
SANCTIONS RELIEF
Aryan's timing was impeccable: Months after he returned
to Iran from college in Canada, job offers started to pile up. A
decade of economic sanctions was drawing to an end in early 2016 as
he settled back home, prompting a frenzied chase for Iran's small
pool of white-collar professionals. "It's a battle for
talent," said Aseyeh Hatami, founder and managing director of
Iran's leading jobs website, Iran Talent. Those with skills "and
who are fit for a professional work environment are seized
immediately," she said. The thriving metropolitan upper middle
class that includes Aryan is a natural constituency for moderate
President Hassan Rouhani, the architect of the 2015 nuclear deal with
world powers that ended Iran's isolation, as he seeks a second term
at May 19 elections. Less clear is the degree of his support among
the poor, leaving him vulnerable to accusations by hardline critics
that his policies have failed to spread the benefits.
Hormoz Pasargad Bitumen Products Co. , Iran's biggest
producer of the asphalt material used to pave roads, plans to boost
output almost 15 percent in the next two years, with all of the
increased supply going to overseas buyers led by India and the United
Arab Emirates. Hormoz's bitumen production will grow to 4 million
metric tons a year, from 3.5 million tons currently, with exports
climbing to 2 million from 1.5 million tons, Managing Director Keyvan
Alaei said in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in
Tehran. Hormoz is in talks to ship on vessels of the the state-run
National Iranian Tanker Co. and European lines, he said. Iran is
boosting oil production a year after the easing of sanctions on its
economy, and this allows for greater output of byproducts such as
bitumen or Raw materials used in buildings and roads are set to
benefit as infrastructure investment in the U.S., China, India and
Europe is expected to rise 7.8 percent a year on average over the
next 10 years, or by at least $26 trillion spent in those regions by
2027, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report in March.
Iran's interior minister stressed the need for achieving
a free trade pact with Pakistan, saying closer economic ties between
the two neighbors will contribute to sustainable security along the
common border. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of
Iran-Pakistan economic cooperation in Tehran on Monday, Abdolreza
Rahmani Fazli said a target of the session is to hammer out an
agreement on free trade between the two countries. "We are
trying to increase the value of economic and trade exchanges between
Iran and Pakistan to five billion dollars," the minister added.
SYRIA CONFLICT
Iran, Russia, and Turkey plan to hold a trilateral
expert-level meeting in Tehran on Tuesday to exchange views about the
latest efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis, Iranian Foreign Ministry
Spokesman Bahram Qassemi announced. Delegations of military experts
from Iran, Russia, and Turkey are slated to participate in the
one-day talks in preparation for the next "Astana Meeting",
Qassemi said at his press conference in Tehran on Monday. He further
expressed the hope that the meeting, which would be held in
continuation of the recent talks between the three countries in the
Kazakh capital of Astana, would yield positive results. The spokesman
also said that representatives of Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara will
once again convene in Astana on May 3 to discuss the Syrian issue.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
A former director of Venezuela's Office of
Identification, Migration and Foreigners said that during his 17
months in the post, the socialist government gave at least 10,000
Venezuelan passports and other documents to citizens of Syria, Iran
and other Middle Eastern countries. In an interview with El Nuevo
Herald, Colonel Vladimir Medrano Rengifo said the operation was
headed by current Vice President Tareck El Aissami. He said most
passports and visas were granted in the Venezuelan Consulate in
Damascus, Syria's capital." Today we don't know where these
people are, nor what they are doing," said Medrano, who
currently resides in the United States.
Iranian defence minister Hossein Dehghan will visit
Moscow on April 25-26 and will take part in a security conference,
RIA news agency cited a source in the Iranian embassy as saying on
Tuesday. The agency also said Dehghan would meet Russian defence minister
Sergei Shoigu.
YEMEN CRISIS
Iran wants to turn Yemen into a "missile base"
from which it can threaten Saudi Arabia, according to a Saudi
general. Saudi Gen. Ahmed Asiri claimed Saudi Arabia prevented an
"Iranian plot" from threatening the country's security and
stability in an interview with Saudi Arabia's al-Arabiya news Sunday.
He added that the Iranians planned to use Yemen's Houthi rebels to
implement their scheme, allowing Iran to deploy missiles and use
Hezbollah suicide bombers against the country. Saudi Arabia "did
not need to wait for Yemen to become another missile base that
threatens the security and safety of Saudi Arabia, as the Iranians
planned to do, to turn Yemen into a military base, from which they
could attack the kingdom," said Asiri, who serves as both the
spokesman for Saudi operations in Yemen and as advisor to the defense
minister.
HUMAN RIGHTS
The Iranian authorities must urgently
stop the imminent execution of two long-time death row prisoners who
were children at the time of their arrest, Amnesty International said
today. One of the men, Mehdi Bahlouli, is due to be executed tomorrow
morning in Karaj's Raja'i Shahr Prison, after more than 15 years on
death row. He was sentenced to death by a criminal court in Tehran in
November 2001 for fatally stabbing a man during a fight. He was 17 at
the time of the crime. The execution of the second man, Peyman
Barandah, is scheduled to take place just three weeks later, on 10
May, in Shiraz Central Prison, Fars Province. He was arrested at the
age of 16 and spent nearly five years on death row, after being
convicted in August 2012, also for stabbing a teenager to death
during a fight.
After disqualifying the initial
reformist winner, Iran's conservative Guardian Council has now barred
most reformist candidates from running in the second-round election
for Isfahan's vacant parliamentary seat. The vote will occur when
Iranians head to the polls on May 19, 2017 to elect their new
president and city and village councils. Reformist politician Minoo
Khalegi won the February 2016 parliamentary election in Isfahan,
central Iran, after receiving the third highest number of votes in
the city. However, the Guardian Council, which vets all candidates,
nullified her victory in March 2016 after photos emerged of her
allegedly shaking hands with a man during a trip abroad.
DOMESTIC POLITICS
Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani criticized
registering candidacy for the presidential elections by individuals
who lack required criteria - he considered what happened in the past
days "here" as "a worldwide scandal and an a mockery
of the regime." According to Iran's official electoral
commission, more than 1,636 people have registered their candidacies
since the registration process began - it is a record score in the
history of presidential elections in Iran. IRNA agency reported that
only 32 of the candidates have a chance to pass the stage of revising
applications. During the period dedicated to receive candidacy
applications 11-15 April, the media revealed that hundreds of
candidates of various motives have turned over to submit their
applications, causing sarcasm in the Iranian street.
OPINION & ANALYSIS
The strikes ordered on April 6 by President Trump to
respond to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons attack
helped restore America's credibility in the region after years of
retreat. But if the president wants to really hurt Assad, he should
push back against Iran, the strongman's chief protector. Disrupting
Iran's airlifts to Syria by re-sanctioning its civil aviation sector would
be a good place to start. Even after the Iran nuclear deal reached in
2015, the United States can still use non-nuclear sanctions to
counter Iran's regional ambitions and ongoing support for terrorism.
In practice, however, this measure has been rarely used, especially
with regards to Iran's ongoing airlifts to the Assad regime and
Hezbollah. Regrettably, the deal lifted U.S. aviation sanctions
against Iran exactly at a time when the sector became vital to
Tehran's war efforts in Syria. Put simply: the deal has made it legal
to sell aircraft to airlines that are accessories to Assad's war
crimes and keep Hezbollah armed to the teeth. The president should
reverse this and bar any new aircraft from reaching Tehran until Iran
stops fueling Syria's civil war with its commercial airliners.
Despite Iran's important role in degrading IS, the
terrorist group has not been able to carry out any attacks inside the
Islamic Republic, unlike much of the rest of the Middle East, Europe
and the United States. Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic
Republic has been under constant domestic and foreign threats. As a
result, it has developed a sophisticated intelligence and
surveillance network that has effectively dealt with internal
threats. In terms of external threats, Iran prefers to fight them in
neighboring countries and has in those endeavors managed to prop up
and support various proxies including Shiite, Sunni and secular
groups across the region. Perhaps the most potent aspect of this strategy
to deal with external threats has been the streamlining of the
Iranian decision-making process.
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