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The U.S. Senate voted nearly unanimously on Thursday for
legislation to impose new sanctions on Russia and force President
Donald Trump to get Congress' approval before easing any existing
sanctions on Russia. In a move that could complicate U.S. President
Donald Trump's desire for warmer relations with Moscow, the Senate
backed the measure by 98-2. Republican Senator Rand Paul and Bernie
Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, were the
only two "no" votes. The measure is intended to punish
Russia for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, its annexation of
Ukraine's Crimea region and support for Syria's government in the
six-year-long civil war. If passed in the House of Representatives
and signed into law by Trump, it would put into law sanctions
previously established via former President Barack Obama's executive
orders, including some on Russian energy projects. The legislation
also allows new sanctions on Russian mining, metals, shipping and
railways and targets Russians guilty of conducting cyber attacks or
supplying weapons to Syria's government.
The U.S. Senate's decision to impose new sanctions on
Iran is an "unquestionable" violation of a nuclear deal
reached in 2015 between Tehran and six major powers including the
United States, Iranian media quoted a senior Iranian official as
saying. The Senate approved on Thursday the sanctions on Iran over
its ballistic missile program and other activities not related to the
international nuclear agreement "The U.S. Senate's move is
unquestionably in breach of both the spirit and the letter of the
nuclear deal," Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was reported by media as saying on
Friday. "The Iranian committee tasked with monitoring the accord
will certainly examine the congressional move and come up with a
decent response."
Congress is seeking new authorities that would enable it
to expose and crack down on an Iranian state-controlled commercial
airline known for transporting weapons and terrorist fighters to
hotspots such as Syria, where Iranian-backed forces have begun
launching direct attacks on U.S. forces in the country, according to
new legislation obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Congressional
efforts to expose Iran's illicit terror networks more forcefully come
as U.S. and European air carriers such as Boeing and AirBus move
forward with multi-billion dollar deals to provide the Islamic
Republic with a fleet of new airplanes, which lawmakers suspect Iran
will use to amplify its terror operations. The new sanction
legislation targets Iran's Mahan Airlines, which operates commercial
flights across the globe while transporting militants and weapons to
fighters in Syria, Yemen, and other regional hotspots.
SYRIA CONFLICT
The United Nations urged Russia, Iran and Turkey on
Thursday to open up areas of Syria to the delivery of humanitarian
aid in "de-escalation" zones whose parameters the three are
meant to finalise. The three countries brokered a deal in the Kazakh
capital, Astana, in May to create four de-escalation zones in Syria.
Russia said on Tuesday that the next round of negotiations in Astana
was likely to be held in early July. Jan Egeland, U.N. humanitarian
adviser, said that U.N. technical experts were joining officials from
Russia, Iran and Turkey in Moscow at preliminary talks that began on
Thursday. A Western diplomat told Reuters the two-day talks are
to focus on setting GPS coordinates for the de-escalation zones.
Egeland, asked about his hopes for the Moscow meeting, told a news
briefing: "That the de-escalation reaches a place like (the
southern city of) Deraa, which is supposed to be a de-escalation zone
but rather has been an area of increased fighting."
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Thanks to a hack allegedly carried out by Russian
intelligence, relations between Qatar and Saudi Arabia are tense to
say the least. The Kingdom has blockaded Qatar ports and several Gulf
states have removed envoys and ambassadors. Right now, the Middle
East looks a lot like Europe on the eve of World War I. This week on
War College, Oklahoma University professor Joshua Landis runs us
through the complicated factions making up the Middle East. According
to Landis, Iran is the real winner in the latest dust up between old
allies.
The town of Ba'aj is deserted and broken. Its streets
are blocked by overturned cars, its shops are shuttered and the iron
gates of its ravaged homes groan in a scorching wind. Amid the
wreckage, though, are the signs of new arrivals - forces who less
than a week earlier chased Islamic State (Isis) from one of its most
important territories in northern Iraq. Spraying graffiti and
planting their battle colours, they have wasted little time in
staking their claim to a place that had mattered little in the sweep
of Iraq's modern history, but which is set to be pivotal from this
moment on. Ba'aj is now a foundation point of an Iranian plan to
secure ground routes across Iraq and Syria and into Lebanon,
cementing its influence over lands its proxies have conquered.
Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency
denounced the West's "double-standards" in dealing with the
Israeli regime's nuclear activities, urging the UN nuclear watchdog
to address the issue in a serious manner. Addressing a seasonal
meeting of the IAEA's Board of Governors in Vienna on Thursday, Reza
Najafi described the Tel Aviv regime's atomic program as a source of
serious concern for the Middle East nations and the international
community. Highlighting the condemnation of Israeli nuclear weapons
by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Najafi urged the Western countries
to stop cooperation with Israel in transferring nuclear materials and
equipment to the regime, and warned against the negative consequences
of such measures for the regional security and for sustainability of
the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Najafi also denounced the Israeli
regime for ignoring the international community's calls and for
pushing ahead with its military nuclear plans, which he said benefit
from the West's blind support and violate the whole international
regulations brazenly.
HUMAN RIGHTS
The arrests by Iranian security forces
of dozens of suspects with alleged links to the terrorist group that
calls itself the Islamic State (IS) could result in extrajudicial
retaliatory actions against innocent individuals. "In every part
of the world, anti-terrorism laws could lead to human rights
violations," Iranian human rights lawyer Hossein Raisi, who is
now based in Canada, told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).
Two days after the twin terrorist attacks in Tehran on June 7,
2017 that left 18 people dead and 50 others injured, Iran's
Intelligence Ministry issued a statement announcing the arrests of
"41 members of the Wahhabi Daesh (IS)" organization in
different parts of Iran. "The terrorist attacks have
inevitably generated negative emotions, but it is primarily up to the
judiciary to manage them in order to prevent public anger against
other ethnicities or followers of other religions and to avoid unfair
punishments," Raisi told CHRI.
DOMESTIC POLITICS
Iranian forces have killed two suspected members of an
armed Sunni Muslim group in southeastern Iran and arrested five
others, a minister said, accusing Saudi Arabia of "sponsoring
terrorists" in the country. "A group of seven terrorists
who wanted to attack a barracks in Chabahar (in Sistan Baluchistan
province) was dismantled,"Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi
said late on June 14. Two of the five people arrested were from
"a neighboring country," and "unfortunately, an
intelligence agent was also killed," he said. Iranian state
media said the suspects were members of the militant Ansar al-Furqan
group. Sistan-Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan and
Pakistan, has seen repeated attacks by Sunni militants against
security forces.
OPINION & ANALYSIS
After the first terrorist attack by the Islamic State
(IS) in Tehran, Iranian officials from various backgrounds have
pointed the finger at their regional rival Saudi Arabia. Iranian
officials have pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia as the culprit
behind the attack by the Islamic State on Tehran. Speaking at
the Oslo Forum in Norway June 13, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad
Javad Zarif said they have "intelligence that Saudi Arabia is
actively engaged in promoting terrorist groups" along the
country's eastern and western borders. Zarif referenced comments by
Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Salman
who said that they will take the war inside Iran's borders and by
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir who said Iran must be
"punished." The commander of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, directly blamed Saudi
Arabia for the IS attack on Tehran. "We have precise
intelligence that Saudi Arabia, unfortunately, supported the
terrorists and demanded the operations in Iran," Jafari said
June 12. The attack on Iran's parliament and the mausoleum of the
founder of the Islamic Republic left 17 dead and 50 wounded.
Like in most Indo-European languages, sentence
arrangement in the Persian language is based on subject, object, verb
or SOV in linguistic code. (In Arabic it is the other way round!)
This means that the first thing that a Persian sentence does is to
identify the subject (in Arabic: Fa'el), the doer of what is done.
The key advantage of that sentence structure is clarity. You know who
did what to whom before learning when and how and why. But what if,
for whatever reason, you fear clarity and wish to hide reality behind
a fog of delusion and diversion. In clerical terms, what if you
wish to practice taqiyeh (obfuscation) or "kitman "
(dissimulation). Throughout the ages some writers, many of them
mullahs, have tried to cope with that problem by using a lexical
device called "nakereh" (unknown) that allows the writer or
the speaker to be vague about the subject of the sentence. Thus,
instead of identifying the subject at the start of the sentence you
might say "It happened that..." Or they did ..."
Examples of the use of this device are numerous in the writings of
Shi'ite theologians from Muhammad-Baqer Majlisi to the more recent
and far deeper Alameh Tabataba'i.
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