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Iran has asked the Bank of England to set up special
clearing accounts for its banks, but has so far been rebuffed in its
effort to resolve an impasse that has left it excluded from banking
in London more than a year after sanctions were lifted. Tehran has
been hoping for swift reintegration into global trade after its deal
in 2015 aimed at curbing Tehran's nuclear program in return for the
lifting of international sanctions. Its failure to persuade Western
banks to accept its business has been one of the main choke points
preventing its rehabilitation. Banking sources from both Iran and the
West, and Iranian political sources close to the talks, said Tehran
has approached the Bank of England to seek clearing accounts directly
with the UK central bank.
Key lawmakers in the House and Senate are racing to
craft bipartisan Iran sanctions legislation before the nation's
largest pro-Israel lobby holds its policy conference starting this
weekend, March 26. The annual gathering of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) offers an ideal environment for
congressional action as thousands of eager activists descend on
Capitol Hill on March 28. With barely a week to go, the relevant
Senate panel remains deadlocked while its House counterpart hopes to
shortly strike a deal, according to multiple sources in Congress and
pro-Israel groups. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs
panel, Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., told Al-Monitor last week he has
"confidence" he can hammer something out with Chairman Ed
Royce, R-Calif. "We're still negotiating it, and like everything
I do with the chairman I'm hopeful we'll have a meeting of the
minds," Engel said. "It won't take forever."
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned late on
Monday that if the United States continues reneging on its
commitments under the nuclear deal to the extent that Iran sees the
keeping of the deal not in conformity with its national interests the
Islamic Republic will resume its nuclear activities with "even
greater" speed. The July 2015 nuclear deal, officially called
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, went into effect in January
2016. According to the JCPOA, Iran put limits on its nuclear
activities in return for a termination of all nuclear related
sanctions. To back up his statement, Zarif told reporters in Isfahan
that Iranian experts have succeeded to develop the country's
"most advanced" centrifuges which are capable of refining
uranium 20 times more than the old generations, ISNA reported.
IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL
President Donald Trump is telling a delegation from Iraq
that "nobody" can figure out why President Barack Obama
signed a nuclear agreement with Iran. In his first meeting with Iraqi
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, Trump says Iran is one of the issues
his team will discuss with the Iraqi delegation. Trump says they'll
also address what he calls the "vacuum" that was created
when the Islamic State group claimed Iraq. The president also says
"we shouldn't have gone in" to Iraq in the first place.
BUSINESS RISK
An informed resource said, most probably, banking issues
have caused a delay in delivery of the third Airbus aircraft to Iran
Air. As quoted by IRIB from Paris, the informed resource said Iran's
third purchased aircraft from Airbus Airbus Aerospace company was not
delivered according to the schedule mainly due to banking
restrictions rather than technical issues. An A330 aero plane was
scheduled to be handed over to Iran Air, the Iranian national flag
carrier, prior to beginning of the new Persian calendar year Nowruz
though the process has been postponed to following days.
"Banking restrictions rather than technical issues have most
probably caused the delay in the delivery process," he
underlined.
SANCTIONS RELIEF
SK Engineering & Construction (E&C) has bagged a
4.1 trillion won ($3.6 billion) contract to build and operate new
power plants in Iran. According to an SK E&C official, Sunday,
the construction firm purchased a 30 percent stake in UNIT
International, Turkey's energy giant. Under the deal, SK E&C is
expected to participate in the Turkish firm's ongoing project to
build and operate five new gas-fired power plants in Iran. SK E&C
will build and operate five new power plants in five locations
throughout the country, Iran's largest private energy project ever to
produce a combined generation capacity of 5,000 megawatts. "The
project is monumental," Land, Infrastructure and Transport
Minister Kang Ho-in said.
Iran started pumping oil from the oil layer of South
Pars gas field (in the Persian Gulf), on Sunday, Gholam-Reza
Manouchehri, the deputy managing director of National Iranian Oil
Company (NIOC) for engineering and development affairs, announced.
The official put the initial production from each well of the layer
at 5,000 barrels per day (bpd) which will reach 35,000 bpd within 5-7
days, Shana news agency reported. South Pars, a supergiant gas field
Iran shares with Qatar in Persian Gulf waters, is estimated to
contain over 14 billion barrels of oil in its oil layer. The
field is also estimated to contain a significant amount of natural
gas, accounting for about eight percent of the world's reserves, and
approximately 18 billion barrels of condensate.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Even if world powers and Iran had not agreed to the
recent nuclear deal aimed at preventing Tehran from obtaining atomic
weapons capabilities in exchange for the lifting of economic
sanctions, the Islamic Republic would still imperil Israel's
security, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen said Tuesday morning.
"As long as the current regime exists, with the nuclear
agreement or without it, Iran will continue to serve as the main threat
to Israel's security," he said in an address at the Meir Dagan
Memorial Conference on Security and Strategy at Netanya College. The
head of Israel's national intelligence agency asserted that while
Iran's aspirations of bolstering its regional power and influence
"remain the same, its methods of operation are changing."
Cohen therefore indicated that Israel should seek
"opportunities for cooperation and, above all, for peace,"
with moderate Arab states in the Middle East. "The defense
establishment should focus on enemies in the region, study them, get
to know them in depth, compel them when it is needed, and it will be
required," he added.
TERRORISM
Iran's Quds Force plotted with the aid of a paid Pakistani
man to surveil --and possibly assassinate--the head of the
French-Israeli chamber of commerce, according to revelations from a
Monday court proceeding in Berlin and German media reports.The daily
Berliner Zeitung reported that the 31-year-old Pakistani Syed Mustafa
spied on the French-Israel business professor David Rouach who
teaches at the elite Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris
(ESCP) and served as head of the French-Israeli chamber of
commerce. Quds Force, a US-classified terrorist entity, is part of
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and paid Mustafa at least
2,052 euros between July 2015 and July 2016. Rouach is expected to
testify on Tuesday. The federal prosecutor Michael Greven said at an
earlier proceeding that a collection of surveillance activities took
place to prepare for possible attacks. Mustafa amassed information on
Rouach from July until August 2015.
PROXY WARS
Thousands of fighters under Iranian command and more
than 10 generals have been killed on the battlefields of Syria and
Iraq during the ongoing conflicts, a report said. The report by the
Israel-based Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center,
citing the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, put the number
of Iranian losses at 2,603. The report claimed that "the number
of losses, especially of so many senior officers, is the reason
Iran's military footprint in Syria and Iraq has fallen from thousands
to hundreds," the Jerusalem Post reported on March 19. Overall,
the Meir Amit report says the broader significance is that Teheran
"is becoming a much more secondary player in directing the Assad
regime, with primary military backup and direction now coming from
Russia."
HUMAN RIGHTS
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was detained
while trying to leave the country with her baby daughter in April
2016. Her sister-in-law, Rebecca Jones, a GP who works in Cwmbran,
Torfaen, said the Foreign Office should "publicly condemn"
what has happened. The Foreign Office said it had supported the
family since the arrest. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe - a charity worker
from London - was sentenced to five years in prison in September on
charges that have not been disclosed. An appeal was launched but the
ruling was upheld in January. Speaking on BBC Radio Wales' Sunday
Supplement programme, ahead of an event in Cardiff to mark the plight
of her sister-in-law, Dr Jones said: "It would be nice if
someone high up in the government publicly condemned this.
After almost a year of calm, spraying people with
burning acid has returned in Iran where a family of four has been
attacked on Saturday in Sharada, within Isfahan province, Iran's top
tourist destination. Last month, unidentified people also attacked two
women in Maashour, within the Ahwaz province, according to Iranian
news agencies. Isfahan's Investigative Police Chief Sitar Khasraoui
said in press statement that the families were taken to the hospital
to treat the burns. The family consists of the father, 53, the
mother, 48, the son, 23, and the daughter, 20. Both parents are said
to be in critical condition.
DOMESTIC POLITICS
During seven years in Iran's Evin prison, six of them
isolated in a wing on his own, Mostafa Tajzadeh says he "buried
grudges and hatred". Now, Mr Tajzadeh, one of Iran's highest
profile reformist politicians, is calling for reconciliation with the
regime hardliners who jailed him in what he says is a necessary move
to "save" Iran from foreign and domestic threats. His
sentiments reflect growing concerns that Iranians' hopes for economic
prosperity and political stability are being undermined by a
confluence of local and global events. The election of President
Donald Trump has raised tensions with the US just as an intense power
struggle plays out ahead of crucial elections in May at which Hassan
Rouhani, the centrist president, is expected to seek a second term.
Mr Trump, who has attacked the 2015 nuclear deal that led to the
lifting of sanctions on Iran, has already put Tehran "on
notice", raising the prospect of new economic curbs or even
military confrontation.
OPINION & ANALYSIS
Two months into the Trump presidency, uncertainty and
confusion about U.S. foreign policy in general, and its policy in the
Middle East in particular, continue to puzzle experts and decision
makers around the globe. Regarding Iran, the administration has been
sending mixed signals, making it difficult to understand its intended
policy. On the one hand, the new administration has continued the
tough anti-Iran rhetoric that Trump adopted during his election
campaign. On Feb. 1, after Iran tested several ballistic missiles,
then-national security adviser Michael Flynn put Iran "on
notice" for its "provocative missile test and for its arming
and training of the Houthi rebels in Yemen." Two days later,
Washington imposed sanctions on 25 individuals and entities involved
in Iran's ballistic missile program.
In June 2014, Mosul was seized by the Islamic State
(IS), whose leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi soon afterward announced a
caliphate from the city's grand mosque. Now the caliphate is
seemingly coming to an end. Iraqi government forces took the eastern
part of Mosul from IS on Jan. 24 after three months of fighting. On March
15, a spokesman for Iraq's Counterterrorism Service said 60% of the
western part of Mosul is under the control of Iraqi security forces
The day before, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had said the
operation is in its final stage, pledging the defeat of IS. But
military victory in Mosul is just the beginning of a more complicated
phase for Iraq. Disparate forces have so far come together to pursue
the common objective of expelling IS from Iraq. With the imminent
achievement of this goal, many underlying and preceding power
struggles will likely re-emerge.
When Challenging Iran In Gulf, Don't Ditch
Entire Obama Playbook | Owen Daniels For The Hill
Confronting the challenge posed by Iran appears high on
the Trump administration's list of Middle East priorities. While
pledging to enforce the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),
the administration has aimed to put Iran "on notice" by
imposing sanctions for its January ballistic missile test, weighing a
Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation for the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC), adding Iran to its list of travel ban countries,
and formulating a plan to drive a "wedge" between Iran and
Russia in the Middle East. The need for tougher action against Iran
is premised on the Obama administration's avoidance of direct
confrontation with Iranian-backed forces, including the brutal Bashar
Assad regime in Syria and Shiite militias in Iraq, with whom it has
at times tacitly aligned against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
(ISIS).
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