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TOP STORIES
As its economy buckles, Iran is
zealously cracking down on financial fraud. Central to its efforts is
a fast-track fraud court approved by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
in August that has sentenced dozens of people, including some 50 men
this month, to up to 20 years for paying bribes, embezzlement and
damaging the economy. In November, authorities executed two men
accused of smuggling foreign currency and manipulating the gold-coin
market, the Iranian judiciary's news service reported.
Initial reports by an Israeli
news site said that a delegation of senior Hezbollah figures in
Damascus came under Israeli attack during the airstrikes. Newsweek
confirmed the report on Wednesday morning.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani
on Tuesday presented a $47 billion state budget with increased
spending on lower income groups, saying U.S. sanctions would affect
people's lives and economic growth but not bring the government to
its knees. U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the United States
out of a multilateral nuclear deal with Iran in May and reimposed
sanctions on it, including on its vital oil industry.
NUCLEAR DEAL & NUCLEAR PROGRAM
President Trump on Monday
attacked outgoing Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Brett McGurk,
the envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq
and Syria (ISIS), over the Iran nuclear deal. Trump wrote in a tweet
that McGurk, who announced his resignation on Saturday, "was
responsible for loading up airplanes with 1.8 Billion Dollars in CASH"
and sending it to Iran as part of the nuclear deal "approved by
Little Bob Corker."
U.S. President Donald Trump has
been criticized for making exaggerated campaign promises during his
first run for the White House. Nobody can claim, however, that he
hasn't kept his word on Iran-or, at least, that he hasn't tried to.
As a candidate, Trump vowed to tear up the nuclear deal that the
Obama administration had painstakingly negotiated with Tehran, which
reduced sanctions in exchange for monitored limits on the Iranian
nuclear program; in May, he scrapped the deal and announced the
reintroduction of sanctions, which have already led to spiraling
economic problems in Iran.
SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC
NEWS
Iran said Tuesday it plans to
spend more money on the poor next year and increase salaries for
government employees in an attempt to boost living standards as the
government tries to cope with growing U.S. sanctions pressure on
its struggling economy. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani presented a
$42.7 billion budget to parliament for next year, the first since the
U.S. reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic after President
Trump in May withdrew from the 2015 multilateral nuclear
accord.
Private buyers of Iranian crude
have had "no problems" exporting it, Iran's oil minister
was quoted as saying on Wednesday by state news agency IRNA, despite
U.S. sanctions targeting Iran's oil exports. Iran began selling
crude oil to private companies for export in late October, just ahead
of U.S. sanctions on sectors including oil which came into effect on
Nov. 5. "Those who bought oil on the bourse have been able
to export and there have been no problems in this regard," IRNA
quoted Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh as saying.
Cargill, Bunge and other global
traders have halted food supply deals with Iran because new US
sanctions have paralyzed banking systems required to secure payments,
according to industry and Iranian government sources. "There is
no real chance of being paid using the existing mechanisms and many
international traders are unable to do new business for the
moment," Reuters quoted one European source with knowledge of
the situation as saying.
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
A prominent British-Iranian
scholar detained in Iran since April has returned to Britain,
according to an advocacy organization he helped found. The scholar,
Abbas Edalat, a professor of computer science and mathematics at
Imperial College London, was taken into custody by the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps on April 15 while in Tehran to visit
family and attend an academic workshop. He is a founder of the
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran.
Lawmakers in Iran have defeated
a bid to outlaw the marrying of girls aged nine to 13, just days
after the findings of a new global report indicate, once again, that
women fare worse in Islamic countries. A female lawmaker described as
a reformist expressed regret at the decision, which was taken by the
parliamentary committee dealing with legal and judicial affairs,
saying forcing children to marry young was akin to "killing
them."
Charity worker Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe will spend her 40th birthday in prison in Iran. The
British-Iranian mother was arrested at Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport
in April 2016 and reached the milestone age on Boxing Day. Mrs
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, of Hampstead in north London, was sentenced to
five years in jail after being accused of spying, a charge she
vehemently denies.
Iran executed on Saturday a
trader known as the "Sultan of Bitumen" over charges of
fraud, bribery, and embezzlement, the judiciary's news agency Mizan
online reported. Hamidreza Bagheri Dermani is the third businessman
to be executed since an anti-corruption drive was launched over the
summer. He was convicted of "corruption on earth", Iran's
most serious capital offense, after swindling over 10 trillion rials
(around $100 million at the current rate) through "fraud,
forgery, and bribery", Mizan reported.
Amnesty International has
published a 200-page comprehensive report on the massacre of
political prisoners in Iran, 30 years after it actually took place.
Its main focus is the dark days of 1988 massacre of 30,000 political
prisoners in Iran. Had the 1988 massacre been given enough
international attention it deserved back then, Iranian people would
not have faced unbridle human rights abuses in the years that
followed. Impunity for crimes in those days, embolden the regime over
the years to the extent that it is leveling the graves of the same
victims all over Iran.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS & NEGOTIATIONS
Iran is ready to respond to any
hostile U.S. action, but it does not consider the arrival of a U.S.
aircraft carrier in the Gulf last week a significant threat, an
Iranian navy commander said on Monday. The USS John C. Stennis
entered the Gulf on Friday, ending a long absence of U.S. aircraft
carriers in the region as tensions rise between Tehran and
Washington. "The presence of this warship is insignificant
to us," Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari was quoted as saying by
the semi-official ISNA news agency.
During the presidential
campaign, the outlier in Donald Trump's foreign-policy orations was
his treatment of Iran. On Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, Russia (remember President Barack Obama's
"off-mic" tête-à-tête with President Dmitry Medvedev?), and
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump largely followed his
predecessor. Differences existed, certainly in style and manner, but
the overlap between the two men on most of the big foreign-policy
questions was profound.
Iran on Monday reportedly
dismissed the presence of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Gulf,
calling it "insignificant." "The presence of this
warship is insignificant to us," Iranian Navy commander
Habibollah Sayyari said, according to Reuters, which cited the
ISNA news agency. "We will not allow this warship to come near
our territorial waters in the Persian Gulf," Sayyari added.
MILITARY/INTELLIGENCE MATTERS & PROXY WARS
Iran's elite Revolutionary
Guards launched war games in the Gulf today after a U.S. aircraft
carrier entered the waterway amid rising tension between the
countries over reimposed U.S. sanctions. State television showed
amphibious forces landing on Iran's Gulf island of Qeshm during the
exercises, which featured naval vessels, helicopters, drones, rocket
launchers and commando units.
IRANIAN INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS
Iran's security forces have
arrested 17 people on charges of profiteering from fraudulent
currency dealings, the state news agency IRNA reported on Tuesday, as
Tehran tries to reverse a slide in the rial following the
reimposition of U.S. sanctions. Iran intervened in the currency
market and threatened speculators as it engineered a dramatic
recovery of the rial in recent weeks to ease pressure on its
economy.
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi
Shahroudi, a senior Iranian cleric and a former chief justice, died
in Tehran on Monday after a long illness, state media
reported. Shahroudi, 70, was a close ally of Iranian Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and had been seen by analysts as a
possible successor to him. He cut short a visit to Germany for
treatment in January when activists referred him to German
prosecutors, citing his record of passing death sentences which they
said amounted to a crime against humanity.
Conflicting reports emerged over
the health of chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council (EDC),
Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi. Some news agencies affiliated with
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard announced his death, citing informed
sources, while official news agencies refuted the reports, describing
them as "rumors", stressing that Shahroudi was in critical
condition.
Iran's state TV says a bus
overturned on a university campus, killing seven students and
injuring 28. It says the crash happened Tuesday at Azad University in
Tehran, which is nestled in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains.
Iran suffers from a high rate of traffic accidents, with an estimated
17,000 casualties every year. The toll is widely blamed on poor
safety, the presence of older vehicles and the inadequacy of
emergency services.
Iran's next elections are to be
held in 2020 and 2021, but it has already preoccupied Reformists'
minds about whether to participate or boycott the ballot box as they
are facing an unprecedented threat of losing their political capital.
Moderate Hassan Rouhani won the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections
after forming a coalition with Reformists. As Rouhani's first
term ended, he seemed committed to his supporters'
ideas and was fighting to fulfill a number of his electoral
promises.
"Esteghlal or
Persepolis?" and "blue or red?" are two questions tens
of millions of Iranians have asked and answered over the years to
determine which side they stand behind in a seemingly perennial
rivalry between Iran's two most popular soccer clubs. Now, the two
may be sold to the private sector, as approved on Dec. 16 by a
Cabinet meeting presided by President Hassan Rouhani.
Police has captured "nearly
three thousand unauthorized weapons" in Dezful, in Southwestern
Iran in the volatile province of Khuzestan, Iranian media reported on
Monday December 24. Meanwhile, Khuzestan Police Chief Heydar
Abbaszadeh told reporters that a "general disarming"
project is under way in the area, warning that "those who own
and use unauthorized weapons will be strictly dealt with."
RUSSIA, SYRIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
As Syria's government consolidates control after years
of civil war, President Bashar al-Assad's army is doubling down on
executions of political prisoners, with military judges accelerating
the pace they issue death sentences, according to survivors of the
country's most notorious prison. In interviews, more than two dozen
Syrians recently released from the Sednaya military prison in
Damascus described a government campaign to clear the decks of
political detainees. The former inmates said prisoners are being transferred
from jails across Syria to join death-row detainees in Sednaya's
basement and then be executed in pre-dawn hangings.
The Pentagon is considering using small teams of Special
Operations forces to strike the Islamic State in Syria, one option
for continuing an American military mission there despite President
Trump's order to withdraw troops from the country. The American
commandos would be shifted to neighboring Iraq, where an estimated
5,000 United States forces are already deployed, and "surge"
into Syria for specific raids, according to two military officials
who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Iran said that the U.S. military
presence in Syria had been "a mistake, illogical and a source of
tension", in Tehran's first reaction to President Donald Trump's
planned pull-out. Trump has begun what will be a total
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, saying on Wednesday they had
succeeded in their mission to defeat Islamic State and were no longer
needed in the country. "From the start, the entry and
presence of American forces in the region has been a mistake,
illogical and a source of tension, and a main cause of
instability," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi
was quoted as saying by state media on Saturday.
Calling each other "baby
killer" and "antisemitic dictator" might not be the
best way to join forces against a shared threat, but that's the level
of discourse between Turkey and Israel these days. Both countries
stand to lose from the anticipated widening of Iranian influence in
Syria after U.S. President Donald Trump announced last week he was
pulling American forces out of that country.
Delaware Sen. Christopher
Coons (D) on Sunday said President Trump is
"handing a great big Christmas gift" to Russia and Iran by
withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. "And it's a pretty clear
guide post for me, when there's a foreign policy decision that's
cheered by [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and [Republican
Kentucky Sen.] Rand Paul, that's a pretty good sign it's a
terrible idea," Coons, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, added.
Israeli military spokesman Ronen
Manelis announced Monday that Iran no longer has missile factories in
Lebanon. In conversation with Kol BaRama radio Manelis said that
"the sites to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to
when he was speaking in the UN are no longer active," reported
Israeli media. He refused to reveal details over the reason of the
closure, on whether it was made by a third party or Iran.
Outgoing IDF chief Lt. Gen. Gadi
Eisenkot on Sunday defended the military against recent criticism of
insufficient action against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, saying the army's primary goal in recent years has
been thwarting Iran's efforts to establish a permanent military
presence in Syria. Tehran is seeking to establish a force of 100,000
fighters in Syria, he said, and the IDF is preventing it from doing
so.
AFGHANISTAN & IRAN
Iran has met with the Afghan
Taliban, a top Iranian security official said Wednesday according to
the Tasnim news agency, just days after the militants attended
reconciliation talks in the UAE. Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's
Supreme National Security Council, made the announcement while on a
visit to the Afghan capital Kabul, several Iranian agencies reported.
"The Afghan government has been informed of the communications
and talks carried out with the Taliban, and this process will
continue," he said, quoted by Tasnim.
GULF STATES & YEMEN
The Iran-backed Houthi militia
in Yemen made critical compromises in peace talks this month,
agreeing to retreat from the key city of Hodeidah and release a
stranglehold that has blocked aid from reaching millions. Now the
hard part: ensuring the Houthis live by their commitments. I found
renewed hope in the scenes of amity between representatives of
Yemen's legitimate government and the Houthis. The two sides, locked
in conflict since the Houthis' violent coup in 2014, sat down for
eight days of negotiation at a castle near Stockholm. They shook
hands, smiled, broke bread. Most significant, they struck agreements
that could dramatically improve the lives of Yemenis, and advance
peace, security and stability.
OTHER FOREIGN AFFAIRS
India has formally taken over
operations at Iran's strategic Chabahar Port, a move that could have
significant geopolitical ramifications in the region. The port
on the Indian Ocean, inaugurated last year, is being built largely by
India and is expected to provide a key supply route for Afghanistan
while allowing India to bypass rival Pakistan to trade with Central
Asia. Representatives from India, Iran, and Afghanistan met in
Tehran to formally hand over control to state-owned India Ports
Global Limited (IPGL).
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