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Eye on
Iran will be suspended Monday, December 31 through
Tuesday, January 1 in observance of the holiday season. It will
resume Wednesday, January 2.
TOP STORIES
A spokesman for the German
company Krempel, which provided construction material to Tehran
businessmen that was used in rockets produced by the Iranian regime
to gas Syrians earlier this year, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday
that the global business firm has stopped trade with the Islamic
Republic of Iran. "Since several months ago, Krempel no longer
delivers goods to Iran," Rainer Westermann said.
The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has accused Iran of
using Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been imprisoned for 1,000
days, as a pawn for diplomatic leverage. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a
British-Iranian dual national from Hampstead, north London, has been
held in Iran since April 2016. Tehran, which accused her of seeking
to overthrow the government, has ignored repeated calls from her
family and UK officials to release her.
Imports of Iranian crude oil by major buyers in Asia hit
their lowest in more than five years in November as U.S. sanctions on
Iran's oil exports took effect last month, government and
ship-tracking data showed. China, India, Japan and South Korea last
month imported about 664,800 barrels per day (bpd) from Iran,
according to the data, down 12.7 percent from the same month a year
earlier.
TERRORISM & EXTREMISM
Just one week after American officials reportedly met
with a Taliban delegation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE),
Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Adm. Ali
Shamkhani confirmed for the first time that Iran has also held talks
with the Taliban. Shamkhani made the comments during a Dec. 26 visit
to Kabul to meet with Afghan officials, including President Ashraf
Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and national security
adviser Hamdullah Mohib, to discuss regional and bilateral security
issues.
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
Iran's interior minister has tried to downplay the
threat from protests by various groups in the past year, insisting
that none of them were organized by political groups or unions. Major
protests rocked Iran between December 28, 2017 and early January
2018. Later, there were mass protests in June and August, in addition
to crippling strikes by truckers, bazaar merchants and industrial
workers in various parts of the country.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British mother jailed in
Iran was allowed to meet with her daughter on her 40th birthday.
Four-year-old Gabriella, who has been staying in Iran with family,
said she "wished her mum was free" as the pair shared cake
in jail, her father Richard Ratcliffe said. He added that Nazanin had
been involved a "long battle" with prison authorities over
recent months about health matters.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS & NEGOTIATIONS
When U.S. forces leave Syria, the plan is for troops
from neighboring Turkey to take their place. One exception: a small,
remote U.S. base in southern Syria that has made it more difficult
for Iran to project power across the Middle East. More than 200 U.S.
troops have been advising local Syrian fighters at the al-Tanf
garrison, which they have used to combat Islamic State and which sits
in strategically important terrain astride a potential Iranian supply
route through Iraq to Syria.
leading Iranian general has called on President Donald
Trump to withdraw his forces from the entire Middle East, arguing
that the United States has wasted resources there as rival nations
such as Russia and China rose. Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a
senior adviser to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told
a ceremony for the premiere of a new computer game at the Art
University of Tabriz in northwestern Iran that the "U.S. is
facing a big economic challenge" made worse by the ongoing war
on terror launched with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11.
Citing strategists, Safavi said that "the U.S. focused on Iraq
and Afghanistan and wasted its costs, whereas the main rivals of the
U.S. were China and Russia, which the U.S. ignored," according
to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
In the days and months following massive protests across
Iran that erupted in December 2017, the regime's vulnerability became
clear. The anniversary of that nationwide uprising is approaching,
and one year later, the anti-regime uprising has grown, in visibility
and viability, coalescing into a unified movement that now includes
virtually all sectors of Iranian society. The days of the ruling
theocracy are numbered. The people of Iran are demanding regime
change.
IRANIAN INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS
Not many details about Iran's budget bill for the next
year, presented to the parliament on December 25, have been publicly
released. However, a few key points about Iran's defense budget for
the next year were leaked the day after President Hassan Rouhani
presented the bill amid heckling and protests by a group of hard-line
MPs. Many Iranians on social media, mainly regime supporters,
protested against what they called "a dramatic decline" in
Iran's military budget.
Following months of turbulence this year, the Iranian
rial has regained a significant portion of its lost value in the past
several weeks. However, this trend has not been seen in consumer
prices, leading to increasing public discontent. The depreciation of
the rial has led to sharp jumps in the prices of imported products,
ranging from vehicles, audio-visual devices and cellphones to iron
and aluminum. Given the import tariffs levied by the authorities,
these kinds of products were already sold in Iran at prices often
higher than the global average.
RUSSIA, SYRIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
The implications of Donald Trump's abrupt withdrawal of
U.S. troops from Syria will play out over many months, but a portent
was apparent Wednesday. While Mr. Trump was defending his Syria
pullout during his visit with U.S. troops in Iraq, Russia was
condemning Israel's defensive air strikes in Syria. This is only some
of what will fill the vacuum left by America's departure.
The Israeli military on Wednesday destroyed another
cross-border tunnel it says was built by Lebanon's Hezbollah militant
group, sending a loud explosion throughout the volatile area. Israel
this month announced the discovery of the tunnels, which it says were
part of a Hezbollah plot to sneak across the border and carry out
attacks in Israel.
President Trump may seek to pull troops from Syria, but
Iran and its Hezbollah terror surrogate remain firmly entrenched
there and in adjacent Lebanon. That's clear from their threats to
Israel: This week IDF forces uncovered the fifth in a series of
surprisingly sophisticated tunnels built by Hezbollah and designed to
sneak terrorists into Israel from Lebanon.
When Iranian officials say Israel will be wiped off the
map, does it mean they are suggesting that Iran should be the one to
do it? The debate was renewed last week by Foreign Minister Mohammad
Javad Zarif. When an interviewer from a French news magazine
suggested that Paris might be reluctant to sell weaponry to Iran
because the Islamic republic had called for Israel's destruction and had
missiles that carried the inscription "Death to Israel",
Zarif objected.
New satellite images of an Iranian weapons storehouse
outside the Syrian capital of Damascus showed significant damage done
to site following Israeli airstrikes against Iranian targets earlier
in the week. The images, taken by ImageSat International (ISI),
showed the complete destruction of the 60x15 meter storehouse which
supposedly held Fajr-5 missiles at an Iranian base in the Syrian
regime's 4th Division camp in the Al-Muna area.
President Donald Trump's surprise decision Dec. 19 to
pull US forces out of Syria has sparked different reactions, both
inside and outside the United States. US allies France and Britain expressed
their dissatisfaction over the move, emphasizing that the Western
mission in Syria is still far from accomplished. Russia and Turkey,
as two pillars of the Astana framework, welcomed the decision, seeing
it as a positive step toward resolving the Syrian crisis. At the same
time, American lawmakers from both ends of the US political spectrum
interpreted the move as a mistake that would empower Iran and Russia
in Syria.
GULF STATES, YEMEN, & IRAN
The well-known face of Saudi Arabia's foreign policy,
Adel al-Jubeir, was moved to a new position in the Kingdom as part of
a shakeup that saw former finance minister Ibrahim al-Assaf appointed
as foreign minister. Jubeir was a passionate critic of Iran who
believed the US should play an important role in the Middle East. In
January 2016, after the Iran deal but before the election of Donald
Trump, Jubeir warned about the "nefarious activities" of
Iran. He was concerned about instability in the region. "If an
American decline were to happen or an American withdrawal were to
happen, the concern that everybody has is that it would leave a void,
and whenever you have a void, or a vacuum, evil forces flow."
IRAQ & IRAN
As minor pockets of Islamic State (IS) territory in
eastern Syria are treated as of little consequence following the
entrance of US-backed fighters into the long-besieged Hejin region,
Iraq's western Anbar province is facing up to emboldened pro-Iran
armed groups nearby. The surprise announcement Dec. 19 that the
United States plans to pull its roughly 2,000 troops out of eastern
Syria strongly suggests that the already heavy influence of
Iran-backed armed groups near the border will rise.
OTHER FOREIGN AFFAIRS
This year has been one of the most challenging ones for
the security services in European countries as they have yet to form
a firm counter-terrorism strategy to halt state-sanctioned terrorist
operations across the EU. If the ISIS targeted people arbitrarily
without any operation center in the EU, Iran's regime uses its
embassies to organize terrorist operations across Europe as part of
its desperate response to domestic crises and growing dissent inside
the country.
CYBERWARFARE
The paper was compiled by the official Iranian
resistance movement, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).
It makes damning assertions which implicate the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC) in waging "cyber warfare to preserve the
theocracy". NCRI representative Hossein Abedini has spoken to
Express.co.uk about his group's findings. Furious Iranians, making
use of cyber technology to disseminate their message, have been part
of a popular uprising that erupted in Tehran in December 2017.
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