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TOP STORIES
Germany's government banned an
Iranian airline from operating in the country following U.S.
allegations that its aircraft transported weapons and fighters to
war-torn Syria. U.S. officials say the move against Mahan Air is the
result of longstanding pressure from the Trump administration. Mahan
Air, which operates three flights a week from Tehran to Düsseldorf
and Munich, had its permit revoked with immediate effect on Monday. A
German government spokesman said that the ban was necessary to
protect the interests of the federal government.
Israel said Monday it struck
several Iranian targets in Syria in response to a missile attack,
sending what appeared to be an increasingly forceful public message
to Tehran to stay away from its borders as U.S. troops prepare to
leave Syria. Israel's military said it hit Iranian targets
including munition storage sites, a military training camp and a site
at the Damascus International Airport in overnight strikes. Israel
also struck several Syrian aerial-defense batteries after Syria fired
dozens of missiles at its jets, the military added.
Iran failed to find any buyers
on Monday in its latest attempt to sell oil to private companies for
export on the energy exchange, state media reported, in a setback to
Tehran's efforts to bypass U.S. sanctions. Crude oil trade is
state-controlled in Iran, but to try to work around U.S. sanctions,
the government last year started to sell crude to private buyers
through the exchange.
NUCLEAR DEAL & NUCLEAR PROGRAM
Germany, France and the UK are
scrambling to win EU backing for a dual pronged approach on Iran that
would threaten Tehran with further sanctions while shoring up the
landmark nuclear deal with the Islamic republic. The three powers
want to agree a common EU position ahead of a February 13-14 meeting
on Middle Eastern security that has been jointly convened by the US
and Poland. Some European ministers see the Warsaw gathering as an
attempt by Washington to push the bloc towards a more hawkish line on
Iran.
The International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) has verified several times that Iran is sticking to its
commitments in the nuclear deal, and so should all other signatories
to the pact, Iranian media quoted the director of the
United Nations Information Center (UNIC) in Iran, Maria Dotsenko, as
saying. According to IRNA and Fars news agencies, Dotsenko said that
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres had expressed
concern over the United States withdrawing from the Iran nuclear
deal, as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is commonly
known.
Eight months after U.S. President
Donald Trump announced the U.S. decision to withdraw from the
Iran nuclear deal and restore economic sanctions on Tehran, both
sides continue to hang tough. Trump has recently told journalists
that Iran is in trouble and will eventually return to the negotiating
table on his terms. Iranian leaders, meanwhile, continue their verbal
attacks on America and its president, and make it clear they are
opposed to any dialogue so long as the sanctions continue.
SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC NEWS
The number of electric vehicles
is growing. Consumer discomfort with plastic bottles is rising.
Diplomats are pushing global action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
The price of renewable energy continues to fall. While none of these
trends bode well for the oil industry, they aren't even the major
forces expected to weigh on oil in 2019. This year, the factors that
will most likely drive the price of oil are the Trump
administration's showdown with Iran and the strength of the global
economy.
Japanese refiners have loaded
Iranian oil onto a tanker, resuming imports after halting purchases
because of sanctions by the United States, a spokesman for a Japanese
refinery and an Iranian official said on Monday. Japan is the
last of the four biggest Iranian oil buyers in Asia to resume imports
after receiving a waiver from U.S. sanctions on crude imports that
started in November. China and India maintained their imports after November
while South Korea halted imports for four months, resuming them over
the weekend.
Iran's gas output has risen 35
percent compared with 2012, the oil minister said on Monday.
"In the first ten months of the (Iranian) year (starting from
March), Iran produced on average 840 million cubic metres of gas a
day, showing a 35 percent increase compared with 2012," Bijan
Zanganeh was quoted by the oil ministry's news agency SHANA as
saying. Zanganeh also said that Iran's gas production from
South Pars, the world's largest gas field, has reached 600 million
cubic metres a day.
The United States is unlikely to
entirely remove waivers for Iran sanctions it granted to eight large
importers of the commodity in November, according to analysts,
as quoted by Reuters. The countries most likely to receive
waiver extensions are also the countries most in need of the oil
supply they receive from Tehran: China, India, Japan, South Korea,
and Turkey. Italy, Taiwan, and Greece, which were granted waivers in
November, are smaller importers of Iranian crude.
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
Iranian labor protest leader,
Esmail Bakhshi, has been arrested for the second time, state media
reported Monday, after the judiciary denied his claim that
he was tortured in custody late last year. Bakhshi "was arrested
last night in cooperation with security and law enforcement
forces," Mansour Mohammadi, the prosecutor general of Dezful, in
Khuzestan province, told the judiciary's news website Mizan Online.
Iranian state TV January 19
aired prison confessions of two labor activists and a civil activist
who were arrested in November during labor protests in southwestern,
oil-rich Khuzestan province. The civil activist, Sepideh Qolian
tweeted that the forced confessions broadcast are evidence of torture
against the detainees. Previously, Qolian and Esmail Bakhshi, a labor
leader, had publicly complained that they were both tortured in
custody.
The Iranian president Hassan
Rouhani, whose administration is characterized as a moderate one, has
frequently called for improving ties with the West, as well as
encouraging skilled Iranians abroad to return to Iran. Iran's
ambassador to the UK recently boasted on Twitter that "The
Iranian authorities have repeatedly given assurances that having dual
citizenship per se is not considered a crime or violation of law, and
no one is prosecuted [in the Islamic Republic] for that reason".
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS & NEGOTIATIONS
A top Trump ambassador is
winning kudos for his part in convincing Germany to ban Iranian
airline Mahan Air amid allegations it ran weapons to Syria. Officials
said that Richard Grenell, U.S. ambassador to Germany, played a key
role and scored his latest victory since landing last May when he
warned, "German companies doing business in Iran should wind
down operations immediately."
An American-born journalist who
works for an Iranian state-run television channel was arrested in the
United States as a material witness in an undisclosed investigation,
according to a federal court order unsealed on Friday. The
journalist, Marzieh Hashemi, was arrested at the St. Louis airport on
Sunday and was transferred by the F.B.I. to
Washington, according to Press TV, where she works as an anchor.
An American-born Iranian
television anchor has been arrested as a material witness in an
undisclosed U.S. federal investigation, according to a federal court
order granted on Friday. At the request of the Justice
Department, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued the order, the
first official U.S. confirmation of reports of the arrest of Marzieh
Hashemi, an anchor for Iran's English-language Press TV news channel.
John Limbert belongs to an
exclusive club - the 52 American diplomats held hostage by Iran
for 444 days during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since that crisis,
which began 40 years ago next month, the two countries shared an
enmity that has only grown worse under President Trump. Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo raised the rhetorical stakes earlier this
month when he urged the world to isolate Iran and promised to
"expel every last Iranian boot" from Syria.
Very quietly, without the furor
that has accompanied the resignations of senior officials in the
Trump administration, Gen. (ret.) Anthony Zinni resigned last week
from the U.S. State Department, saying his services were no longer
needed. Actually, his services are greatly needed, but he has failed
in the difficult diplomatic assignment Trump gave him. About 18
months ago, Trump sent him to end the crisis between Saudi
Arabia and Qatar and try to form an "Arab NATO."
MILITARY/INTELLIGENCE MATTERS & PROXY WARS
Iran has dismissed allegations
by German prosecutors that an army employee was spying for Tehran The
semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman
Bahram Ghasemi as saying that "enemies" were aiming to
"sour relations" between Iran and Europe. He appeared to be
referring to the United States and Israel, which have pressed
European nations to withdraw from Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world
powers. Germany's federal prosecutor's office said last week that a
50-year-old German-Afghan dual citizen was detained in the western
Rhineland region.
Iran on Saturday denied having
any link to an Afghan-German man suspected of spying for Tehran,
suggesting his arrest in Germany was part of efforts to mar EU-Iran
relations, the state news agency IRNA reported. Germany's
federal prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that a 50-year-old
Afghan-German dual national who worked for the German military had
been detained on suspicion of passing data to an Iranian intelligence
agency.
Iraqi sea mines of antiquated
design crippled the multi-billion dollar Aegis cruiser USS Princeton
(CG 59) and the Iwo Jima-class amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli
(LPH-10) on the same day during that conflict. The mines cost less
than $25,000 each. The United States is accusing Iran of testing rockets
near one of its aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf as it passed
through the Straits of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM)
denounced the Iranian actions as "highly
provocative."
RUSSIA, SYRIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
Israel sent Military Intelligence officials to New York
in recent weeks to meet with senior UN officials and representatives
of the UN Security Council states to present intelligence information
on Hezbollah's tunnel network to keep the issue on the diplomatic agenda,
Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said on Monday. Danon said the IDF
officials were sent following a special Security Council discussion
in late December on the tunnels, during which certain member states
asked to see more information.
Israel struck in Syria early on
Monday, the latest salvo in its increasingly open assault on Iran's
presence there, shaking the night sky over Damascus with an hour of
loud explosions in a second consecutive night of military
action. Damascus did not say what damage or casualties resulted
from the strikes. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor
said 11 people were killed.
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said Israel's air strikes on Syria on Monday had mainly
targeted military positions set up by Iran, which he warned would
face consequences for threatening to destroy Israel. "We
are operating both against Iran and against the Syrian forces that
are abetting the Iranian aggression," Netanyahu said in a
speech. "We will strike at anyone who tried to harm us. Whoever
threatens to eliminate us, bears full responsibility."
The head of Iran's air force
said on Monday the country was impatient to fight Israel and destroy
it, a state-linked news website said. "The young people in
the air force are fully ready and impatient to confront the Zionist
regime and eliminate it from the Earth," Brigadier General Aziz
Nasirzadeh was quoted as saying by the Young Journalist Club, a
website supervised by state television.
The commander of Iran's air
force, Brigadier Aziz Nasirzadeh, said that Iran will "eliminate
Israel from the Earth" in a fiery statement to the Young
Journalist Club, a website supervised by state television. This comes
after Israel's military said on Monday it struck Iranian Quds
targets inside Syria and warned Syrian forces not to attack
Israeli territory or forces. The Israeli air strikes and
ground-to-ground missiles killed at least 11 fighters including two
Syrians, a Britain-based war monitor said.
China calls on all sides to
refrain from steps that could derail the situation in Syria, said
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, in response to the
IDF's attack late Sunday and early Monday on Iranian targets in
Damascus. "Finding a political solution to the Syrian
crisis is at a key stage," Chunying said.
"We believe that all parties should refrain from measures
that will increase the tension."
GULF STATES, YEMEN, & IRAN
Iran is financing Yemen's Houthi rebels through illegal
shipments of fuel, UN experts said in a new report to the Security
Council that also described how such funding is allowing the rebels
to deploy increasingly sophisticated weaponry in the years-long civil
war. In the 85-page report to the Security Council seen on Friday by
The Associated Press, the panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions
against Yemen said "the Houthi leadership has continued to
consolidate its hold over government and non-government
institutions".
Fuel is being shipped illegally
from Iran to Houthi Shiite rebels in Yemen to finance their war
against the government, and both sides are violating international
law with their military campaigns and arbitrary detention of rivals,
U.N. experts said in a new report. The experts painted a grim picture
of a "deeply fractured" country sliding toward
"humanitarian and economic catastrophe" with no sign of
victory by either side in a conflict that many view as a proxy war
between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The eleventh annual Council on
Foreign Relations' "Preventive Priorities Survey" once
again stated the obvious: "Conflict between the United
States and Iran as well as between the United States and China
constitute two of the greatest threats to peace in 2019."
Certainly, Washington and Tehran appear on a collision course. The
risk is not that the United States will pre-emptively launch an
attack on Iran-as much as the Trump administration seeks to isolate
and pressure Iran, that simply is not on the table-but rather than the
United States and Iran might stumble into conflict.
NORTH KOREA & IRAN
Researchers have discovered another secret ballistic
missile base in North Korea, one of an estimated 20 that the
communist state has not declared. The base, called Sino-ri, was
disclosed in a report released Monday by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS), a Washington D.C.-based think tank. It
is located 132 miles north of the demilitarized zone that divides
North and South Korea and provides "an operational-level nuclear
or conventional first strike capability against targets located both
throughout the Korean Peninsula and in most of Japan," according
to the report.
OTHER FOREIGN AFFAIRS
In Tehran on Jan. 8 during a
meeting with European envoys, Iranian officials abruptly stood up,
walked out and slammed the door in an extraordinary break with
protocol. The French, British, German, Danish, Dutch, and
Belgian diplomats in the Iranian foreign ministry room had incensed
the officials with a message that Europe could no longer tolerate
ballistic missile tests in Iran and assassination plots on European
soil, according to four EU diplomats.
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