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TOP STORIES
The American military downed an Iranian drone in the
Strait of Hormuz on Thursday in what President Trump called an act of
self-defense, just hours after Iran's chief diplomat offered a modest
road map for easing tensions with the United States. Officials said
the uncrewed, relatively small drone came within 1,000 yards of the
Boxer, a United States amphibious assault ship in the strait. It was
not known if the drone was armed, but a Pentagon spokesman, Jonathan
Hoffman, said that it had "closed within a threatening
range" before being shot down over international waters.
Iran on Thursday signaled a willingness to engage in
diplomacy to defuse tensions with the United States with a modest
offer on its nuclear program that met immediate skepticism in
Washington. Iran's foreign minister told reporters in New York
that Iran could immediately ratify a document prescribing more
intrusive inspections of its nuclear program if the United States
abandoned its economic sanctions, media organizations reported.
Argentina designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization
on Thursday and ordered a freeze on the financial assets of the
group, which has been blamed for two terrorist attacks in the
country. The move coincided with the 25th anniversary of one of those
attacks, the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos
Aires, the Argentine capital, which killed 85 people and wounded more
than 300 in one of the deadliest anti-Semitic crimes since World War
II.
UANI IN THE NEWS
Last month, the U.S. Department of the Treasury
sanctioned Iran's biggest petrochemical holding company, Persian Gulf
Petrochemical, and reaffirmed its threat to "vigorously
enforce" existing sanctions on Iranian petrochemicals exports -
which provide the Iranian regime with $13 billion annually. Some U.S.
allies haven't gotten the message though because ships carrying
products like ethane, methanol and urea continue docking around the
world, most recently in Brazil. Iran is exploiting the size and
complexity of global sea-trade to sell its petrochemical products.
Because ocean trade encompasses a wide spectrum of highly
specialized, limited roles that could be interpreted as being
excluded from U.S. sanctions, nobody is taking responsibility for
stopping the sale of sanctioned cargo.
NUCLEAR DEAL & NUCLEAR PROGRAM
On July 9, French President Emmanuel Macron sent his top
diplomatic adviser to Tehran on a mission to ease spiraling tensions
between the U.S. and Iran. Having cultivated direct lines to
President Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and spoken to
each since Trump ordered and then canceled airstrikes on the Islamic
Republic in June, Macron saw the potential for dialogue. For all the
chest thumping, he was confident the Iranians didn't want further
escalation, according to a person familiar with the French
president's thinking.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said
Thursday that if Congress lifts sanctions against the country, Iran
will commit firmly to allowing international inspections of its
nuclear program. Speaking to reporters at the Iranian mission
to the United Nations, Zarif said Iran's parliament, or Majlis, would
quickly ratify what is known as the Additional Protocol, a part of
the Non-Proliferation Treaty that enforces monitoring by the
International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran is determined to "leave all doors open"
to save its 2015 nuclear deal with major powers, Iranian state TV
quoted President Hassan Rouhani as saying in a telephone call with
his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Thursday. "We
are determined to leave all doors open to save the nuclear deal ...
The Europeans should accelerate their efforts to salvage the
pact," Rouhani said.
Germany and the other countries that remain party to the
2015 Iran nuclear deal expect Tehran to uphold its side of the
accord, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said, describing recent
pronouncements by the Iranians as
"unacceptable". "Those of us who have remained in
this agreement expect from Iran that it fulfills its obligations, we
are trying to do this ... and we expect from Iran that it sticks to
its commitments too," Maas said on Thursday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged Europe on
Thursday to be clearer in its position on the Iran nuclear deal that
the United States quit last year. Speaking in Germany at talks
with Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, Lavrov also said Russia had growing
concerns that the United States was backing away from nuclear arms
control treaties.
The Iranian nuclear deal looks all but dead just one
year after the President Donald Trump administration walked
away from it and reimposed crippling sanctions on the Islamic
Republic. As Iran's government starts breaking its agreed uranium enrichment
limits, European leaders are floundering to keep it alive. British
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt claimed Monday that the Obama-era deal
- signed by the U.S., U.K., Iran, Russia, China, France and Germany
in 2015 and intended to provide Iran economic relief in exchange for
limits on its nuclear program - "isn't dead
yet."
SANCTIONS, BUSINESS RISKS, & OTHER ECONOMIC NEWS
The United States on Thursday imposed sanctions on an
international network of companies and their agents it said were
involved in the procurement of materials for Iran's nuclear
program. They are the first punitive steps by Washington since
Tehran announced earlier this month it would increase its levels of
enriched uranium that can be used for bomb fuel.
Two Iranian vessels have been stranded for weeks at
Brazilian ports, unable to head back to Iran due to lack of fuel,
which state-run oil firm Petrobras refuses to sell them due to sanctions
imposed by the United States. The vessels Bavand and Termeh came to
Brazil a couple months ago carrying urea, a petrochemical product
used as fertilizer. They were expected to load corn and return to
Iran, but lacked enough fuel for the trip, the port operator in
Paranaguá told Reuters.
PROTESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS
Iran's judiciary has just confirmed the arrest of Fariba
Adelkhah, a French-Iranian anthropologist, in Tehran. Media sources
had earlier reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps'
(IRGC) Intelligence Organization arrested Adelkhah, a researcher at
the Paris-based academic institute Sciences Po, at her home on June
7. She has been detained ever since. The accusations against her
remain unclear, but her arrest fits an
all-too-familiar pattern concerning Iran's targeting of
dual nationals.
U.S.-IRAN RELATIONS & NEGOTIATIONS
Immediately after entering the Strait of Hormuz at 7
a.m. local time on Thursday, a group of six U.S. Navy ships had a
series of tense encounters with the Iranian military, culminating in
the downing of an Iranian drone. The incident came after the group of
six ships led by this sea-to-land assault vessel headed into waters
where the U.S. and the U.K. have blamed Iran for attacking or
harassing commercial vessels. Iran downed an American spy drone over
the Persian Gulf last month and, on Thursday, seized a foreign vessel
it accused of smuggling.
Iran's foreign minister said on Thursday that he was
willing to meet with American senators to discuss possible ways out
of the nuclear crisis with the Trump administration and, for the
first time, floated an opening bid of modest steps that Tehran would
be willing to take in return for simultaneous lifting of sanctions
President Trump reimposed last year. The American-educated foreign
minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, would not say whether he was planning
to meet Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who has proposed
himself as a quiet emissary to Iran from the Trump administration.
The Pentagon is sending hundreds of troops to Saudi
Arabia as part of a buildup to counter potential threats from Iran
and its allies, U.S. officials said, marking a U.S. return to the
kingdom after its 2003 withdrawal. U.S. forces will again be stationed
at the Prince Sultan Air Base, which had been closed to the American
military since the fall of Baghdad following the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, officials and experts said.
Iran denied Friday it lost a drone in the
Strait of Hormuz after the United States said it had
"destroyed" an Iranian drone that was threatening a
U.S. ship. "We have not lost any drone in the Strait of Hormuz
nor anywhere else. I am worried that USS Boxer has shot down their own
UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) by mistake!," Iran's Deputy
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Twitter.
The United States said on Thursday that a U.S. Navy ship
had "destroyed" an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz
after the aircraft threatened the vessel, but Iran said it had no
information about losing a drone. In the latest episode to stir
tensions in the Gulf, U.S. President Donald Trump told an event at
the White House that the drone had flown to within 1,000 yards of the
USS Boxer and had ignored "multiple calls to stand
down."
Iran must immediately release a vessel it seized in the
Gulf and its crew, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said on
Thursday. "The United States strongly condemns the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy's continued harassment of vessels and
interference with safe passage in and around the Strait of
Hormuz," the spokesperson added in an email to Reuters after
Iran said it had seized a foreign tanker smuggling fuel in the Gulf.
The United States is not aiming to set up a military
coalition against Iran with its new security initiative in the Gulf,
but simply "shining a flashlight" in the region to deter
attacks on commercial ships, a top Pentagon official told
Reuters. Kathryn Wheelbarger, who briefed NATO allies this week
on the U.S. proposal, said it was less operational and more geared
toward increasing surveillance capabilities.
At a thumbs-up sign from a sailor, a U.S. Harrier
fighter jet takes off from the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer in
the Arabian Sea as an oil tanker passes, a nautical mile
away. The patrol is "standard" but the situation -
growing tension between the United States and Iran - is not.
Soon after the roar of the Harrier fades, two combat helicopters and
two unmistakable Osprey aircraft with their tiltable rotors land back
on the flight deck.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards said on Friday they would
release images to disprove U.S. President Donald Trump's assertion
that the U.S. Navy has destroyed an Iranian drone in the Gulf,
Iranian news agencies reported. "Soon, images captured by
the Guards drones from the U.S. warship Boxer will be published to
expose to world public opinion as lies and groundless the claim ...
of shooting down an Iranian drone over the Strait of Hormuz,"
the Revolutionary Guards said in a statement carried by news
agencies.
The U.S. is defending its new restrictions on the
movements of Iranian diplomats at the United Nations in New York,
saying the measures are consistent with U.S. obligations as host of
the world body. In response to a question from VOA Persian, a
State Department spokesperson issued a Thursday statement saying the
tightened restrictions on Iranian diplomats will be implemented
"consistently with our obligations under the U.N. Headquarters
Agreement."
U.S. forces downed an Iranian drone that approached a
Navy warship in the Middle East on Thursday, stoking fears that the
two countries will fall into a military confrontation even as they
both seek diplomatic openings with each other. President Donald
Trump said the unmanned aircraft "had closed into a very, very
near distance, approximately 1,000 yards" of the U.S.S. Boxer,
an amphibious assault ship, in the strategically critical waterway
known as the Strait of Hormuz.
When a U.S. Navy ship downed an Iranian drone in the
Strait of Hormuz Thursday it sent an important message to the mullahs
who rule the Islamic Republic: aggression has consequences and
America will strike back when provoked. During the Obama
administration, Iran's leaders figured out that President Barack
Obama was desperate to secure his place in history by reaching a deal
to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
MILITARY/INTELLIGENCE MATTERS & PROXY WARS
The head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards warned on
Thursday against any aggression targeting his country, the
semi-official Tasnim news agency reported. "Iran has
adopted a defensive strategy but if our enemies make any mistakes...
our strategy can become an offensive one," said the Guards'
commander-in-chief, Hossein Salami.
Last month, the Islamic Republic of Iran made a new
appointment in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence
Organization (IRGC-IO), expanding the scope of its operations abroad
focused on the US in order to fight a "total intelligence war."
The IRGC has furthermore signaled the merging of the IRGC Strategic
Intelligence Directorate (IRGC-SID) into IRGC-IO as a component of
this expanded mission.
IRANIAN INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS
If there was a currency you wouldn't expect to be
strengthening, it would be Iran's. But the truth is that the rial is
soaring on the country's parallel market, gaining 8% against the
dollar this week alone to extend its advance since early May to 30%.
That's according to Bonbast.com, a local website that monitors the
currency. The appreciation is borne out by a Bloomberg survey of
street traders in Tehran. U.S. President Donald Trump's
administration has been toughening up sanctions on the Islamic
Republic, all but preventing it from exporting oil, the lifeblood of its
economy.
RUSSIA, SYRIA, ISRAEL, HEZBOLLAH, LEBANON & IRAN
The tranquil winding roads of Lebanon's mountainous
interior are far from the tense waters of the Persian Gulf where
President Donald Trump says America came within 10 minutes of war
with Iran a few weeks ago. And where, he said on Thursday, the U.S.
shot down an Iranian drone. But if fighting ever does begin, these
hills and valleys near the border with Israel will quickly be on the
front lines. And according to Hezbollah commanders, that moment could
be coming soon.
No conversation about the world's massive political and economic
changes since 2015 is complete without mentioning the F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter, developed by Lockheed Martin. That became even
clearer this week thanks to a somewhat cheeky statement by Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in response to Iran's provocative
moves in the Persian Gulf and other threats from Tehran. Standing in
front of an F-35 jet parked at an Israeli Air Force base, Netanyahu
barely held back a smile as he said that Israel can reach Iran, but
Iran cannot reach Israel.
GULF STATES, YEMEN, & IRAN
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said
Thursday that Saudi Arabia - and not Iran - is to blame for
sowing instability in the Middle East, and accused the Trump
administration of turning a blind eye to Riyadh's "malign"
actions. Speaking to reporters at Iran's United Nations Mission in
New York, Zarif also proposed what he called a
"substantial" diplomatic offer in which Iran would agree to
permanent and enhanced inspections of its nuclear program in return
for a permanent lifting of U.S. sanctions.
US Central Command chief Kenneth McKenzie stated on
Thursday that evidence points to Iran's connection to attacks against
civilians and civilian infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. The US
general was talking to reporters in Riyadh at a joint news conference
with General Prince Fahd bin Turki, commander of the Saudi-led Arab
coalition fighting the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen.
OTHER FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Gibraltar's Chief Minister Fabian Picardo had a
"constructive and positive" meeting with Iranian officials
in London about the detained oil tanker Grace 1, Gibraltar
said. "The Chief Minister met yesterday in London with
Iranian officials to discuss matters related to the detention of
Grace 1 and to seek to de-escalate all aspects of the issues
arising," a spokesman said. "The meeting was constructive
and positive."
Gibraltar's supreme court has granted a 30-day extension
to allow authorities to detain the Iranian oil tanker Grace 1 until
Aug. 15, the Gibraltar Chronicle newspaper said. The paper said
Gibraltar's Attorney General, Michael Llamas, had confirmed the
decision. No official comment from the Gibraltar government was
immediately available. The tanker was seized earlier this month by
British Royal Marines off the coast of the British Mediterranean
territory on suspicion of violating sanctions against Syria.
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