US General Concerned Over Iran's Missiles And Drones

"No one can be trusted [fully] in the international community, but at the same time, no one is needless of negotiations and relations with other countries," Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi-Amoli told Amir-Abdollahian Friday during his visit to Qom, the main concentration of Iranian Shiite seminaries and senior clerics.

"We have to negotiate with them and shake hands with them whether we want or not, but we have to count our fingers afterwards," Javadi-Amoli advised, according to remarks published on the ayatollah's personal portal.

Javadi Amoli is recognized by many Shiites as a grand ayatollah, which means he is accepted as a top religious authority.

The quotes came from a readout of the meeting published on the grand ayatollah's personal portal, while state media largely did not reflect his message about the importance of good relations with other countries.

Amir-Abdollahian visited several leading clerics, including grand ayatollahs Naser Makarem-Shirazi, Hossein Safi-Golpaygani, Jafar Sobhani, and Hossein Nouri-Hamedani, as well as Mohammad Saeedi, who holds the lesser title of hojjat ol-eslam.

The foreign ministry reported that Amir-Abdollahian had discussed regional developments including Afghanistan and the government commitment to prioritize relations with immediate neighbors. Saeedi, custodian of the Shiite shrine of Masoumeh, told the foreign minister that proving one is not on the enemy's side did not mean “cutting off economic and human relations with them.”

Amir-Abdollahian's visits to influential Shiite leaders in Qom came ahead of a round of nuclear talks between the administration of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi and world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.

Iran refuses to directly negotiate with the United States, even during multilateral nuclear talks currently underway in Vienna.

A few months after Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Javadi-Amoli welcomed the agreement while advising then foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to remain on guard. "We kept all that we needed" for work in medicine and agriculture, he told Zarif, but had conceded nothing, given Iran had never sought nuclear weapons.

Javadi-Amoli, who is 88, led a mission on behalf of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, to Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1988. In January 2009, he resigned as Friday imam of Qom, possibly due to dissatisfaction with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election and handling of subsequent protests, and had generally good relations with the government of President Hassan Rouhani (2013-17).

As recipients of massive religious duties from their devout followers and as providers of funding for seminaries as well as their charitable foundations, grand ayatollahs wield great influence in the Shiite establishment, particularly Qom where most of them are based.

Visits to prominent ayatollahs by the president, parliament speaker, judiciary chief, and ministers are common before or after important occasions. The general content of such talks is published in readouts on personal portals.

Details usually remain private but occasionally reach the media. In November 2005 Baztab website, linked to former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei (Rezaee), published a video and transcript of a meeting with a cleric in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinjejad had claimed to have been surrounded by a “bright light” when addressing the United Nations two months earlier.

The story, whose leaking was taken to reflect the clerical establishment’s unease at Ahmadinejad, dogged the president for many years.

In Iranian currency the prices seem even more outrageous, ranging from 2-4 trillion rials. The average monthly income of an employee is less than $150 in Iran. An ordinary 1,000sqf apartment can be fetched for well under $100,000 but the great majority of Iranians cannot afford that.

Fararu news website in Tehran wrote that these super-expensive properties are rarely sold, but the owners seem not to mind very much. The reason could be that in an unstable economy, with a falling national currency that has lost its value tenfold in four years, real estate is a sure way of protecting wealth.

Rumors have it that a penthouse apartment was recently sold for $10 million, and Fararu says similar properties are cheaper in Beverly Hills, California than in Tehran’s exclusive neighborhoods. It has compared a 9,000sqf penthouse apartment in Tehran which is priced at $15 million with a much larger property in Beverly Hills offered for $7.5 million.

Properties ranging around 10,000sqf of living space typically feature a roof garden, fitness, jacuzzi, 5-6 bedrooms. a luxurious and large living room and sometimes a swimming pool.

The head of a government chamber of commerce, Gholam-Hossein Shafei speaking at a ceremony in Mashhad said that the private sector in Iran has been dealt a bad hand by politically well-connected elites who took advantage of privatization to enrich themselves.

Shafei, who is the chairman of trade ministry’s chamber of commerce for industry, mines and agriculture, pointed out that depreciation of assets is taking place faster than investments in the economy. In the meantime, the world economy has made great progress and Iran has remained behind., he argued.

With economic crisis gripping Iran since 2018, and lack of progress in nuclear talks with the United States, there are increasing calls for rational thinking to resolve international disputes, remove sanctions and rescue the economy.

Shafei, in an implicit reference to Iran’s isolation, stressed that the world economy is intertwined and interdependent and implied that Iran has remained behind in globalization. He added that Iran has the potential to rescue its economy but it cannot be done “with traditional steps”.

Based on 24 food items in the past 12 months, the report divided price increases into three categories of acceptable, alarming, and critical. The last it defined as a monthly increase of 2 percent, or an annual rate of 27 percent.

But the report claimed prices for the 24 items had risen 83.3 percent in the past 12 months. It said that “essential food items” – including the ones surveyed in October, were up more than 60 percent in October year on year.

The 24 food items included rice, chicken, dairy products (milk, yoghurt, cheese, butter), eggs, cooking oil, tea, sugar, beans, lentils, vegetables (cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes), and fruit (oranges, apples, bananas).

The prices of three of the 24 items, including potatoes, increased by over 10 percent in October alone, while five other items – including cooking oil and red meat – dropped around 1 percent.

The report was released a day after President Ebrahim Raisi's (Raeesi) live televised interview Sunday in which he said curbing inflation would be a priority target of his government.

Quoting the ministry's report, the reformist Arman-e Melli newspaper Tuesday warned "food poverty” would have “irreparable consequences.

The paper quoted Morteza Afghah, an economist at the Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, that “the income of a group of the society is no longer sufficient even for…their minimum food requirements. Afhgah said that “in Iran people become rich when they are close to politically powerful groups and this amplifies the dissatisfaction of people.”

Those conservatives who follow Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s political guidance claim that a "resistance economy" based on self-reliance is the only way to recover from the damage inflicted by United States ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions introduced in 2018 when the US left the 2015 nuclear deal. After economic growth of 13.4 percent in 2017, the Iranian economy went into recession from which it has not really recovered.

The government, including the Central Bank, have stopped publishing critical economic data, which makes it hard to judge how bad the situation is. But the annual rate of inflation is around 45 percent and the national currency has dropped close to an all-time low.

The Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) warned Wednesday that those on low incomes could no longer cut down on food consumption without serious health consequences, even as they faced rising costs for housing, education, healthcare, and transport.

"Workers have already curbed their monthly spending,” ILNA wrote. “Leisure, clothing, furniture and appliances were given up long ago. When it comes to food, they have to be content with only one warm meal, often of poor nutritional value. But can they give up what is necessary for remaining alive?"

"There were no casualties and rescue and operations forces are at the scene of the accident and have cut off the line," state broadcaster IRIB quoted the Parsian refinery's head as saying. The pipeline was shut off.

There is no independent report about the incident given Iran's strict control of information.

The pipeline carries 32,000 barrels of gas condensate daily(12 million annually) worth approximately $900 million, to the Persian Gulf cost.

Before US sanctions, Japan and Korea were the biggest customers of Parsian’s gas condensate. Now only China is a customer.

The semi-official Fars news agency carried a similar report.

Mohammad Asgari, a spokesman for the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC), said gas production was not affected by the accident, the semi-official YJC news agency reported.

Iran has the world's second largest natural gas reserves but production has not kept pace with galloping demand for heavily subsidized gas, because of lack of investment and foreign partners as the economy faces US sanctions.

With reporting by Reuters