IRGC’s Quds Commander Says Iran ‘Has Humiliated Israel’
Mardo Soghom
Iran International
Iran has humiliated Israel by organizing “Islamic resistance”, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, Esmail Qaani said in Tehran on Wednesday.
Iran International
Iran has humiliated Israel by organizing “Islamic resistance”, commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, Esmail Qaani said in Tehran on Wednesday.
“At this point, Israel has reached a level of humiliation that it has surrounded itself with barbed wire and radars to prevent infiltration,” Qaani told a gathering of young clerics.
The commander who replaced Qassem Soleimani after his killing by the order of former US President Donald Trump in January 2020, is in charge of Tehran’s militant proxies in the region, including Palestinian groups and the Lebanese Hezbollah.
Although Qaani is not a strong operator like his predecessor who organized a large network of proxy forces, Iran succeeded in inflaming tensions between Israel and Palestinian militant groups this year, which led to military clashes in April.
Qaani’s remarks came as Islamic Republic’s president Ebrahim Raisi was in Damascus for a two-day visit, for the first time by an Iranian head of state since civil war broke out in 2011.
Iran has a large military presence in Syria, where Israel says Tehran is building up forces to threaten its northern border and use the country as a supply route to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Qaani boasted that because of Tehran’s efforts to instill “the spirit of resistance,” some days up to 30 attacks take place against Israel “that their media try to hide.”
He added that the Islamic Republic is so strong that “Today, America, Israel, NATO and others have mobilized” to destroy it.
Qaani’s remarks came as Iran seized a second oil tanker in the Persian Gulf in a span of days, despite the United States deploying a guided-missile submarine in the region in April.
The Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet said Wednesday that the Panama-flagged oil tanker Niovi was seized by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) while passing through the narrow Strait of Hormuz.
The incident happened in international waters, as swarms of Iranian armed speed boats surrounded the vessel. It is not clear why the US Navy, which has a strong presence in the region, and was apparently aware of the unfolding seizure, did not intervene.
Asked by a reporter Wednesday why the United States does not respond to Iran’s actions, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel said, “When it comes to holding the – the malign Iranian regime accountable, we’ll continue to take steps to do whatever we can to protect the security of our allies and partners in the region, protect the security of the United States and its service members, and we continue to have a number of tools at our disposal.”
But clearly Tehran has decided to make oil shipping through the strategic Persian Gulf waters unsafe, potentially hurting vital oil traffic.
Saudi Arabia, which agreed to restore relations with the Islamic Republic in March after a seven-year hiatus, has not publicly reacted to Tehran’s actions in the Persian Gulf endangering oil shipments by its allies Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
It was expected that the Iranian regime would act more cautiously after emerging from its regional isolation following the agreement with Riyadh.
However, the calculus in Tehran might be different. The restoration of ties was brokered by China, which was seen as a blow to US influence in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic sees its alliance with China as a game changer.
“The shift in power from West to East has begun,” Qanaani said in his speech, referring to China becoming a diplomatic and military power in addition to its economic clout.
“In this shift the Islamic Republic should find its rightful place and with God’s help it will find it.”
Media in Tehran and other cities are reporting dozens of similar cases as no one actually knows how much the annual inflation rate is after the government stopped publishing its monthly statistics.
Aftab News, a website which dares to be more critical of the authoritarian regime, quipped Wednesday that President Ebrahim Raisi still insists, “The progress by Iran has angered the enemies,” meaning the United States and its allies.
Mehr News Agency, a conservative website and a supporter of Iran’s hardliners reported that families share rented apartments, as they cannot afford the soaring security deposit and monthly rent.
Others simply must move to cheaper and cheaper areas, getting farther than the cities and have to commute somehow if they do not own a car. Vehicles have also become unaffordable for many with the cheapest options costing billions of rials.
Ordinary Iranian salaries are less than $200 a month, while rents for simple apartments have soared to beyond $300. Couples must work two jobs just to pay the rent.
Although Iranians have been losing their purchasing power since 2018 when their currency nosedived, the situation took a turn for the worse last September as the rial began to fall further, losing half its value. The US dollar rose from around 260,000 rials last August to near 550,000 in late April.
The minimum monthly income needed for bare necessities for a family of 3.3 people remains at around $500 a month, but the rials a family earns buys much less each week.
The political leadership, however, continues its nuclear program and its anti-West policies, so far refusing to compromise with the United States.
Even some real estate agents will soon be forced to go out of business as they cannot sell properties overpriced for the impoverished population. Some agencies close just one deal a month and cannot even afford rent for their own office.
Etemad newspaper reported that people who just a few months ago were helping others in need are now unable to afford their own groceries. Prices for eggs, milk, meat and rice have doubled in less than a year.
“Until a few months ago there were upper middle-class people who were quietly leaving some money with neighborhood stores so that they could give out food to needy customers who were asking to buy things on credit,” Etemad wrote, “but in the last 6-7 months these philanthropists have disappeared.”
One such person who went to the butcher to pay the debts of those who could not pay, realized that most people were buying only chicken skin and bones, the newspaper reported.
One kilogram of chicken fillet now costs 1.8 million rials, while an ordinary salary is around 70,000 rials. A few months ago, the same chicken meat was sold at 630,000 rials. Now, people are forced to buy the cheaper parts, such as skin or stripped bones.
In poorer Tehran neighborhoods, even butchers are opting to close shop and start another business as far fewer people can afford beef or chicken.
Desperate people try to barter homemade jams or pickles for protein foods.
As million of people are becoming impoverished, Aftab News quotes psychologists and doctors about the damage inflicted by malnutrition on children and adults alike. While mothers have to breastfeed babies with intake of nutritious food, adults face more health problems, such as cancer, that many say has spiked in recent years.
According to the secret documents received by Iran International, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) had asked the government to let the agency import 800,000 tons of phosphate from the mines under the Islamic Republic’s control in Syria without paying the share of the administration.
One of the documents is a letter issued in January by Mojtaba Hosseinipour, a deputy at the president’s office, addressing Minister of Economic and Financial Affairs Ehsan Khandozi and Reza Fatemi Amin, the former Minister of Industry, Mines and Business who was sacked this week, as well as former head of Iran's Planning and Budget Organization Masoud Mirkazemi and Mohammad Dehghan, Raisi’s deputy in legal matters.
In the letter, the office of the president has asked the officials to decide whether or not they can give the green light to the nuclear agency for “the annual purchase of phosphates from Syria without paying the government’s share.”
In 2017, Tehran and Damascus signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in a phosphate mine in Syria’s Al-Sharqiya. Syria is among the world’s largest exporters of the rock phosphate, a raw material used in the production of phosphatic fertilizers. The main use of phosphate is production of fertilizers, but the rock is also an unconventional source to extract uranium, explained in another document attached to the letter.
While EU sanctions on Syria do not explicitly prohibit phosphate imports, they do ban deals with the Syrian minister of oil and mineral resources, who is in charge of phosphates. Cheap Syrian phosphate exports to Europe have boomed in recent years, The Guardian reported in January 2022, noting that European farmers are dependent on phosphate fertilizers. Anyhow, it seems that the Islamic Republic has found another way around sanctions to advance its nuclear program.
Another letter included in the bundle of documents is by the head of Iran’s atomic agency, Mohammad Eslami, who asked Raisi’s first deputy Mohammad Mokhber to allow the purchase of the product from Syria.
“In order to supply part of the uranium needed for the country's nuclear industry, this organization (AEOI) is mulling a project to extract uranium from Syria’s phosphate mines, the exploitation of which is at the disposal of the Islamic Republic,” Eslami wrote.
“Due to the high grade of uranium in the phosphate soil of these mines, the extraction of the element and the preparation of yellowcake from it is technically more feasible than the extraction of uranium from low-grade radioactive mines of Iran,” he added, requesting the cabinet to give the go-ahead for the project without paying the government.
Yellowcake is used in the preparation of uranium fuel for nuclear reactors, for which it is smelted into purified uranium dioxide for use in fuel rods for pressurized heavy-water reactors and other systems that use natural unenriched uranium. It has both civilian use as well as application for weapons but it should be processed further. Highly enriched uranium can be blended down with uranium containing low levels of U-235 to produce low-enriched uranium -- less than 5% U-235 -- fuel for power reactors. Further processing can yield weapons-grade uranium with U-235 levels usually above 90%, suitable for nuclear weapons.
In an appendix attached to the letter, the nuclear agency said that there are two main sources for extracting uranium, but the Islamic Republic is barred from using the conventional sources under international sanctions.
It has been forced to resort to unconventional sources in which uranium is extracted as a byproduct, such as is the case for phosphate soil.Khunayfis mine in Homs Governorate with 300 million tons of phosphates is the better choice among the mines under contract with Iran because it has a higher amount of uranium, according to the document.
The presidents of Iran and Syria on Wednesday signed a long-term strategic cooperation agreement, including a memorandum of understanding on oil industry cooperation.
The signing came during a visit by Raisi to Damascus for talks with his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, in the first such visit by an Iranian head of state since war broke out in Syria in 2011. Tehran is helping Syria rebuild its roads, airports, power stations and ports — potentially benefiting the Revolutionary Guards, which own the biggest construction firms in Iran.
In March, the E3, made up of France, Germany and the UK, issued a tough statement addressing IAEA Board of Governors, demanding immediate response to Iran’s 84-percent uranium enrichment.
While the US responded to the IAEA chief’s visit to Tehran with a cautious approach, waiting to see what the outcomes would be, the E3 said the enrichment at up to 83.7% U-235 is an “extremely grave escalation” which comes against the highly concerning backdrop of continued accumulation of high enriched uranium up to 60% and Iran continuing to expand its enrichment capabilities.