Dust Storms Sweep Iran
Dust has engulfed over a dozen Iranian provinces and the storm is expected to continue until early April, head of the national taskforce for mitigation of sand and dust storms said Monday.
Dust has engulfed over a dozen Iranian provinces and the storm is expected to continue until early April, head of the national taskforce for mitigation of sand and dust storms said Monday.
The dust was coming from within Iran and from outside, Ali Mohammad Tahmasbi Birgani said. This was an international challenge, he said, needed action including through the United Nations Development and Environment Programs and the Asian and Pacific Centre for the Development of Disaster Information Management: “We have a large number of bilateral and multilateral agreements with neighboring countries, including Iraq, Syria and Turkey, but no operational action has been taken.”
A report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in February projected temperatures in the Middle East and North African will rise “by at least 4°C by 2050 − that is, if greenhouse gases continue to increase at the current rate − and heat waves are set to be experienced ten times more frequently by the same year.”
Carnegie predicted growing migration, food insecurity and conflicts over resources: “In addition to increased water scarcity, climate change will produce increased aridity in parts of the MENA region in the next century, thus shrinking arable lands and disrupting agricultural patterns. Moreover, already dry soil is set to become drier, and desert dust will increasingly accumulate in the atmosphere and create more sandstorms, especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.”
Dust storms and other pollutants have increased markedly in recent years in several Iranian provinces, including Khuzestan, Kermanshah, and Sistan-Baluchestan.
The White House issued a statement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Monday, saying, “The United States stands with Prime Minister [Mustafa] Kadhimi and the leaders of the Kurdistan Region, President Nechirvan Barzani, and Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, in condemning this assault on the sovereignty of Iraq and its Kurdistan region”.
It expressed US support for “the full sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of Iraq”, noting, “We will support the Government of Iraq in holding Iran accountable, and we will support our partners throughout the Middle East in confronting similar threats from Iran”.
Iran claimed it targeted an Israeli spy station in Erbil but missiles fell close to a US consulate building, damaged a villa that presumably was used by Israelis and a Kurdish TV station.
The Wall Street Journal in an editorial said, "The Biden Administration’s hell-bent pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran grows harder to understand with each provocation from Tehran. The latest came Sunday in a missile attack near a US Consulate under construction in northern Iraq."
Several lawmakers and former American officials have reacted to the attack apparently targeting the US consulate in Iraq’s Erbil urging an end to Iran nuclear talks, but some senior US officials have appeared to suggest that the assault would not impact the chances of concluding a nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Referring to the intelligence agencies’ 2022 annual report, Representative Nicole Malliotakis said in a tweet on Sunday that such reports as well as the attack in Erbil “should put an end to all discussions on a new nuclear deal with Tehran”.
The 2022 Annual Threat Assessment published by the Office of Director of National Intelligence on Tuesday said, "We assess that Iran will threaten US persons directly and via proxy attacks, particularly in the Middle East,” adding, “Iran also remains committed to developing networks inside the United States—an objective it has pursued for more than a decade.”
On March 6, Secretary of State Antony Blinken sidestepped a question about whether the renewed nuclear agreement with Iran would also address threats on US soil, including threats against his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, and Trump administration Iran envoy Brian Hook to avenge the targeted killing of Iran's most powerful military general Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.
"We were very clear when we were in the deal originally that nothing about the deal prevents us from taking action against Iran when it's engaged in actions that threaten us, threaten our allies and partners. That will very much continue," Blinken said.
Concurring with Blinken that the threats do not have to be addressed in any renewed nuclear-related deal, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff said, "These other malign activities of Iran's, their plots against the US personnel or Americans around the world we can deal with and have to deal with separately, and we should deal with them aggressively. We need to go after all of this, not necessarily in one agreement."
After the attack on Erbil, Pompeo reiterated that “Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. It must remain designated as such” adding that “Terrorist-related sanctions must remain in place”.
There have been reports that the Biden Administration has agreed to remove terror-related sanctions imposed by the previous administration to secure a nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Iran’s missile attack came as diplomats have stopped nuclear talks in Vienna after 11 months of negotiations even though they say an agreement was very close to be finalized. The pause came after Russia on March 5 demanded an exemption from Ukraine sanctions in its economic and other relations with Iran. Tehran has not objected to Russia’s sudden move, which is bound to delay an agreement and lifting of Iran’s economic sanctions, vital for the government.
The commentary by Esfahan University academic Mohsen Ranani, published by reformist newspaper Etemad in Tehran on Saturday, has met with angry reactions from Iran's conservative press.
Ranani's social commentary was also carried by many Iranian websites and quoted by dozens of Iranians on social media as a serious critique of the social and political situation in Iran. The commentary was taken from a speech by Ranani in Esfahan last week.
The academic said that the Iranian government pretends not to hear what critics and intellectuals say about the country's problems while officials openly call them "social germs" in their speeches. As a result, it appears that intellectuals have nothing more to say.
This, he said, has left only those who want regime change and pseudo-artists who crack jokes about everything, as the only groups who can win the hearts and minds of young Iranians.
The academic said young Iranians can either choose to be like Rouhollah Zam, the rebel journalist who was abducted abroad and hanged in Iran in 2020, or they can be careless and ignorant like Amir Tatallou, the controversial singer and a rebel in his own right who cooperated with Ebrahim Raisi's election campaign in 2017 but was later jailed and finally fled to Turkey where thousands of young Iranians go to attend his concerts.
Under these circumstances, the only hope for a rational and ethical change in Iran can be pinned on Iranian women, Ranani said, adding that they are going forward step by step and taking back the self-confidence and rights men took from them in the course of history.
He suggested that Iran's male activists should give their place to women who act, instead of writing articles or delivering speeches. Ranani opined that women do not stage revolutions or riots as Iranian men did in the 20th century upheavals. He named several prominent female activists currently in Iranian prisons.
Ranani said that Iranian women will impose change on Iranian men, and traditional patriarchal government. "Their weapon is silence and calm resistance. They are armed with non-violent steadfastness," Ranani said, adding that "No power can resist against this silent resistance."
The IRGC-linked Javan newspaper said in a commentary that the academic was simply angry because the government has ignored him and accused Etemad of being a "radical media outlet" that has gone beyond the frontiers of press freedom in the Islamic Republic. Ironically the commentary in Javan was authored by a woman, Kobra Asupar.
Asupar also said that Ranani's comment about Iranian youths having no role models apart from Zam and Tatallou was an invalid and irrelevant generalization. About his comments regarding women, Asupar said that Iranian women played a major part in the Islamic revolution in 1979. So, Ranani cannot say that "good women have supported a bad revolution!"
Meanwhile, hardline daily Kayhan also lashed out at the academic, attacking his background as a reformist, claiming that reformists have plundered public resources and now pretend to be innocent. The Kayhan then blamed the reformists for all of Iran's problems and mentioned former President Hassan Rouhani and former Vice President Es'haq Jahangiri's brothers' involvement in corruption cases to prove its case and said that Ranani should be accountable for his support of reformist government's "harmful" economic policies.
The Kayhan called Ranani's commentary "an outrageous shift from plundering the people's resources to claiming to be following their demands."
