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Engineers in Damascus
Dr. Franklin Lamb Salem-News.comNov-17-2014
While Unleashing Projects to Derail Nuclear Talks
(DAMASCUS) - With less than two
weeks run-up to the deadline for
Iran and the P-5 + 1 to negotiate
a final agreement, the ninth set
of talks between the parties on
the nuclear issue, Mossad has
assassinated a team of five
nuclear weapons specialists in
Damascus, the leader of whom
was Iranian.
This according to one of the
DeputyForeignMinisterHassanGhashghavi
Photo:radiofarda.com
authors of the just published Naame Shaams report: Iran in Syria: From
an Ally of the Regime to an Occupying Force which levels many
accusations against Irans leadership and accuses the Islamic Republic of
occupying Syria in order to fill in its Shia Crescent trajectory from
Yemen to Lebanon.
The five engineers were reportedly being watched for weeks as they would
arrive one at a time daily to their secured work quarters without guards
and in plain clothes in order not to attract attention.
Mossad, widely known to have many agents among the opponents of the
regime across Syria as it watches Iranian projects. By its own admission,
Hezbollah policy.
This action is urged even though the people of Syria, and to a much lesser
extent, the people of Iran, will continue to pay the price. But the White
House is yet to publicly admit that it is actively involved in a proxy war
against the Iranian regime, because Barack Obama wants to avoid Zionist
lobby pressure to prematurely take concrete military steps to end the
bloodshed.
The impact of US-led sanctions on the Iranian economy which the
Congressional committee estimates at well over 120 billion US dollars as of
June 1, 2014 rather than being rusty as Rohani claims is enormous
according to the US Treasury Departments Office of Financial Assets
Control (OFAC).
AIPAC photo handouts after the hearing included scenes of hundreds of
Iranian citizens daily lining up for food supplies in Tehran.
According to AIPAC, as well as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
(WINEP), and Naame Shaam, one key indicator of the economic burden is
the inflation rate, which has more than tripled in the last five years (from
10 per cent in 2009 to over 35 per cent in 2014) and has increased by
about 11 per cent since the start of the war in Syria.
Official reports also indicate that Iranian household purchasing power has
decreased by about 27 per cent. BBC Persian, in March 2014 published a
list of basic food items claiming that consumer prices in Iran had at least
tripled in the past four or five years.
According to a July 2014 report of the Iranian Ministry of the Economy, 31
per cent of all Iranians live below the poverty line. Three months before, in
March 2014, Iranian MP Mousareza Servati declared that 15 million
Iranians (about 20 per cent of the population) are living below the national
poverty line. Seven million of them are not receiving assistance of any
kind.
A hand-out document at the hearing also emphasized the following:
Despite Iranian medias celebration of President Hassan Rouhanis economic
achievements the reality is that Irans economic problems are unlikely to go away any
time soon unless there are fundamental shifts in its foreign policies which Washington
and its allies do not believe will happen until regime change happens.
In March 2014, The New York Times published an article entitled Hopes fade for
surge in the economy. The article argued that people in Iran had voted for President
Rouhani in the hope for a revival of the countrys ailing economy. But more than six
months after he took office, hopes of a quick economic recovery are fading, while
economists say the government is running out of cash. On taking office, he discovered
that the governments finances were in far worse condition than his predecessor,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had ever let on. Now, with a lack of petrodollars and
declining tax revenues, Mr. Rouhani has little option but to take steps that in the shortrun will only increase the pain for the voters who put him into office. The article also
quotes Saeed Laylaz, an economist advisor to President Rouhani, saying Iran is
heading to a black spring and only a miracle could save it from political damage
caused by the economic problems. I am worried we might witness turmoil, civil unrest
or worse, he added.
According to the UK Economist and other media reports Iran is so short of cash that
the government has no other option but to take painful steps such as printing
money (therefore pushing inflation further up) and cutting down on public spending.
While phasing out energy subsidies and cutting back on social assistance payments to
nearly 60 million poor Iranians (about 12 US dollars a month), Iran has been sending
millions of tons of food and cash to Syria and increasingly the Iranian public is
complaining.
Consequently the sanctions will remain and be intensified according to the
House Committee on Financial Services.
Meanwhile the Mossad is watching closely Irans activities in Iraq, Syria and
now Lebanon and has once more telegraphed its intentions to continue its
serial violations of those countries sovereignty while implementing other
Posted by Thavam