Over the past few years, India has been expanding Iran’s port of Chabahar, seeking to send goods through this route to markets in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Northern, and Eastern Europe. However, India has now changed its decisions and abandoned the Iranian regime, in favor of joining the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council’s Rail Network (GCC) instead.
This railway starts in Muscat, Oman, and connects all six Gulf Cooperation Council member states in Eastern Arabia. The project, which has been under construction since 2009, is 2,177 km long and will be operational by 2025. It is worth mentioning that these countries have the largest and most advanced ports in the Persian Gulf region.
The ports of these countries, including the one in the UAE, are among the five largest ports in the world, and the countries bordering the Persian Gulf have now decided to connect their transport infrastructure by creating a common railway from Israel to Turkey, and then connecting to Europe from there.
This has been a huge hit on the Iranian regime, especially the regime’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), which intended to take advantage of handing over the port of Chabahar to India to assist in their smuggling operations.
In addition to the losses for the regime’s organizations, this decision will have disastrous consequences for Iran’s economy in the future, because it will lose a significant source of revenue as the country with the longest coast and many ports in the Persian Gulf. Needless to say, the regime has not improved any of Iran’s ports since the beginning of its reign.
On Tuesday, May 17, the state-run daily Shargh quoted Ali Ziaei, a regime’s transport industry analyst, as saying that India had turned a blind eye to Iran’s Chabahar port for the transit of its goods.
According to the newspaper, the railway network will reach the port of Haifa in Israel and then extend to Turkey. Following the normalization of relations between the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and Israel, the completion of this railway network has gained astonishing speed as The UAE and Israel have invested heavily in building and upgrading their current infrastructure. It has come to light that India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel have been pursuing a joint economic project called the India-Middle East Food Corridor for a long time.
India, as one of the world’s food giants and, of course, a large economy, is seeking to manage its water resources and modernize agriculture with this project, and Israel, as one of the most advanced countries in the world in the field of industrial agriculture, is helping India in this regard.
Ziaei explained, “In my opinion, India and the United States deceived Iran. While the US exempted the Chabahar port from the sanctions and India demonstrated a passive presence in this port, they caused the development of Chabahar port to be postponed and now India has left Chabahar port and joined the Persian Gulf railway project.”
He emphasized that the regime’s passivity in developing its trade infrastructure has eroded golden opportunities for transit through Iran’s borders and that it any hope of reviving them or creating new opportunities is practically lost.
