Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah is bypassing US sanctions against Iran by laundering many millions of dollars in the drug trade in Europe.
This news comes as the result of a study about how Hezbollah’s political wing serves its military wing and further enshrines that there is no real distinction between the two. It showed that Hezbollah acts as intermediaries in the global drug route from South America to West Africa to Europe, with only 5-10% of total drugs being intercepted.
It has been reported in Iran that the National Iranian Oil Company’s (NIOC) owed almost $50 billion at the end of the Iranian year (21st March 2019).
Over the years, Iran has brought in nearly $2 trillion in oil revenues. But years and years of mismanagement, neglect and corruption have destroyed the country’s oil infrastructure.
The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has placed Iran’s petrochemicals industry on its anti-terrorism sanctions list, which deals a heavy blow to the Iranian economy and further diminishes Iran’s revenues.
The US has previously imposed sanctions on a number of Iranian petrochemical companies, but this is the first time that the industry as a whole, which is Iran’s largest source of non-petroleum revenues, has been targeted.
Last month, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its contingent of Navy destroyers, cruisers, and 70-odd aircraft arrived in the Persian Gulf region to counter what US officials described as heightened Iranian preparations to strike US targets.
These threats, which are still secret for national security reasons, came shortly after the US announced a stricter crackdown on Iran’s oil exports in late April. This involved the expiration of sanctions waivers for the eight largest buyers of Iranian oil; waivers that had come into place in November after US sanctions were finally reimposed. Since then, the US has gone further. On Friday, the US Treasury announced sanctions against Iran’s largest petrochemical company.
London, 11 June – Iran-linked terrorists have allegedly been caught stockpiling tons of explosive materials in London.
The terrorists, who have links to Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which was recently labeled a terrorist group in its entirety by the UK, were supposedly caught storing thousands of ice packs filled with ammonium nitrate at a secret bomb factory on the outskirts of the British capital. Ammonium nitrate is a common ingredient in homemade bombs.
MI5 and the Metropolitan Police officers uncovered the would-be bombs in autumn 2015, according to The Daily Telegraph, and found that they contained three metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate. This is more than the amount used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed at least 168 people, injured nearly 700 more, and destroyed hundreds of buildings, so one can only imagine the damage it would wreak here.
One source said the number of explosive materials stored there could do “a lot of damage”. Another described the plot as “properly organized terrorism”.
The British security services raided four buildings in North West London and arrested a man in his forties on suspicion of plotting terrorism, but he was later released without charge.
Reportedly, the covert operation was launched after a tip-off from a foreign government, with MI5 spending months trying to disrupt the plot and gain evidence about the plans of Iran-backed Hezbollah. They found that there was no evidence that the UK was being targeted in these bomb plots though.
A UK intelligence source said: “MI5 worked independently and closely with international partners to disrupt the threat of malign intent from Iran and its proxies in the UK.”
This news comes during a time of increased tensions between Iran and the West.
Earlier this year, UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid ruled that all UK supporters of the Iran-backed Hezbollah group will face up to 10 years in prison. The reason that Hezbollah appears on the official register of banned groups is that the Iran-backed group is “committed to armed resistance to the state of Israel, and aims to seize all Palestinian territories and Jerusalem from Israel”.
Hezbollah, which came into being in the early 1980s thanks to financial backing from Iran, has its external security organization banned in the UK in 2001, its military wing in 2008, and its political wing in 2019.
For those rightly angered by Iran-backed groups plotting attacks in London, there is an anti-regime demonstration being held by the Iranian Resistance on July 27. The bigger it is, the more obvious it will be to Iran that the UK rejects its vile agenda.
A 2,000 strong Basij group has been launched in the northern Iranian province of Gilan to counter what Iran calls “improper hijab”, according to an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander.
Mohammad Abdollahpour, the commander of the Gilan Quds Force, said on June 4 that this marked a new “chapter of promoting virtue and prohibiting vice” in the province. He continued to say that the Basij would give verbal notices and take action against “improper” actions but failed to elaborate on what these were.
While Iran has slowed down its threats towards the US in order to “recalculate”, the danger is far from over, according to the top commander of American forces in the Mideast on Thursday.
Gen. Frank McKenzie said that he is still concerned by Iran and would not rule out requesting additional US forces to defend against Iranian missiles or other weapons.
U.S President Donald Trump, left, talks to French President Emmanuel Macron during a meeting at the Prefecture of Caen, Normandy, France
London, 08 June – For a second day running, Donald Trump has called for talks between the US and Iran but has stressed that under no circumstances will Iran be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
After a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Caen, France, on Thursday, Trump said: “I understand [Iran] wants to talk, and we want to talk. That’s fine. We’ll talk. But the one thing that [Iran] can’t have is … nuclear weapons. And I think the president of France would agree with that very strongly.”
This came just one day after Trump told Britain’s ITV that he would prefer to talk to his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, but refused to take military action off the table.
He said: “Yeah, of course. I would much rather talk… [But] there’s always a chance [or military action]. Do I want to? No. I’d rather not. But there’s always a chance.”
Tensions between the US and Iran have been rising since Trump took power and began to exert pressure on Iran by pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposing sanctions on Iran, labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, among other things.
Trump said the nuclear deal didn’t do enough to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons or modify its other malign behavior, so his pressure campaign was designed to get Iran to agree to a new comprehensive deal.
Recently. tensions escalated when the US sent an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the Gulf in response to an as-yet-unspecified threat to the US, which was described as “imminent”.
On Tuesday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei suggested that Trump’s supposed openness to talks was a “cunning political ploy” and Iran would not be deceived.
Tzvi Kahn, a senior Iran analyst at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said: “Iran knows that the current situation is unsustainable as sanctions are tearing apart the country. So, we’re beginning to see cracks in the regime’s facade.”
Indeed, Iran’s currency has been weakened significantly since the sanctions and inflation rates have soared.
Following his address with Macron, Trump said: “[Iran is] doing very poorly as a nation. They are failing as a nation. And I don’t want them to fail as a nation.”
While Macron said that the US and France agreed that Iran should not obtain nuclear weapons, reduce its ballistic missile activity, contain its involvement in regional conflicts; and pursue peace in the Middle East.
He said: “I think the [message] pronounced by President Trump is that [negotiations] are very important. We need to open a new negotiation in order to build and to get these four objectives.”
The National Council of Resistance of Iran’s (NCRI) representative office in Oslo has issued a statement regarding the Iran’s latest activities. It has stated that the Iranian government is becoming more and more hostile towards the opposition in terms of its misinformation campaign against the NCRI and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK).
