Iran Digest Week of January 26- February 2
/AIC’s Iran digest project covers the latest developments and news stories published in Iranian and international media outlets. This weekly digest is compiled by associate Samuel Howell. Please note that the news and views expressed in the articles below do not necessarily reflect those of AIC.
US- Iran Relations
U.S. strikes more than 85 targets in Iraq and Syria in initial barrage of retaliatory attacks
The United States launched attacks Friday against 85 sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iranian forces and Iran-backed militants, its first retaliatory strikes for the killing of three American soldiers in Jordan last weekend, U.S. officials said.
U.S. military forces struck targets at seven facilities tied to attacks on U.S. personnel in the region, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters. U.S. Central Command said the facilities included command and control operations, intelligence centers, rockets and missiles, and drone storage sites.
“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond.”
(NBC News)
U.S. mixed up enemy, friendly drones in attack that killed 3 troops
American air defenses failed to intercept an attack drone that killed three U.S. troops and wounded dozens in Jordan amid confusion about the identity of approaching aircraft, officials said Monday as more details emerged about the incident and the Biden administration deliberated how to respond.
While the Pentagon scrambled to identify what went wrong at the isolated facility with the goal of preventing more bloodshed from ongoing attacks by Iranian proxy forces, President Biden’s vow to retaliate raised questions about whether the United States could tip the region into the full-scale conflict that Washington has sought to avoid. The incident also prompted concern about whether U.S. personnel are adequately prepared to defend against the proliferation of attack drones.
The dead were identified as Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, 46; Spec. Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24; and Spec. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23. They were members of an Army Reserve unit, the 718th Engineer Company, from Fort Moore in Georgia and the first American troops killed by hostile fire since the war in Gaza triggered a steep rise in violence across the Middle East.
(The Washington Post)
Nuclear Accord
Will Iran Get the Bomb in 2024?
Amid the ongoing tensions in the Middle East and Israeli operations in Gaza, concerns over Iran’s nuclear program have once again intensified. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported late last year that Iran has sped up production of 60% enriched uranium, which is very close to the 90% needed for a nuclear bomb.
Iran does not seem to have made the political decision to translate its growing nuclear capability into a weaponization program. But the ongoing conflict in the region, the prolonged U.S. economic war against Iran, Israel’s frequent precision strikes on Iranian interests and assassination of its military commanders have heightened internal debates about abandoning a long-held hedging posture and dashing for the bomb.
Recently, an anchor on Iran’s state television posed a question to the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, Mohammad Eslami, suggesting that with the certainty of Israel possessing nuclear weapons and repeated Israeli threats against Iran, “is it not the time for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons or at least conduct a nuclear test?” While Eslami quickly underscored that nuclear weapons have no place in Iran’s defense doctrine, the question itself was significant because it reflects the perspective of some Iranian conservatives who increasingly view nuclear weapons as a solution to Iran’s security problems.
(Stimson)
Economy
Iran’s economy, so far resilient, now faces ultimate test
After six years of U.S. “maximum pressure,” Iran’s economy continues to defy dire predictions of economic collapse that motivated Trump’s hasty 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal (also known as the JCPOA). The Biden administration’s continuation of the same policy since 2021 is similarly based on the logic that the weaker Iran’s economy is, the more likely Tehran will bend to Washington’s will.
The economy’s resilience is evidenced by the fact that in the first nine months of the Iranian fiscal year (March 21 to December 20, 2023), GDP grew by a 6.7% annual rate, and it is very likely to finish the year in two months with a growth rate exceeding the World Bank and IMF forecasts of about 4%.
But, after more than a decade of decline in their living standards, resilience is not what ordinary Iranians are looking for. As a result of Trump’s reimposition of sanctions in 2018, Iran’s economic growth fell by 13.6 percentage points, from a positive annual growth rate of 9.5% during 2016-2017, when the JCPOA had eased U.S. sanctions, to negative 4.1% per year during 2018-2019.
Iran's oil exports reach 5-year high, with China as top buyer
Iran's exports of crude oil grew by roughly 50% last year to a five-year high of about 1.29 million barrels per day, with the vast majority going to China, helping to prevent a sharp increase in prices triggered by conflict in the Middle East.
Even as the war between Hamas and Israel and attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen on vessels in the Red Sea threaten to disrupt supplies of oil and petroleum products, benchmark oil prices fell on Monday. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures closed down 1.6% at $76.78 per barrel, while European Brent crude dipped 1.4% to $82.40.
While crude prices are 7% higher now than at the end of 2023, they are down nearly 20% from September's highs.
Inside Iran
Western Iran Businesses Strike to Protest Execution of Kurds, Say Activists
Businesses and shops in several cities in Kurdish-populated western Iran shut down Tuesday in a strike protesting the hanging a day earlier of four Kurds convicted of collaborating with Israel, activists said.
The four, who had been arrested in July 2022, were hanged at a prison in the city of Karaj outside Tehran in defiance of a campaign by rights groups who said their trial had been grossly unfair.
Their hanging added to concerns over a surge in executions in Iran, which has seen on average two people executed every day so far this month, according to campaigners.
(VOA)
Iran International Reveals Tehran-Based Cyber Group Targeting Israeli Hospital
Iran International can reveal that the Islamic Republic’s Intelligence Ministry conducts cyberattacks against Israeli civilian targets via a cover tech company.
The cyber group “Black Shadow” (“Saye-ye Siah” in Persian), which targeted Ziv Medical Center in the northern Israeli city of Safed in November is in fact a tech company which works under the registered name of “Raahkarha-ye Fanavari-e Etela’at-e Jahatpardaz.”
According to Iran International’s investigative journalist Mojtaba Pourmohsen, the two operational offices of the “Black Shadow” cyber group are located in Tehran.
Regional Politics
Exclusive: Iran's Guards pull officers from Syria after Israeli strikes
Iran's Revolutionary Guards have scaled back deployment of their senior officers in Syria due to a spate of deadly Israeli strikes and will rely more on allied Shi'ite militia to preserve their sway there, five sources familiar with the matter said.
The Guards have suffered one of their most bruising spells in Syria since arriving a decade ago to aid President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian war. Since December, Israeli strikes have killed more than half a dozen of their members, among them one of the Guards' top intelligence generals.
As hardliners in Tehran demand retaliation, Iran's decision to pull out senior officers is driven partly by its aversion to being sucked directly into a conflict bubbling across the Middle East, three of the sources told Reuters.
(Reuters)
US intelligence officials estimate Tehran does not have full control of its proxy groups
Intelligence officials have calculated that Tehran does not have full control over its proxy groups in the Middle East, including those responsible for attacking and killing U.S. troops in recent weeks, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The Quds Force — an elite branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — is responsible for sending weapons and military advisers as well as intelligence to support militias in Iraq and Syria as well as the Houthis in Yemen. The groups have varying ambitions and agendas, which sometimes overlap, but Tehran does not appear to have complete authority over their operational decision-making, the officials said.
While the disclosure means it may be particularly hard to predict what actions these groups will take, it also could lower the chance of the U.S. getting pulled into a direct confrontation with Iran. Any indication that Tehran was directly involved in ordering or overseeing the attacks would make U.S. retaliation against Iran more likely.
(Politico)
Analysis
Iran’s New Best Friends
By: Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar
Since November, the Red Sea has become the site of escalating attacks by Yemen’s Houthi movement, the armed group that governs most of Yemen’s population. These assaults, which the Houthi rebels say are designed to pressure Israel to end the war in Gaza, mark the emergence of a new conflict zone in the already volatile Middle East. By effectively closing the sea to cargo ships, the strikes have disrupted global trade and earned the Houthis unprecedented international attention.
