Iran demands immediate withdrawal of occupying US forces from Syria

Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s permanent Ambassador to the United Nations has demanded the United States to withdraw all of its occupying forces from Syria. 

Majid Takht-Ravanchi made this demand on Monday while addressing the United Nations Security Council. He emphasized that the sole solution to the crisis in Syria would be implementation of peace, confirming to international laws.

The Iranian Ambassador underlined that all foreign forces that are present in Syria without the Damascus government’s approval, particularly the American troops occupying parts of Syria, must leave the country as soon as possible.

“The Syrian people do not accept continued occupation of their soil or violation of their country’s sovereignty and the international community should not concede to it either, because it contravenes the most basic principles of international law,” he noted.

Takht-Ravanchi also strongly condemned frequent attacks by the US and Israel forces in Iraq and Syria, as these illegal measures only worsen the situation in an already tense region.

“The Syrian crisis has no military solution and the sole way to end it would be a peaceful one in total conformity to principles of international law and articles of the Charter of the United Nations,” he pointed out.

Takht-Ravanchi also called on the international community to put an end to Israel's military adventurism in the region.

Iran has long criticized presence of US military in Syria. In late February, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh condemned American attacks on areas east of Syria, saying the illegal bases run by American forces in the country are used to train terrorists for later use against the Syrian government.

“Illegal American bases on the Syrian soil are training terrorists and using them against the Damascus government,” Khatibzadeh said.

Speaking at a Security Council meeting on Syria in November, Takht-Ravanchi said the US is plundering the Syrian nation’s wealth and oil resources while supporting terrorist groups in the Arab country, calling for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American troops from the war-ravaged country.

Also in February, Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York condemned the brutal attacks of foreign-backed terrorists and illegal occupation as well as inhumane sanctions. 

Eshagh Al Habib, Deputy Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council on February 25 that “For ten years, the Syrian people have utterly suffered from the brutal attacks of foreign-backed terrorists and illegal occupation, and in recent years, from inhumane sanctions.”

He noted, “The international community has a responsibility to help the Syrian people and government to overcome this crisis and to ensure Syria’s unity, sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence. In this context, we call for the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces that are present in Syria without the permission of its government. These and other aspects of the Syrian crisis have been extensively discussed in the Astana format meeting, held recently in Sochi, Russia, following which a joint statement was issued by Iran, Russia and Turkey. The three countries condemned the increasing terrorist activities in Syria and agreed to continue cooperation to ultimately eliminate Daesh, Al-Nusra Front and all other Security Council designated terrorist groups and their affiliates.”

Al Habib pointed out that these countries also expressed serious concern over the increased presence and terrorist activity of “Hayat Tahrir al- Sham” and other affiliated terrorist groups and the threat they pose to civilians inside and outside the de-escalation Idlib area.

The Iranian diplomat also took a jab at US sanctions on Syria, saying these sanctions will only prolong the crisis and inflict more pain on the Syrian people.

“The imposition of unilateral sanctions against Syria further exacerbates the situation and prolongs both the crisis and the sufferings of the people. Such sanctions are unlawful, inhumane and unjustifiable, and must therefore come to an immediate end,” he stressed. 

“Mounting political and economic pressures on Syria or making multiple preconditions for the peaceful settlement of the crisis has proven to be counterproductive. Reconstruction of the country and the return of refugees and displaced persons must go hand in hand with the political process. They are interlinked, mutually inclusive and mutually reinforcing,” Al Habib continued.

“Finally, Iran reiterates its commitment to political resolution of this crisis and will continue supporting the people and government of Syria to restore the unity and territorial integrity of their country,” he concluded.

Iran and Syria enjoy close relations. In Late February, Khatibzadeh traveled to Syria and held talks with Syrian officials and attended meetings of think tanks, media outlets and elites in the Arab country. The meetings were held in Damascus in line with Iran-Syria cooperation in public diplomacy, media and cultural arenas.

Israel Elections: President Rivlin to pick new coalition head with care

Learning from the past experiences, this time, President Reuven Rivlin intends to use all the time at his disposal to appoint a candidate to build a new governing coalition. It was told by President's Residence Director General, Harel Tuvi to The Jerusalem Post in an interview on Sunday. 

Tuesday's election results will be formally presented to Rivlin by the Head of the Central Elections Committee, Supreme Court Judge Uzi Vogelman on 31st March 2021, after counting around 600,000 double ballots of emissaries, soldiers, prisoners, those quarantined and sick from COVID-19 and those returning from abroad on Election Day and voting at Ben-Gurion International Airport. 

"No action will be taken until the results will be clear, official and final," Tuvi said.

Rivlin will then begin consultations with faction representatives to hear their recommendations about who should form the next government. 

The deadline for Rivlin to give his 28-day mandate to build a coalition is 7th April 2021. Sources close to him said that unlike after other elections when he expedited the process, this time, he will take his time to help facilitate it better. 

"After the first couple of elections, he didn't wait for the final results because the public interest was to end uncertainty as soon as possible," Tuvi said.

"This time, there are double envelopes and other complications from corona, so the president said he would not start the consultations until we really know the official results," he said.

"This time he will also encourage the parties to talk among themselves first and let the situation settle."

The first candidate who receives a mandate to form a government can ask for a two-week extension. If there is a second candidate, he received no more than four weeks.

Rivlin's term is set to end on 9th July 2021. It is possible a new president-elect could be chosen by the Knesset while a second candidate has the mandate. But Tuvi said Rivlin's decisions and timetable will not be impacted by the race for his successor.

Tuvi denied reports that Rivlin would not consider giving the mandate to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu due to Netanyahu's criminal indictments.  

"The president will be guided by the decision of the nation," Tuvi said.

"He has wide considerations and can choose among many options but he cannot go against a clear decision by the nation."

Israeli Prime Minister promises direct flights to Saudi Arabia

Israeli Prime, Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to launch direct flights to Saudi Arabia if he is victorious in Tuesday’s elections. “I’m going to bring you direct flights from Tel Aviv to Mecca,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Channel 13 on Saturday night. 

Speculation had always been high in the last year of the Trump administration that such ties would come to fruition under the rubric of the Abraham Accords, in which Israel established normalized relations with four Arab states.

But normalized ties with Saudi Arabia never materialized. Saudi Arabia has granted Israel flyover rights, something it had denied to the Jewish state in the past.

In his Channel 13 interview, Netanyahu touted those four agreements and promised that four more deals would be finalized. It was a pledge that he made last week as well.

He brushed aside criticism with respect to the failed and ultimately canceled meeting with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Netanyahu had been scheduled to fly to the United Arab Emirates for the meeting, but first it was canceled because of a diplomatic snafu with Jordan. As a result of the fiasco, Amman would not let an Emirati plane leave Amman for Tel Aviv to collect Netanyahu for the visit.

The UAE rejected an attempt to reschedule the visit, explaining that they did not want to be part of Netanyahu’s reelection campaign.

When pressed by Hasson about whether ties with the UAE were problematic, Netanyahu said, “Our relations with the UAE are very strong” and pointed to the UAE pledge to invest NIS 40 billion in Israel.

Netanyahu in his Channel 13 interview also touted his close ties with both US President Joe Biden, who he has known for over three decades, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The relationship with Putin, he said, was particularly important when it came to ensuring Israel Air Force’s ability to operate aerially in Syria, so that it could attack Iranian-related targets and prevent Tehran from entrenching itself in that country.

When asked about the impact of the US-Russian tensions on his relations with both countries, he said that he knew how to stay the course in both cases.

Trade between Iran and SCO members exceeds US$23 billion

The value of trade between Iran and the members of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) rose to US$23.165 billion during the first 11 months of the current Iranian calendar year. This was disclosed by Ruhollah Latifi, spokesman of the Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration (IRICA) announced.

Iran has cross-border trade with 11 key member states and observer states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that include China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Belarus. Among these the largest volume of trade was with China amounting to US$15.518 billion, the IRICA spokesman stated.

He put Iran’s export to the SCO members at 33.339 million tons valued at US$11.173 billion during the period under review. Out of this the highest amount of export has been to China, amounting to US$6.724 billion and the lowest was to Mongolia, amounting to US$412,809.

Iran’s imports from the member countries weighing 8.408 million tons was worth US$11.991 billion Latifi said, adding the highest amount of imports was from China (US$8.793 billion), and the lowest was from Mongolia (US$2.448 million).

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is a Eurasian political, economic and security alliance. Its creation was announced on 15th June 2001 in Shanghai, China by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO Charter was signed in June 2002 and became effective on 19th September 2003.

Long ten years of Syrian crisis

As Syrians mark the 10-year anniversary of the 2011 uprising, it is event that the crisis is far from over. After a decade of conflict that has been supported and proliferated by super powers, Syria is devastated. At least half a million are dead, over 100,000 are missing and 12.5 million — over half the population — are displaced.

With an economy crippled by years of war, over 90% of Syrians now live below the poverty line. More than half of Syria’s basic infrastructure has been destroyed or rendered unusable and reconstruction remains a distant fantasy.

Though, the nationwide hostilities appears to have subsided, Syria remains plagued by multiple conflicts — each driven by its own unique local dynamics.

Areas recaptured by Syrian regime in 2018, are now the most impoverished and violent, evident from more than 400 attacks recorded in Daraa Governorate in 2020. Though, ISIS’s territorial caliphate has been defeated in March 2019, the group is now undertaking a methodical resurgence across Syria’s central desert.

ISIS attacks have consistently increased in scale, scope, and potency since early 2020. Though, cease-fires remain largely in place in the northwest and northeast, a single spark could swiftly precipitate crippling violence. And above all of this, Israeli aircraft continue to confront a persistent Iranian campaign to convert its military gains in Syria.

This is only a glimpse of the true scale of destruction, chaos, violence, and human suffering that a decade of conflict has caused in Syria. The international community has failed in Syria, abandoning the country and its people to a level of violence and suffering not seen in decades.

In the early years, the response was indifference, indecision, and contradiction. The response mostly remained focused on tackling symptom of Syria’s crisis, but catalyzing emergence of new conflict. The efforts failed in removing the root cause of Syria’s crisis.

If there was one diplomatic line that has been repeated most often on Syria, “There is no military solution to the Syrian crisis.” The crisis is not a self-contained local dispute. In fact, the crisis has transformed the world in profoundly negative ways like no other conflict has done in decades

There is demand that the United States should try to resolve the crisis, but the super power does have the solution. Four years under President Donald Trump has debased American leverage. UN Special Envoy has rightly stressed that a new multilateral format is needed. Without the highest level of diplomatic investment, failure is again a guarantee.

Portraying Iran a threat for United States is Israel’s biggest scam

It is evident that since Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, United States has kept the country under sanctions that is: 1) small, 2) half the world away, 3) has never attacked United States, 4) does not have nuclear weapons and 5) whose contribution to regional instability doesn’t look any worse than that of Israel or Saudi Arabia.

It is in Israel’s interest to portray Iran a threat to United States and the world. Keeping the US engaged in Israel’s proxy war with Iran keeps the attention on a supposedly dire threat, instead Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians. On top of all it serves Benjamin Netanyahu in his effort to stay in power and out of jail by coining one enemy after another and keeping the US presidents under his influence.

Israel’s supporters in the US Congress keep on playing the mantra. Lately, Senators Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham have sent Joe Biden a letter containing the astounding claim, “Outside of its nuclear program, Iran continues to pose a threat to the US and international security.” The Israel lobby group AIPAC tweeted on Wednesday, Iran’s determination to further destabilize the Middle East, develop nuclear weapons and build ballistic missiles brings the world closer to war.

Wendy Sherman, Biden’s choice for Deputy Secretary of State helped negotiated the Iran deal, or JCPOA, but Menendez said, “Returning to the JCPOA without concrete steps to address Iran’s other dangerous and destabilizing activities will be insufficient.”

The Iran deal was a signal accomplishment of the Obama administration in setting the United States on the path toward amicable relationship with Iran. It took years for Obama to build the deal; it has been destroyed not only by Donald Trump and his late patron Sheldon Adelson, but by a bunch of Democrats.

Even if Biden gets back into the deal, as all hope, it is going to take many months or years and a lot of political capital to make it a reality. It is also evident that liberal bunch of Israel lobby is working hard on Biden’s behalf, but they can’t get unanimity inside the Democratic Party. The AIPAC implants are campaigning against the Iran deal.

The only thing to be said about all the efforts to destroy the deal is that they originate from the Israel lobby. Because it was such a “strong deal,” there was only one nation on earth that opposed it, Israel, Obama had said that in a famous speech when he was trying to seal the deal in summer 2015. But the President also said it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty as American president to take Israel’s side.

The pity is that the US media and political system fall again and again fall of Israel’s scam. Recently, “60 Minutes” aired a segment highlighting Iranian-backed attacks on American troops in Iraq as a grave insult to the US honor. They did this without ever questioning the US presence in Iran’s neighbor, let alone NATO-led criminal attack on Iraq.

It is amazing that Netanyahu was able to address a joint session of Congress in opposition to the Iran deal back in 2015, while many Democrats were in the attendance. As Obama said, foreign policy touching on Israel was taken as a domestic issue, when the Israeli government is opposed to something; people in the US take notice.

Netanyahu is able to make such demands because as Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former foreign policy aide, explained recently, Israeli lobbyists are deeply involved in policymaking. Ten to twenty American Jews who invariably took the Israeli government’s position came in and out of the White House all the time, Rhodes said.

While Congress people parroted an Israeli script on the latest radioactive isotopes found in the Parchin military facility, and when the deal actually got close, they warned Rhodes that AIPAC was going to cancel their fundraisers. Political money was at the heart of the influence.

When Benjamin Netanyahu said in Hebrew 20 years ago that he didn’t worry about the peace process because “America is a thing you can move very easily,” he was talking about the power of the Israel lobby.

The United States was easily played, at the highest level. When Obama clashed with Netanyahu not over Iran but the creation of a Palestinian state, Democrats in Congress bailed on Obama, and Rhodes wrote in his memoir, “I was given a list of leading Jewish donors to call to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.”

Now Rhodes tells us that he feels “shame” that the Obama administration “pretended” that Netanyahu supported the creation of a Palestinian state, which he never did, because it was politically dangerous to alienate the rightwing Israeli Prime Minister.

The good news is that the Israel lobby is split and liberal Zionist organizations such as J Street and Americans for Peace Now have vigorously supported the Iran deal and are trying to give Joe Biden some of the Jewish political capital he needs to take on Menendez.

But Israel is setting the terms for the US foreign policy… Just as it did when it needed Israel as battleship in the Middle East against the Soviet Union… Just as it did when the cold war ended and United Staes needed the only democracy in the Middle East in its war against “radical Islam”… There’s always some geopolitical agenda that Israel is advancing. Israel gets to determine the narrative.

Palestinians are the biggest victims of the Iran shell game. For nearly 75 years the world has been promising them self-determination in their own land, and the US has made sure that that would not happen, while Israel takes more and more of the country for expansion.

Netanyahu dragging Mossad into politics

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of yet another election, seems to be following every trick in the book. It has been reported that he would like to have Mossad Director Yossi Cohen continue in some governmental capacity after his term ends this summer. Rumors persist that Netanyahu would like to see the spy chief join his political party.

This would be highly unusual, even though there is a history of former generals and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chiefs entering politics, since Mossad chiefs are supposed to have a cooling-off period. 

In response to the reported announcement by Netanyahu, Cohen released an even stranger statement, denying any political affiliation with the prime minister or his Likud Party. 

Netanyahu has worked to erode many aspects of Israeli democracy over his nearly 12 consecutive years in power, centralizing power at the Prime Minister’s Office and taking away key decisions from the Foreign and Defense ministries. He conducts many policies himself, seemingly without even consulting others in his coalition. 

Cohen has been a phenomenal head of Mossad. He has been praised by those who know him and the organization he is currently leading. He is said to have a good relationship with the prime minister, unlike some former intelligence heads such as Meir Dagan, who slammed Netanyahu repeatedly in 2016.

In August 2019, reports emerged that Netanyahu viewed Cohen or former ambassador to the US Ron Dermer as “fit to lead Israel” after he leaves office. Netanyahu has often heralded the credentials of the Mossad over the last years, lauding it for bringing out the secret nuclear archive from Iran and helping in the nation’s battle against the novel coronavirus. 

However, it is not clear whether releasing this information has helped Israel or the Mossad, or helped Netanyahu’s political fortunes. Politicizing the organization or even releasing information that may improve Netanyahu’s political standing is a dangerous and toxic mix of national security and politics.

The attempt to use the new relations with the United Arab Emirates has continued unabated, to the point of harming relations with Jordan and embarrassing Israel. Normally state visits are planned well in advance and have a large entourage. In Israel, Netanyahu does things without even consulting his foreign and defense ministers, as though it were a one-man, not even one-party, state.