Iran withdraws Qods force from Syria
The members belong to a brigade known as Unit 400, which fought alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad against Sunni rebels, the report quoted a western intelligence officer as saying. According to The Times, the unit flew out of Syria last week. The report added that the information was confirmed by a relative of a Unit 400 officer.
The withdrawal of Iranian troops from Syria was seen by some as an indicator of waning confidence among Iran’s Shi’ite leaders in Assad’s ability to survive the uprising.
According to The Times, there have been loud complaints about an estimated $5 billion of Iranian money spent to prop up the Assad regime in Damascus.
There are signs that Iran’s oil wealth, which pays for its nuclear program and support for Assad, is eroding. Iran faces new sanctions for failing to cooperate with Western concerns about its nuclear program, and the sanctions are taking its toll, evident in the fall in the value of the rial and soaring food prices.
Last week, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz predicted that Iran's economy is edging towards collapse due to international sanctions over its controversial nuclear program.
"The sanctions on Iran in the past year jumped a level," Steinitz said. "The Iranians are in great economic difficulties as a result of the sanctions," he added.
A Foreign Ministry document leaked last week also said sanctions had caused more damage to Iran's economy than at first thought and ordinary Iranians were suffering under soaring inflation.Well, yeah, but so far we don't see any signs that Iran is slowing down the nuclear program. Ahmadinejad and Khameni aren't starving even if their people are. And Obama has not and will not back anything that smells of regime change.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Iran, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian oil, Syria
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:34 PM
3 Comments:
I wish I had kept the website. This weekend I read on the internet an article quoting some academics who say the sanctions are not hurting Iran at all. The regime is able to sell oil and ship it out more or less the same way Saddam sold oil and shipped it out of Iraq when his regime was under sanctions. The academics said the only losers are the Iranian middle class, which is getting squeezed. That's fine with the regime, since the only serious competition comes from the middle class.
The Mullah Regime will continue to fund their nuclear weapons program even if the Iranian people have to eat grass. They do not care about their people.
However, they might want to consider that the catalyst that started the French Revolution was widespread hunger caused by the unaffordable vast rises in the price of bread. A hungry man is a desperate man. A hungry man with a hungry family is a desperate, violent man.
The shah was kicked out not because he deprived the population but because he tried to kickstart his society forward 500 years in 20. Say what you like, dictators live longer if they work to UNwind their country's social clock - sending the populace backwards into anarchy and famine always ensures them more longevity. As the Ayatollahs oversee the slow unraveling of their country it will only cement their position in place that much harder because the populace has that much less to fight back with, each day, each month.
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