Im Irak konnte der Iran eine Niederlage vorläufig abwenden: Mit Druck gelang es, eine Koalition zu Wege zu bringen, in der mit Amiri ein Mann Teherans eine große Rolle spielen wird. In Bagdad geht man davon aus, dass einige Bombenattentate Muqtada al Sadr zeigen solltem, was passiert, wenn er weiter einen dezidiert anti-iranischen Kurs fahren würde:

In the wake of the sudden coalition deal struck between Muqtada al-Sadr's Sairoon Alliance and the pro-Iran Fatah Alliance on June 12, the allied parties seem to be trying to soften the reactions of the opposing parties both inside and outside Iraq. (...)

These rapid developments come in the wake of several bombings that targeted Baghdad, most notably the explosion June 6 in the arms depot of Sadr City, which is predominantly loyal to Sadr, as well as the June 10 burning of the warehouse where ballot boxes were kept in the Rusafa district of Baghdad.

The growing differences over the results of the recent elections have deepened the tension plaguing the country, which prompted several political parties, including Sadr himself, to warn against the outbreak of civil war in Iraq.

All indicators show that the recent coalition deal comes following pressure placed on both Sairoon and Fatah, as there had been no previous preparations for such a deal, which was concluded very quickly amid the recent tension.

Über den "Druck" schreibt AFP:

Insiders said the unlikely tie-up to try to form a new government came after Iran decided that if it couldn't beat Sadr, then it might be better to seek to join him.

In the immediate aftermath of the vote, Tehran had launched a political offensive to try to unite its allies and block Sadr's path to power.

But Iran changed tack on realising pushing the popular cleric aside was too problematic, and instead sought to include Sadr in a Shiite alliance broad enough to neutralise his influence.

At a meeting Sunday with Ameri and former premier Nuri al-Maliki at Iran's embassy in Baghdad, top emissaries from Tehran apparently endorsed a link-up with Sadr as the lesser of two evils.

"Dismissing Moqtada Sadr could allow him to assemble other groups and increase the criticism levelled at Iran's role in Iraq," said a source close to participants of the meeting.

The gathering involved influential Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Mojtaba Khamenei, son of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Soleimani used the opportunity to call for "a strong government, far from American and Saudi pressure and from foreign interference", the same source told AFP.

If the broad Shiite alliance gets off the ground Iran will be "the first to support the next government in Iraq," Soleimani was quote as saying.
 

Ein Verdacht, der seit Jahren besteht, erhärtet sich:

A report by the European Union’s official intelligence body, EU INTCEN, has suggested that the October 10, 2015 suicide bombing of a peace march outside the Ankara train station may have been committed on the orders of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), according to a report by online news outlet Ahval.

The terror attack, in which two bombers belonging to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) blew themselves up in the midst of a crowd made up largely of leftists and Kurdish sympathisers, was the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Turkish history, killing 109 civilians and injuring 500 more.

It followed the ISIL bombings of a pro-Kurdish political party rally in Diyarbakır on July 5 in which five were killed and over 100 injured, and of a group of leftists in the town of Suruç in Turkey’s Şanlıurfa province who were planning a solidarity trip to the Kurdish Syrian town of Kobani on July 20, 2015, in which 33 were killed and 104 injured.

The death toll in Syria’s complicated conflict, now in its eighth year, has reached nearly 511,000.

Over 350,000 of the casualties have been confirmed while the remaining victims haven't yet been identified according to a UK-based war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Reuters reported on Thursday.

According to the Observatory, at least 85 percent of the casualties were civilians killed by the Syrian regime and its allies, which has been accused of using chemical weapons. 

The conflict in Syria began after mass protests in March 2011 erupted into a civil war between pro-Syrian regime forces and rebel factions.

The rise of ISIS across Iraq and Syria in 2014 further complicated the situation and regional and global powers were drawn into the conflict.

At least half of the pre-war population has been displaced at one time or another, with many fleeing the country altogether.

Quelle

Tage vor Abhaltung der so genannten Al-Quds Märsche fordert der Bürgermeister von London ein Verbot der Hizbollah:

Sadiq Khan has written to Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, asking him to ban Hezbollah in order to prevent displays of the group’s flag on London’s streets. (...)

It comes days ahead of the annual Al Quds Day march in London, at which the flag has been flown in recent years.

Under current laws, only the military wing of the organisation is proscribed. Because the flag represents the group as a whole, police are unable to take action against those flying it.

Mr Khan told Jewish News: “What is astonishing is there are people using a loophole in the law to fly a flag of an organisation that’s been proscribed – banned.

“I know from experience and the letters people write to me and speaking to Londoners that they feel the ripples of hatred. It cannot be right than it 2018 there are Londoners who, by virtue of being Jewish, feel these ripples of hate.”

“What’s happening is people who may feel scared by the flag and the association with what Hezbollah have done will see this flag fly in the heart of our city and think ‘how can that be allowed?’.”

Moscow confirmed on Monday that its jets would not provide air coverage to Syrian regime forces in their “southern battle,” if Iranian-linked militias are allowed to participate in it.

The Russian Hmeimim airbase announced in a statement posted on its Facebook page that “Iranian forces and Hezbollah should withdraw from southern Syria, or else Syrian regime forces would not be provided with any support from Russian forces in the upcoming battle in the province of Daraa.”

The statement added: “We have fears of losing this battle in the absence of Russian launchers, which helped Syrian regime forces win several battles.”

During the weekend, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani denied that any Iranian forces were present in southern Syria.

Earlier, Moscow and Tel Aviv held advanced talks concerning Syria after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu met in Russia with Avigdor Lieberman, his Israeli counterpart, while President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Syria in a phone call.

Political sources in Tel Aviv said the advanced Russian-Israeli talks led to an understanding to keep Assad’s forces and to allow their deployment at the border with Israel, in exchange for the withdrawal of Iranian fighters from Syria.

Quelle

Es sei höchste Zeit die Proteste und Streiks im Iran zu unterstützen meint Hesmat Alawi:

Tuesday (June 5) marks the 15th consecutive day of a nationwide strike launched by tens of thousands of truck drivers in Iran. Video footage and still images widely circulated on social media indicate both the vast scope and organized nature of this movement, two characteristics causing major concerns for the Iranian regime.

As truckers in nearly 300 cities across the country continue to emphasize their rightful and long-neglected demands, colleagues throughout the globe are displaying sympathy and solidarity. This is one very effective method of both taking measures against the Iranian regime’s unjust rule and standing alongside the Iranian people’s just cause.

The Teamsters, known as one of the largest labor unions in the United States and the world over, issued a very powerful message recently in support of Iranian truckers.

“Iranian truck drivers in 25 provinces and 160 cities have been on strike over low pay, rising operating costs, increased tolls and other regulatory fees. #Teamsters stand in #solidarity with our Iranian brother & sisters!” said Teamster General President James Hoffa in a letter to Abolfazl Mehrabadi, deputy director of the Iranian regime’s interest branch at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Taking a step further and boosting the Iranian truckers’ efforts even further, Hoffa emphasized that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, representing the voice of 1.4 million transportation and supply chain employees across the US and Canada, also “stands in solidarity with our Iranian brothers and sisters.”

“We urge the government of Iran to listen to the grievances of the striking Iranian truck drivers, address their just demands and recognize their internationally recognized rights to assembly, speech, freedom of association and collective bargaining,” Hoffa added. (...)

Iran is home to nearly 370,000 trucks delivering goods across the country. An increasing number of drivers are realizing how they have tolerated their unjust conditions far too long and now is the time to stand firm, knowing their voices are heard by the international community.

As the United States and its partners in the Middle East – and eventually Europe – are realizing and adopting a firm policy vis-à-vis the Iranian regime, one very effective and necessary initiative is to stand shoulder to shoulder with Iran’s protesting populace.

The water crisis has spread in southern and central provinces of Iraq and the Kurdistan Region as dams built by Turkey and Iran, irrespective of international laws, slow the flow of rivers into Iraq to a trickle.

There are growing fears up to seven million people will be displaced due to the dramatic fall in water resources.

“Nine months ago, the Iraqi water resources ministry warned of water shortage during this summer. It called for necessary measures to be taken to tackle the issue,” Iraq’s Water Resources Minister Hassan al-Janabi told reporters on Saturday. 

“The government responded to us, forming a high level committee  comprising of many parties from agriculture, interior, defense, industry, electricity, housing and reconstruction and municipalities as well as the Iraqi Media Network in order to tackle the matter in question on a national level in case of water decrease,” he added 

The committee has recently met to set out a 24 point plan to address the problem, he said.

The Kurdistan Region has also fallen victim to the water crisis, as neighboring Iran has created dams on rivers flowing into its territory.

The town of Qaladze is on the brink of catastrophe after Iran restricted the flow of the cross-border Little Zab River.

Quelle

Activists in Jordan are calling for rare protests against new government policies to continue on Friday after they picked up pace overnight.

Anger over a proposed law to raise income tax first prompted a strike on Wednesday and has since been compounded by a rise in oil prices.

Jordanian news website 7iber’s live stream showed thousands demonstrating outside the prime ministry in the capital Amman on Thursday evening, chanting about the costs of fuel and bread, while Arabi 21 reported that protests had spread throughout the country.

A Facebook event set up overnight by the Jordanian Youth Movement page, and responded to by more than 13,000 people, called for protests to gather in the centre of the city on Friday night to reject the raising of fuel prices.

On Wednesday, Jordanian trade unions called a general strike that saw citizens from across society protest against proposed policies they felt hit them at a time when they were already struggling with living costs.

The law - which follows a key condition of a three-year IMF economic programme to bring down public debt - would significantly lower the income tax threshold. Banks and industrial firms would be forced to pay taxes at a time when economic growth has been stagnant and businesses have complained of shrinking consumer demand.

Quelle

Kurz und knapp:

Michael Totten über Muqtada al Sadr:

Sadr is painfully reactionary and more than a little bit dangerous. He’s also complicated. He is a Shia sectarian whose militia brutally “cleansed” Sunnis from neighborhoods in and around Baghdad but he’s also what passes today for an Iraqi nationalist, disavowing violence against all Iraqis and opposing all foreign influence. “We won’t allow the Iraqis to be cannon fodder for the wars of others nor be used in proxy wars outside Iraq,” says Sadrist movement member Jumah Bahadily of the Syrian civil war.

He also forged an alliance with communists—a horrifying ideological cocktail from the point of view of any liberal-minded Westerner, but alas there are few Jeffersonian democrats in old Mesopotamia. There are however, some secular reformists and technocrats, and they also formed an alliance with the Sadrists. Tehran has taken notice and isn’t happy about it. “We will not allow liberals and communists to govern in Iraq,” says Ali Akbar https://meforum.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b7aa7eddb0f2bb74bfa4f6cb5&id=6b8864e070&e=e29e1653ad
Velayati, a senior advisor to Iranian ruler Ayatollah Khamenei.

Precious few Americans would enjoy living under a government run by Sadrists. Even so, his pushback against Iran is nothing to sniff at. Westerners and Arabs alike have bemoaned Iran’s rising influence in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, thanks in large part to Sadr’s own Mahdi Army, yet no one is resisting Iranian influence in Iraq as successfully right now as he is. Sure, the Sunni parties are pushing back as they always do, but the Sunnis are a small minority. Nearly all Iranian influence in Iraq comes through the Shias. Only they can successfully resist Tehran because they’re the only ones who can enable Tehran in the first place. With Sadr’s movement in the saddle, Iran faces the most formidable obstacle in Baghdad since Saddam flitted from palace to palace.