WarSclerotic

VILLEPINTE, France – US President Donald Trump will suffocate Iran’s “dictatorial ayatollahs,” his close ally Rudy Giuliani said on Saturday, suggesting his move to re-impose sanctions was aimed squarely at regime change.

The former New York mayor who is now Trump’s personal lawyer, was addressing a conference of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella bloc of opposition groups in exile that seek an end to Shi’ite Muslim clerical rule in Iran.

“I can’t speak for the president, but it sure sounds like he doesn’t think there is much of a chance of a change in behavior unless there is a change in people and philosophy,” Giuliani told Reuters in an interview.

“We are the strongest economy in the world … and if we cut you off then you collapse,” he said, pointing to protests in Iran. In May, Trump withdrew the United States from a 2015 international deal to curb Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting some sanctions.

Trump supporters have spoken at NCRI events in the past, including national security adviser John Bolton, who, before taking his post at the same conference last July, told the group’s members they would be ruling Iran before 2019 and their goal should be regime change.

Bolton said in May that the administration’s policy was to make sure Iran never got nuclear weapons and not regime change.

In Tehran, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Trump would fail in any attempt to turn the Iranian peopleagainst the ruling system.

“They bring to bear economic pressure to separate the nation from the system … but six US presidents before him (Trump) tried this and had to give up,” Khamenei said on his website.

The fear of sanctions, which Giuliani said would be increased, has already seen major companies leave Iran despite Europe vowing to save the accord. Britain, France and Germany, which signed the Iran deal along with the United States, Russia and China say the agreement prevents Iran developing weapons-grade nuclear fuel.

But Giuliani said Europe should be “ashamed” of itself.

“Anybody who thinks the Ayatollahs are honest people is a fool. They are crooks and that’s what Europe is propping up … murderers and sponsors of terrorism. Instead of taking an opportunity to topple them they are now left propping them up,” Giuliani said.

The NCRI members joined the 1979 Islamic revolution but later broke from the ruling clerics. Based in Iraq in the early 1980s, their fighters clashed with U.S. forces during the 2003 Iraq war, but have since renounced violence.

“Regime change in Iran is within reach as never before … The wheels of change have started turning,” Maryam Rajavi, who heads the group, told reporters at the conference.

NCRI, also known by its Farsi name Mujahideen-e-Khalq, was once listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union but is no longer.Tehran has long called for a crackdown on the NCRI in Paris, Riyadh, and Washington. The group is regularly criticized in state media.

WASHINGTON – US intelligence agencies believe North Korea has increased production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months and may try to hide these while seeking concessions in nuclear talks with the United States, NBC news quoted US officials as saying.

In a report on Friday, the network said what it described as the latest US intelligence assessment appeared to go counter to sentiments expressed by President Donald Trump, who tweeted after an unprecedented June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”

NBC quoted five unidentified US officials as saying that in recent months North Korea had stepped up production of enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, even as it engaged in diplomacy with the United States.

The network cited US officials as saying that the intelligence assessment concludes that North Korea has more than one secret nuclear site in addition to its known nuclear fuel production facility at Yongbyon.

“There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the US,” NBC quoted one official as saying.

The CIA declined to comment on the NBC report. The State Department said it could not confirm it and did not comment on matters of intelligence. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The NBC report raises further questions about North Korea’s readiness to enter serious negotiations about giving up a weapons program that now threatens the United States, in spite of Trump’s enthusiastic portrayal of the summit outcome.

NBC quoted one senior US intelligence official as saying that North Korea’s decision ahead of the summit to suspend nuclear and missile tests was unexpected and the fact that the two sides were talking was a positive step.

However, he added: “Work is ongoing to deceive us on the number of facilities, the number of weapons, the number of missiles … We are watching closely.”

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at California’s Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said there were two “bombshells” in the NBC report.

He said it had long been understood that North Korea had at least one undeclared facility to enrich nuclear fuel aside from Yongbyon.

“This assessment says there is more than one secret site. That means there are at least three, if not more sites,” he said.

Lewis said the report also implied that US intelligence had reporting to suggest North Korea did not intend to disclose one or more of the enrichment sites.

“Together, these two things would imply that North Korea intended to disclose some sites as part of the denuclearization process, while retaining others,” he said.

North Korea agreed at the summit to “work toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” but the joint statement signed by Kim and Trump gave no details on how or when Pyongyang might surrender its nuclear weapons.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week he would likely go back to North Korea before long to try to flesh out commitments made at the Trump-Kim meeting.

On Thursday, the Financial Times quoted US officials as saying that Pompeo plans to travel to North Korea next week, but the State Department has declined to confirm this.

Ahead of the summit, North Korea rejected unilaterally abandoning an arsenal it has called an essential deterrent against US aggression.

Trump said last week North Korea was blowing up four of its big test sites and that a process of “total denuclearization … has already started,” but officials said there had been no such evidence since the summit.

US economic pressure on Iran is intended to turn Iranians against their government, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying on Saturday by his website.

The country’s rial currency has lost up to 40 per cent of its value since last month, when US President Donald Trump pulled out of Iran’s 2015 nuclear accord and said he would reimpose sanctions and try to curb Iranian oil exports.

“They bring to bear economic pressure to separate the nation from the system … but six US presidents before him tried this and had to give up,” Khamenei was quoted as saying by Khamenei.ir, referring to Trump.

Speaking to graduating Revolutionary Guards officers, Khamenei accused the United States and Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab states that regard Shi’ite Muslim Iran as their main regional foe of trying to destabilize the government in Tehran.

“If America was able to act against Iran, it would not need to form coalitions with notorious and reactionary states in the region and ask their help in fomenting unrest and instability (in Iran),” Khamenei said in remarks carried by state TV.

Khamenei was speaking after three days of protests in Tehran and other cities in which hundreds of traders in the bazaar closed their shops to voice anger at the rial’s plunge. Such merchants have mostly been loyal to the leadership since the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the monarchy.

Some of the graduating Guards officers had drawn the flag of Israel, Iran’s arch-enemy, on the soles of their boots, pictures from the military ceremony carried by semi-official news agency Tasnim showed.

Measures to achieve self-reliance in gasoline production were among issues discussed, IRNA said.

The United States has told allies to cut all imports of Iranian oil from November and is unlikely to offer exemptions, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday as the Trump administration seeks to cut off funding to Iran.

Thousands of Syrian refugees have begun to crowd near Israel’s Golan Heights border in the Syrian town of Rafid near the historic cease-fire line between Syria and Israel. As the Syrian regime keeps up its bombardment of rebels in the south there are concerns that the refugees and spillover from the fighting will pressure Israel to intervene.

Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an expert who did extensive research on the border area and is familiar with relations between Israel and the Syrian rebels, presents several scenarios as the crisis unfolds.

“I think the Syrian military operation will grow and a deal will be struck… Some [rebels will be] deported to the north… others will stay and some who stay may become enforcers for the Syrian government,” says Tamimi, a Research Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

The Syrian regime has been pounding rebel positions and overrunning villages and towns in southern Syria for a week. An estimated 45,000 people have fled, with as many as 5,000 or more fleeing toward the Israeli border, seeking shelter in an area they know the regime is loathe to bomb.

The Russian air force has also been active in southern Syria, claiming to be targeting extremist groups that are not party to a cease-fire it signed with Jordan and the US last July. With US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled to meet in July, the crisis in southern Syria could throw a wrench into discussions between their two countries. For Israel, the central concern is keeping Iranian-backed militias away from the Golan and managing the crisis.

“It is still early… and there is a sense that the Jordanians may pressure the rebels into negotiations,” says Tamimi. In other places in Syria the regime has signed reconciliation deals with local rebels and left them to run their own affairs even after the government reasserted control. This “soft” deal could be in store for the small rebel groups on Israel’s border.

However, another option is that the factions surrender and then end up being paid to be part of the regime’s government structures, such as military intelligence. A third, “harsher” deal would envision the rebels being deported and their supporters being shipped north to Idlib province, which is still controlled by rebels.

The problem for the villages near the Golan is that some are run by a single group – such as Fursan al-Jawlan, the “Knights of the Golan” – while other areas might have numerous rebel groups, including more extreme factions among them. “If there is a multiplicity of factions there could be problems with law and order,” Tamimi says. The more extreme groups such as the ISIS-affiliate Jaysh Khalid bin-Walid in the southern Golan will want to fight the regime, and Damascus will not want to reconcile with them. Instead they could be bused to the eastern desert where the regime has sent other ISIS members.

The rebels’ fate on the Golan is likely sealed, Tamimi argues. After the US made it clear they would not intervene, it is only a matter of time until they are defeated. “The outcome is predetermined and the rebels and their cause will lose one way or another.”

Russia has provided crucial support for Damascus in its drive to reconquer the country since 2015. The regime and Russia have sought deescalation agreements, like they had in the south, until they were ready to retake them. Through these salami tactics they have focused on defeating first one group and then another.

“Some in the US thought that Russia was interested in deescalation for its own sake rather than the actual goal, which is bringing back the government to the south,” Tamimi says. “They thought this agreement would hold due to Trump’s relations with Putin, but you see how Russia does these deals to game the system and advance the interests of their main ally.”

For those closest to Israel the expert predicts that some might try to cross over, but that Israel will not open the border. “I think the regime will be careful there near the border. If they bomb an area and a bomb or missile or mortar shell goes into Israeli territory accidentally then Israel will respond and hold the Syrian government responsible.”

Some of the rebels have been accused of working with Israel but Tamimi says that Syrian leader Bashar Assad has put on a magnanimous face, appearing ready to reconcile. He points to the example in Beit Jann near the Hermon where the former rebel commander had been in touch with Israel and was allowed to remain after the regime returned. He even gets a government salary today.

Some of the Syrians in the south, after seven years of war, are also ready to go back to regime control. The question is what the rebels think will happen. “They do talk a lot about the Iranian militias targeting them and they play that up because whether it is true or not, they want someone to intervene and say this is crossing a redline.”

The reality is that the Iranian-backed militias are more concentrated in the Euphrates Valley in Syria, not near the Golan, he says. However, there are elements of Hezbollah located in an area several kilometers from the Golan called the “triangle of death.” Hezbollah, like the Iranians, likely knows that if they approach the border, Israel may respond.