Al-Sharq al-Awsat, London, Originally posted in Arabic on December 18
Ever since concluding the nuclear agreement with Tehran this past summer, sanctions have been slowly lifted from Iran. And despite certain pleas to include Tehran’s exterritorial involvement in the region in the nuclear deal, the United States limited the scope of the agreement solely to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Now, however, there are signs that this stance might be changing.
A senior US official recently claimed that the United States will target all Iranian institutions and individuals supporting Tehran’s involvement in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. In other words, the US will explicitly distinguish between the lifting of sanctions associated with Iran’s implementation of the nuclear deal, and the removal (or non-removal) of sanctions associated with its funding of terror.
While the White House did not corroborate this statement, there is still reason to believe that it reflects the administration’s change in stance towards Iran, as it came from a Treasury official. And it is the US Treasury, indeed, which is in charge of implementing and monitoring sanctions on behalf of the US government. There are important implications to this move that will likely unfold in the next few weeks. Chief among them is the weakening of the moderate opposition in Iran, which hoped that the removal of the sanctions would usher in more public pressure for a regime change.
In the meantime, it seems like Washington is beginning to understand the sinister use made by the mullahs in Tehran with the money flowing in from the removal of the sanctions. – Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed