Iran continues support of Shi’ite radicals
As we get news from the Associated Press that Shi’ite militants attacked a council meeting in Sadr City, the Wall Street Journal writes that US authorities continue to accuse the Islamic Republic of continuing their support of Shi’ite radicals in Iraq;
The report reserved its harshest words for Iran, accusing Tehran of breaking its promise to curtail the flow of Iranian armaments into Iraq. It said U.S. and Iraqi forces operating in Basra found large caches of Iranian-made weapons that had been manufactured earlier this year, after Iranian officials told their Iraqi counterparts that they would take measures to curb such shipments.
The report also noted that the number of attacks featuring a particularly lethal form of roadside bomb that the U.S. has linked to Iran reached a high in April, while the number of attacks involving Iranian-supplied rockets rose sharply over the same period.
Iran has been facilitating the “large-scale trafficking of arms, ammunition, and explosives,” and helping to “fund, train, arm and guide numerous networks that conduct wide-scale insurgency operations,” according to the report.
Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs writes that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is making a special trip to meet with Israeli military heads this week;
In a visit likely to fuel speculation about possible Israeli military action against Iran, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen will touch down briefly in Israel at the end of the week for talks with IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, top defense officials told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
A few weeks after Mullen’s visit, Ashkenazi will fly to Washington DC for several days on his first visit to the US as chief of staff.
And the USAToday reports that rockets are again striking Israel from Iran-backed Hamas-controlled Gaza effectively ending the days-old ceasefire;
The midafternoon rocket barrage, which lightly wounded two people, capped a day of violence that presented the truce with its first serious test. Just before midnight, Palestinian militants fired a mortar shell into an empty area in southern Israel. And in a pre-dawn raid, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Islamic Jihad, a small armed group backed by Syria and Iran, claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. Although the West Bank is not included in the truce, the militant group said the Nablus raid had soured the atmosphere of calm.
All of this on the day after the Islamic Republic rejects the legality of EU sanctions against the government for ignoring pleas to stop their march towards nuclear armaments;
Iran condemned on Tuesday fresh European Union sanctions against the Islamic Republic and made clear they would not slow the country’s nuclear activities, an Iranian news agency reported.
“Such illegal and paradoxical behavior …. is meaningless and strongly condemned,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini was quoted as saying by the Fars News Agency.
All of this activity a few days after UN’s Nobel Prize winning Nuclear policeman Elbaradei warned that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within the next six months, but that a strike against them would turn the Near East into an inferno. And Iran negated the effect of an Israeli attack on their facilities after Israel supposedly made a practice run of an attack on Iran’s nuclear labs.
It seems to me that all of the planets are aligned.
Category: Foreign Policy, Terror War
