Another Strong Quake Strikes Western Afghanistan
A strong earthquake rattled Afghanistan's western province of Herat on Wednesday, following a series of deadly quakes on Saturday.
A strong earthquake rattled Afghanistan's western province of Herat on Wednesday, following a series of deadly quakes on Saturday.
There were no details on casualties so far, but provincial officials said hundreds of homes had been destroyed. The office of Herat's governor said some areas had suffered "huge losses", without giving details.
"Mobile medical teams and officials have been working together and have transferred several injured people to hospital," the governor's office said in a statement.
Saturday's tremors killed at least 2,400 people and injured more than 2,000, the Taliban-run government said, making the quakes one of the deadliest in the world so far this year.
Most of the casualties in that quake were women and children, the World Health Organization said.
The German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) said the latest quake was a magnitude 6.3 and occurred at a depth of 10 km (6.21 miles).
Hemmed in by mountains, Afghanistan has a history of strong earthquakes, many in the rugged Hindu Kush region bordering Pakistan. Herat province borders Iran, which said it would send humanitarian aid.
There were no casualties reported so far, he said, as many villagers were already sleeping out in the open or in tents since the earlier earthquakes.
"People need urgent aid," Governor Noor Ahmad Shahab said, adding that survivors were falling ill from the colder autumn weather.
Relief and rescue efforts after Saturday's earthquakes have been hampered by infrastructure left crumbling by decades of war and a lack of foreign aid which once formed the backbone of the economy, but which has dried up since the Taliban took over.
Reporting by Reuters
The bloody invasion of Israel by the Iran-backed Palestinian Hamas has caused a tumble in the Iranian economy, with the rial falling and stock market in decline.
At the opening of trading day on Sunday, the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) crashed within just 30 minutes, with a sharp decline reported for almost all stocks on trade. Closing at 2.1 million points, the TSE main index dropped over 51 thousand points. The rial began to slightly fall late on Friday, before the attack, while the fall accelerated on Saturday. While for weeks the rial was hovering around 495,000 per US dollar, it broke through the 500,000 on Saturday and dropped to 520,000 on Sunday.
Iran's regime is openly supporting the horror which has seen over 2,000 Israelis wounded, at least 700 dead, and dozens abducted in Hamas's declaration of war, holding state-sponsored street ceremonies. President Ebrahim Raisi defended the atrocities as “the legitimate defense of the Palestinian nation” and held phone calls with Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal.
Tejarat News, a business website in Tehran, said in an article Sunday that the surge in the exchange rates of foreign currencies against the national currency rial is due to the developments in Israel. “Since Saturday, dollar traders are saying that tensions in Israel are the cause of the rise in the dollar's exchange rate,” the website said.
However, the impact of war was being felt in Israel too. According to Bloomberg, Israel’s stock exchange also witnessed the biggest drop since March 2020 and the outbreak of the pandemic while the shekel slumped towards a seven-year low in recent days, the war set to push that further. Israel has also faced a floundering economy amidst political instability since the return of the Netanyahu coalition at the start of the year which has plunged the country into economic and geopolitical turmoil.
The rial, however, has lost its value 12-fold since early 2018, when the United States withdrew from the JCPOA nuclear deal and imposed tough economic sanctions on Iran. This has made imports much more expensive and has led to inflation at around 50 percent for the past three years. Some officials and media in Tehran have been warning that tens of millions of people have fallen into poverty because of persistent high inflation, and this in turn has seriously contributed to political instability. Widespread anti-regime protests in 2022 and 2023 are partly attributed to financial hardships ordinary citizens face. For the transfer of such an amount to Iran, the greenlight by the US seems necessary given the country’s sanctions on the regime’s banking system.
The sudden devaluation of the rial came a few weeks after Iran managed to get access to $6 billion of its assets that was blocked In South Korea due to US sanctions as part of a prisoner swap deal with Washington.
Whenever Iran’s economy is in a slump, regime officials start bragging about the positive prospects of releasing Iran’s frozen assets abroad on the control of inflation and freefall of rial, a propaganda line that never delivers. This time is no exception. Fars news agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, ran an article Sunday in line with Tehran’s effort for damage control, claiming that Iran’s unfrozen assets in South Korea and Luxembourg can have a positive psychological impact on the market.
The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) announced on Friday that Luxembourg has released $1.7 billion of Iran’s frozen funds, following a ruling issued by the country's Supreme Court. “This fund is now available to the Central Bank of Iran.” Former CBI Governor Abdolnasser Hemmati said in 2020 that Iran's assets were unfrozen despite an attempt by victims of terror to get the funds as compensation. In 2012, a New York court found there was evidence showing that the Islamic Republic provided "material support and resources to al Qaida for acts of terrorism".
In another case in 2023, a federal judge in New York ordered Iran's central bank and a European intermediary to pay out $1.68 billion to family members of troops killed in the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon.
The attack has also ignited a wave of criticism directed at the Biden Administration over its deal with Iran and the release of funds that Iran is allegedly funneling to its proxies.
In May, Iran International reported that Hamas pressured the Islamic Republic into inviting its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, to Tehran hoping to get financial support. Our sources said that although the Islamic Republic continues to provide financial aid to Hamas despite its own economic situation, Tehran is not satisfied with the performance of the group against Israel.
While Hezbollah is by far Iran's richest and most powerful proxy, the combined funds of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are enormous, Hamas and Islamic Jihad receiving a large share of Tehran’s aid. In March 2022, Haniyeh revealed that the Islamic Republic paid a total of $70 million to Hamas to help it develop missiles and defense systems. During an interview with Al-Jazeera, Haniyeh said different countries help in financing the group, but Iran is the biggest donor.
In 2018, US President Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, who recently visited Israel's communities on the Gaza perimeter and toured the terror tunnel the IDF exploded, claimed Iran provided $100 million annually to Hamas compared to $700m annually to Hezbollah.
In a video on the official Al-Qassem Brigades' Telegram channel - the military wing of Hamas - published on Sunday, spokesman Abu Obaidah said, "We thank the Islamic Republic of Iran who provided us with weapons, money and other equipment. He gave us missiles to destroy Zionist fortresses, and helped us with standard anti-tank missiles."
Mahmoud Sariolghalam, an Iranian academic, emphasized the importance of a country having sufficient income for cultural and social growth. He also pointed out that a country without sufficient income lacks international credibility and faces constant challenges to its stability and security.
These statements are reinforced by alarming statistics that highlight Iran's significantly lower gross domestic product (GDP) compared to other Middle East and North Africa countries. In 2022, Iran's GDP was $350 billion, while Saudi Arabia's was $1,100 billion, Israel's was $522 billion, the UAE's was $507 billion, and Egypt's was $475 billion, according to Statista.
Last week, when visiting Esfahan, President Ebrahim Raisi said with a tongue-in-cheek gesture: "If we do not invest in industrial development, we will lag behind others. If we do not invest in the oil and petrochemical industries, our share of the shared oilfields with other countries will become insignificant."
However, Iranian journalist Ehsan Bodaghi reminded Raisi in a tweet that "Even a student of economics knows this simple fact. He should say how effective investment is possible without lifting the sanctions?"
Sanctions that the United States imposed in 2018 after withdrawing from the JCPOA nuclear accord have immeasurably weakened Iran’s economy, which was already suffering from government control, corruption and mismanagement.
Knowing that most of Iran's problems stem from its shaky relations with Europe and the United States, Azizollah Hatamzadeh, the author of the book Iran's Trans-Atlantic Relations published by the Iranian government's Strategic Research Center, told Khabar Online in Tehran that some of Iran's problems stem from the United States' attempts to create a security situation around the Islamic Republic.
Like most scholars and analysts in Iran, Hatamzadeh also failed to mention Iran's share in creating problems for itself. While accusing the United States and Europe of conspiring against Tehran, he -possibly deliberately- forgets what Iran has been doing to US interests in the region and how it has disrupted its normal ties with Europe by taking European citizens hostage, threatening Iranians in Europe and engineering assassination attempts in Europe against Iranians and non-Iranians.
Hatamzadeh discussed the post-Cold War developments in Iran's relations with the West and noted Donald Trump's influence in changing those relations. He also mentioned that Trump challenged traditional US-Europe ties and predicted that disputes between the US and Europe might resurface if Trump won the next US presidential elections.
The author generally believes that the United States has always managed to convince Europe to follow Washington's policies toward Iran.
This feeds into part of the Iranian establishment's belief in the fallacy that differences between the US and Europe will prompt Europe to invest in Iran. That is impossible as long as US and other sanctions are still in effect. On the other hand, Iranian scholars keep forgetting that it was Europe that recently decided to extend the embargo on Iran's missile development plan beyond its mid-October deadline.
Meanwhile, Moscow's war on Ukraine has made the West even more united and this unity will continue as long as the war continues. Hatamzadeh, however, acknowledged that as a result of the Ukraine war, Europe recognizes Iran as a security challenge regardless of its proximity to or its distance from the United States.
